Harold L. Smith

War and social change : British society in the Second World War

The contributors to this volume look at the effects of World War II on British society, on employment policy, planning, health care, education, demography, and on groups such as women, businessmen, the Labour Party and the working class. In contrast to the view of many historians, they suggest that surprisingly little wartime change was lasting. A significant degree of unity prevailed, given the opportunity for extensive alterations in society, and much of the change which did last beyond the conflict arose out of the pre-war rather than the wartime period. Social historians and those concerned with the development of social policy, students and teachers of womens studies, economic history, sociology and business history, as well as general readers, may find this volume of interest.

The Womanpower Problem in Britain during the Second World War

At the national womens conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.

British feminism and the equal pay issue in the 1930s

Abstract Did British feminism become moribund during the 1930s? It is often assumed that feminism as an organised movement virtually disappeared from the late 1920s until it re-emerged in the late 1960s. This paper suggests that view needs revision by showing that an active feminist movement existed during the 1930s, and that it conducted a campaign for equal pay in the civil service which culminated in a parliamentary vote for reform even though the Government opposed it. Although the Government later forced Parliament to reverse its vote, the campaign indicates the need for further research on 1930s feminist groups, such as the London and National Society for womens Service (subsequently the Fawcett Society), and its leaders, Ray and Philippa Strachey

British Feminism in the Second World War

The Second World War introduced destabilizing forces that threatened to undermine gender and class hierarchies. Although the British home front used to be viewed as an example of total war generating social unity, historians now are more aware of the ways in which the war heightened gender and class tensions as the equal citizenship rhetoric aroused expectations inconsistent with gender and class structures.1 As a result, recent studies have focused on explaining how the wartime pressures for change were contained or diverted into less threatening channels.2

Book Review: Louise A. Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006; ix + 220 pp.; £50.00 hbk; ISBN 0719073901

are articulated in historical contingent relations, rather than emerging in our recent history. The essays in the volume seek to demonstrate the longer historical trajectory of these central features of lifestyle. The book locates lifestyle in examples such as the debates over the framing of household work in the interwar years and the articulation of eating out as a cultural activity in good eating guides from the first half of the twentieth century, in which domestic practice and consumption in the public sphere are identified and reflected upon as key sites of identity and consumption. Similarly, the idea of social diversity, of different social fractions and countercultures articulated in consumption practices understood as lifestyles are identified in chapters on scuba diving, Ebony magazine, the self-help literature of the 1930s and alternative publishers in the USA in the 1960s. In addition, chapters on the Michelin man and (my favourite) an analysis of the marketing strategy of Heal’s furniture department store in the 1920s identify the use of postmodern irony in the tasteful mode of addressing the viewer as the participant in a way of life rather than as a consumer. Interestingly, although these are very different books they share some common themes in the analysis of the relationship between media, culture and society. For example, the media are understood to play the role of making visible ways of living and legitimating social arrangements by providing examples of ways of living. Both books make their points well; each is illustrated with detailed analyses of the media and the culture of consumption. However, I was left as a slightly dissatisfied customer because, while Turnock hints at the contemporary relevance of his analysis of the emergence of commercial television, as I read his book I increasingly thought of the discontinuities between the special moment of 1950s media and the present. In contrast, as I read the Bell and Hollows collection I was convinced of the demonstrations of the longer run of different features of lifestyle but, paradoxically, increasingly convinced that the assemblage of these different elements in the present is what matters. The question is how these different features of the culture of consumption coalesce around lifestyle, rather than that each strand in the complex of lifestyle culture has historical precedents.

Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote Jill Liddington

No abstract available.