Maggie Andrews

Domesticating the airwaves : broadcasting, domesticity and femininity

Introduction 1. Domesticity and Broadcasting in the inter-War Period 2. Early Domestic Goddesses 3. The Gardener and the Chef: Broadcasting Celebrities 1930s style 4. Domesticity under Fire 5. From Austerity to Consumer Wonderland 6. Broadening Domestic Realities: Soaps, Documentaries, and Working Class Domesticities 7. Contesting the Domestic: Chat Shows, Lifestyle and Ethics 8. Domesticating the Public Sphere in the Era of Digital Revolution 9. Idealised Domesticities Afterword: An Uncertain Future.

Poppies, Tommies and Remembrance

The centenary of WWI has produced a plethora of activities and events, building upon the cultural obsession with remembrance that emerged in Britain in the last 30 years and in which the media plays a significant role. WWI frames contemporary practices of remembrance, but politicians, organisations and individuals contest the meanings of Remembrance Sunday and the Poppy. Remembrance, narratives, myths and memories of WWI are tied up with constructions of nationhood and recently there has been a blurring in the public imagination between contemporary conflicts and WWI. Broadcast medias focus on private lives and personal stories have led the Tommy to emerge as a new working class hero, a victim as well as a and family member and enabled those in the armed forces to have an increasingly central place in British cultural life. Questions remain about how this will shape Britains military involvement in the current volatile global situation.

‘Homes Both Sides of the Microphone: Wireless and Domestic Space in Interwar Britain’

The paper will explore a neglected area of womens history, namely the entry of ‘the wireless’ into the domestic space of the home in the 1920s and 1930s. The domestic, as much a discursive as a physical space, had been emotionally and symbolically constructed as a place of mundane belonging for women. However, the introduction of the radio changed womens experiences of domesticity, offering education and reducing isolation. This article suggests that as women in the 1920s and 1930s enjoyed the cultural space of broadcasting—listening to travel programmes, explanations of political issues, comedy, plays and popular music—the porous and fluid boundaries between the domestic and public worlds were further underlined. This new domestic, and hence gendered, medium offered a novel, paradoxical, and unsettling cultural space. The reception of the wireless in the home, and the creation of a perceived ‘female listener’ and her concerns, influenced the nature of broadcasting by ‘domesticating the airwaves’. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) frequently utilised a language related to domesticity when discussing and, at times presenting, itself and its broadcasters. However, as the article will demonstrate, the relationship between the cultural space that broadcasting inhabited and the domestic spaces in which it was consumed was dynamic and contested.

Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War

As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, public commemoration of the war has often been dominated by a focus on the men in the armed forces, who risked or lost their lives for causes that at the time may or may not have seemed heroic, noble or simply unavoidable. The visual spectacle of Paul Cummins’ ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, the art installation at the Tower of London in which 888,246 ceramic poppies filled the moat from 17 July to 11 November 2014, was the most visited artistic response to the war in its centenary years, while Jeremy Deller’s ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, commemorating the first day of the Battle of the Somme, provided a widely seen and moving memorial to the victims.22. ‘We’re here because we’re here’ marked the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Hundreds of volunteers, working with the artist Jeremy Deller, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the National Theatre and 1914–18 NOW, commemorated the centenary by re-enacting as soldiers in cities, towns and the countryside around Britain. First World War soldiers were seen at train stations, shopping centres, beaches, car parks and high streets. This vision of the conflict, focusing exclusively on the combatant dead, should not, however, become the only history of the conflict. There are, as the research brought together here demonstrates, multiple histories of the First World War.

Radical reformers and respectable rebels: how the two lives of Grace Oakeshott defined an era

Jocelyn Robson’s engaging book focuses on the life story of Grace Oakeshott who, on Tuesday 27 August in 1907, left a pile of clothes on a deserted beach in Brittany and swum into the sea. The newspapers reported Grace’s death four days later and referred to her contribution to the Women’s Industrial Council and her role in setting up the first Trade School for Girls in London for waistcoat making. At the age of 35, Grace, a respectable middle-class married woman from Coulsdon in Surrey, also a career woman who had studied at Newman College Cambridge, faked her own death. She did so in order to start a new life with her lover, Walter Reeve, on the other side of the world, far away from family and friends. After travelling for many months, first to Australia and then onwards to New Zealand, the couple arrived in Wellington where Walter developed a career as a doctor and Grace gave birth to, and raised, three children. Thanks to subterfuge and changing their names, the pair was able to disguise their unmarried status and hide their past lives, thus enabling Grace to become a pillar of the different communities in which they lived. Grace played an active role in voluntary work to support the Allies in the First World War, became a stalwart of the Women’s Institute movement and was active in the Girl Guides.

Entitlement and the Shaping of First World War Commemorative Histories

The four years of commemorative outpouring and activities in response to the Centenary of the First World War have led to the production of a multiplicity of amateur and professional, academic, media and community histories of the conflict. These can be seen as exciting examples of what Raphael Samuel (2012) once optimistically described as history made by a thousand hands, which can democratize the past. However, all histories are framed by the cultural milieu in which they are produced and the centenary of the first industrialized conflict, which cost the lives of millions across the world1 is taking place in Britain, a fractured country, still reeling from the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, which heralded in austerity politics and a restructuring of welfare provision. The centenary has coincided with the rise of UKIP and 2016’s divisive referendum about Britain’s membership of the EU. The commemoration of a conflict, which has a significant place in British national narratives, is taking place against a backdrop of hotly contested debates about who exactly is entitled to see themselves as part of the nation, and who is entitled to support from the national purse if they are in crisis. This has an inevitable, though perhaps, unintentional consequence on the selectivity and the silences in the histories of the First World War that have emerged. My own recent work with heritage organizations and community groups as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Voices of War and Peace World War One Engagement Centre, 2 suggests that in the present political climate, despite the best intentions and determined efforts of many cultural agents, some hands were mu

Introduction: Home Fronts, Gender War and Conflict

Introduction to special edition of Womens History Review special edition on Gender War and Conflict

‘Nationalising Hundreds and Thousands of Women’: a domestic response to a national problem

The wartime evacuee has become a symbol of the home front in World War Two. However, behind the iconic image lie more complex histories. The government evacuation scheme both encouraged and enforced many homeowners to share their private domestic space with strangers. The preparation, organisation and monitoring of this scheme led to unparalleled public interference into the private space of the home. The enforced domestic intimacy this led to resulted in the voluntary and governmental agencies becoming increasingly entangled in a complex, shifting understanding of ideas of the family, domestic labour, motherhood and the home during wartime.

The WI's Rural Retailing and Markets 1915–1939: a First World War Legacy

The Womens Institute Movement was set up under the auspices of the Agricultural Organisation Society in 1915 to improve the food supply during the Great War. The Womens Institutes encouraged food saving and preservation. This article draws attention to the rural retailing opportunities and markets that were established by the WI in wartime and continued to develop in the inter-war period, assisted by grants from the Carnegie Trust in the 1930s. The WI established sales tables, depots and markets that enabled smallholders, cottage gardeners and allotment holders to find financially non-exploitative retail opportunities for their produce. Initially this produce came from their gardens, allotments and smallholdings, but in time preserves, baking craftwork, jam, cakes, toys, knitted toys and garments and even a wedding trousseau were ordered or sold through these various WI retail outlets. The markets were not restricted to WI members and often sold work produced by smallholders, the disabled and ex-servicemen. Furthermore they were seen as an example of co-operative marketing that could prove useful in preventing food waste and helping rural households to survive in wartime and later during the economic crisis of the 1930s. This article suggests that these retail opportunities were of significance to rural women as a chance to earn much needed cash and in placing a value on domestic labour. They, like the WI, were a legacy of the First World War.

Ideas and Ideals of Domesticity and Home in the First World War

The munitions worker and the Women’s Land Army are familiar images of the Home Front in First World War and the number of women in paid employment increased during the conflict; however the majority of women remained in the home1 or retained domestic roles and responsibilities alongside paid work. Nevertheless domestic life can still be categorised by Gilbert and Gubar as part of the ‘unofficial female history’ of First World War 2 which has received limited academic attention. This chapter suggests that during the conflict, the home and women’s associated domestic and emotional responsibilities for nurturing and supporting men were sustained, reworked, stretched and developed in Britain. A range of letters, diaries, memories, newspapers and posters, particularly from the West Midlands, will be utilised to draw attention to the significance of the domestic activities women undertook in wartime. Women cared for or supported men in their domestic lives and in voluntary activities beyond their homes; hence gender roles and status were not fundamentally challenged. Indeed the seeds were sewn for a new privileging of the domestic3 within private life, the imagination and public discourses4 in the post-war era.