Introduction

Yet surely those who were adults between 1914 and 1945 had more reason than any generation this century for despair. They had to endure two worldwide competitions in massacre separated by a world-wide economic slump and the triumph of dictatorships. Nevertheless, this is not a gloomy book. British women’s history during this period is not one of passive suffering-far from it. The following essays demonstrate women’s insistence on survival and resistance; they focus on women’s creativity in the construction of countercultures; and they give due credit to the takenfor-granted, life-enabling work of women in the background, whether that work be the weekly wash, or finding foster homes for refugee children or doing obscure but vital medical research. Our emblematic cover photograph shows two womenperhaps the two faces of women in Britain 1914-1945-one anxious and worn, the other laughing and ready to take on the world. I think this book is unusual in two ways. First, it looks at more aspects of life than those usually included under ‘history’, since we include housework, the visual arts, broadcasting, literature, and science. Secondly, it refuses to confine history to the interaction of individuals in power or to the interaction of powerful groups or to the interaction between individuals and powerful groups. Here are several individuals not in power-isolated pacifists in World War One, a single mother in World War Two, a teenage refugee in Manchester-for history is lived singly as well as collectively and it is felt singly more often than it is felt collectively. Whether or not such individual accounts ‘deserve a place in the story’ is up to the reader to judge. Do we deserve a place in history only if we are clearly representative of others-and of how many others do we have to be representative&

Do British women 1914-1945 need or deserve a history separate from men at all& Yes, insofar as women had and have gender-specific experience. No man could have been in the predicament of Doreen Bates. And yes, insofar as there were important women-only groups at this time such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Women’s Institutes, the Women’s Teacher Training Colleges and the feminist Six Point Group. But there is a way in which women’s history has been artificially and unnecessarily separated from that of men in that women have so often simply been left out. A Martian could read C.L. Mowat’s Britain Between the Wars 1918-1940 (1955) or Julian Symons’ The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (1960) or Pimlott’s Labour and the Left in the 1930s (1978) or Stevenson and Cook’s The Slump (1978) among many other such works and conclude that the population of Britain between 1914 and 1945 must have been 90 per cent male. Indeed, given that the index to Mowat’s 698 pages lists the names of 600 men and only 25 women that percentage is nearer 95 per cent male. And that is socio-political history, not military or naval or colonial history which are 100 per cent male. The explanation for such an extraordinary under-representation of women lies not just in the sex of the historian but also in the historian’s conception of history. If history, by definition, be held to be the history of individuals or groups with power, then women remain unnoticed.1 But what, then, do we mean by power& A book such as this, focusing principally on many aspects of women’s working lives, exists not only to redress a gross imbalance in the imaging of our shared past, but also to ask what in our past we hold to be worth remembering. Separate women’s history is a necessary stage not just in the reconceptualizing of history but of society and life itself.