ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the wartime identity of women who did no war work but structured their lives around their homes and their men. It investigates the social and narrative function of romance as revealed in popular magazines and novels of the period. The penny-weeklies, while they encourage women’s silent acceptance of men’s part in the war, toe a harsh moral line with regard to the challenges presented to women. The pulpit rhetoric of lyrical repetition and the quasi-poetical imagery, masquerading as philosophical and anthropological discourse, exalt women to a position far beyond the drudgery of daily life. Women, then, are portrayed as being naturally averse to ‘radical’ political opinion. All women, then, are seen to live in separate worlds, lacking the threads – the men – that once drew them together and made a social pattern.
