Gender, Labour, War and Empire

Gender, Labour, War and Empire Essays on Modern Britain

Edited By

Philippa Levine Professor of History, University of Southern California, USA

and

Susan R. Grayzel Associate Professor of History, Department of History, University of Mississippi, USA

palgrave macmillan

* Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel 2009 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-52119-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN 978-1-349-35612-6 ISBN 978-0-230-58292-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230582927

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library.

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender, labour, war and empire: essays on modern Britain 1 [compiled

and edited by] Philippa Levine, Susan R. Grayzel. p. cm. - (Genders and sexualities in history)

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-349-35612-6 (alk. paper)

1. Great Britain-Social conditions-20th century. 2. Women--Great Britain­History-20th century. 3. Great Britain--Colonies-History. 4. Great Britain­Race relations-History-2Oth century. 5. Great Britain-Foreign relations-20th century. 6. Civilization, Modern-British influences. I. Levine, Philippa. II. Grayzel. Susan R.

DA566.4.G435 2009 941.082-dc22 2008030085

10 9 8 7 18 17 16 15

6 5 14 13

4 12

Transferred to Digital Printing 2012

3 11

2 1 10 09

For Sonya, Colleague, Friend, Mentor

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

List of Illustrations

1 Introduction Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel

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1

Part I Labour, Sex and Race: The Problems of Modernity 13

2 Remaking the British Working Class: Sonya Rose and Feminist History Dennis Dworkin

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3 In Search of Free Labour: Trinidad and the Abolition of the 33 British Slave Trade James Epstein

4 Race and the Regulation of Prostitution: Comparing 51 Public Health in the U.S. and Greater Britain Philippa Levine

5 The Colonial Actress: Empire, Modernity and the Exotic in 72 Twentieth-Century London Angela Woollacott

Part II Gender, Identity and the Second World War

6 British Feminism in the Second World War Harold L. Smith

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7 "Magazines are essentially about the here and now. 116 And this was wartime": British Vogue's Responses to the Second World War Becky E. Conekin

8 "Fighting for the Idea of Home Life": Mrs Miniver and 139 Anglo-American Representations of Domestic Morale Susan R. Grayzel

9 Film and the Popular Memory of the Second World War in 157 Britain 1950-1959 Penny Summerfield

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Part III Gender, Race and the Aftermath of War and Empire

177

10 Men of the Royal Air Force, the Cultural Memory of the 179 Second World War and the Twilight of the British Empire Martin Francis

11 Disturbing the People's Peace: Patriotism and "Respectable" 197 Racism in British Responses to Rhodesian Independence Alice Ritscherle

12 "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?": Race and 219 Sex in 1950s Britain Elizabeth Buettner

13 How is the National Past Imagined? National 238 Sentimentality, True Feeling and the "Heritage Film", 1980-1995 GeoffEley

14 Afterword to Gender, Labour, War and Empire Laura L. Frader

Index

256

269

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to express their gratitude to Geoff Eley, Catherine Hall, Connie Hamlin, and Michael Strang for their early assistance, Kali Israel for her invaluable encouragement and aid, and all of the contributors for their fine work and willingness to share in this labour of love. Sue Grayzel wishes to thank the history department of the University of Mississippi for its financial support, Nikki Bourgeois for her assistance with the index, Joe Ward for his moral support, and above all, Philippa Levine; in addition to being tremendous fun, it has been intellectually satisfying and a genuine privilege to be her collaborator. Philippa Levine would like to thank, most especially, Sue Grayzel, model collab­orator and good friend, with whom it has been a profound pleasure to work. Also, thanks to Curt Aldstadt, who as ever, reminded me that the singular pleasures of the academy have some pretty decent rivals out there. My life would be the poorer without him. The University of Southern California has been as generous an employer as one can imagine, and I thank the university for time off and for research funding.

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Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Buettner studied under Sonya Rose at the University of Michigan. She is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York (UK). Her publications include Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004), which was the joint winner of the Women's History Network Book Prize for 2004. She was shortlisted for Young Academic Author of the Year in the Times Higher Education Supplement Awards in 200S.

Becky E. Conekin is Senior Research Fellow & Course Director for the MA in the History & Culture of Fashion, the London College of Fashion. Her PhD (1998) was supervised by Sonya Rose and Geoff Eley. Her pub­lications include: The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (2003) and as co-editor, Moments of Modernity (1999), and the special 10th Anniversary issue of Fashion Theory dedicated to Vogue magazine (2006).

Dennis Dworkin teaches British and Irish history and cultural theory at the University of Nevada. His recent publications include Class Struggles (2007) and "Intellectual Adventures in the Isles: Kearney and the Ireland Peace Process", in Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (eds) Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge (2007).

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002) and A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (200S); and co-author with Keith Nield of The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social? (2007). He has also published widely in German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a general history of Europe in the twentieth century.

James Epstein teaches at Vanderbilt University, and is author, most recently, of In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain. He is presently working on a study of Britain and Trinidad in the age of revolution.

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Notes on Contributors xi

Laura L. Frader is Professor of History at Northeastern University and a Senior Associate in Residence at the Center for European Studies, Harvard. Her most recent books include, with Sonya O. Rose (eds) Gender and Class in Modem Europe (1996); with Herrick Chapman, Race in France (2004); and Breadwinners and Citizens. Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (2008).

Martin Francis is the Henry R. Winkler Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on the histories of politicS, gender and war in twentieth-century Britain. His most recent publication is The Flyer: Men of the Royal Air Force and British Culture, 1939-1945 (forthcoming).

Susan R. Grayzel is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Women's Identities At War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), which was awarded the British Council Prize in 2000, and Women and the First World War (2002), a global history.

Philippa Levine is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is author, among other works, of The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (2007) and Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2003).

Alice Ritscherle is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Her research, to date, explores the ways that memories of World War II informed British racial politics and responses to immigra­tion between 1945 and 1968.

Harold L. Smith is Professor of History at the University of Houston­Victoria and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain. He is the author of The British Women's SUffrage Campaign 1866-1928 (2nd ed., 2007), co-author of Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragist's Life in Politics (2003), and editor of British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (1990).

Penny Summerfield is Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She has written widely on the social and cultural history of the Second World War, notably, with C. Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007) and Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse

xii Notes on Contributors

and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998). She is currently working on a project with support from the Leverhulme Trust, entitled liThe Popular Memory of the Second World War in British Society 1945-1970".

Angela Woollacott is Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the author of On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (1994); To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (2001); and Gender and Empire (2006). Current projects include two co-edited anthologies on transnational lives; a study of three iconic 'Australian' women perform­ers, race and modernity in the early twentieth century; and a new research area exploring cultural understandings of the political changes in mid-nineteenth century Australia in imperial context.

List of Illustrations

7.1 "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down", British Vogue, November, 119 1939, p. 19 ©. Conde Nast Publications, courtesy of the Lee Miller Archives, England, 2008.

7.2 "Problem Hands", photographs by Lee Miller, British 122 Vogue, February, 1944, p. 34 ©. Conde Nast Publications, courtesy of the Lee Miller Archives, England, 2008.

7.3 Pile of Dead Prisoners, by Lee Miller, Buchenwald, 130 Germany, April, 1945 ©. Lee Miller Archives, England, 2008.

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