Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Dorothy Sheridan (Editor)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $12.20

  A unique document offering unrivalled insight into women's minds and lives during the Second World War. The Mass-Observation organisation was set up in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life in Britain. Dorothy Sheridan has plundered its astonishingly rich archives to put together this anthology of women's experience in the Second World War. What was this experience? How far did it go to liberate women? Was it the opportunity that so many expected or was it simply six years of deprivation, hard work and pain? WARTIME WOMEN allows us to explore these questions through the writings of women living through the war years. Dorothy Sheridan has chosen extracts from the whole range of Mass-Observation material including research reports, letters, dairies and detailed questionnaires. The range of contributors is enormous from a fish and chip shop worker in Birmingham to Irish immigrant munitions factory workers, young women welders in Yorkshire and a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Essex. 'My horror of all this war business is qualified by an eagerness to be a unit of it. I feel as if I have been waiting for this all my life and I have just realised it' A young woman writing in her diary in September, 1939.

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $6.71

  Just how far did women's experience of World War II help to liberate them? Was it the opportunity they had expected, or was it simply six years of deprivation and hard work? This volume considers these and other questions through the writings of women living through the war years. It has been compiled from the archive at the University of Sussex, which houses the papers of Mass-Observation, an organization which was set up in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life in Britain. Although this anthology inevitably represents only a fraction of the archive, it offers contemporary insight into the experiences and perceptions of women during the war period, and includes extracts from personal diaries, letters and detailed questionnaires.