For the Duration: Place, Space and Gender

Abstract

The Second World War had a significant impact on British culture. Myths were created and have found their way into accounts of the war, state propaganda and areas of popular culture. An exploration of women’s understanding of the war, contrasted with other accounts, serves to highlight the discrepancies between private and conventional history, offering ‘a means of analysing how and by whom national memory is constructed’ (Scott 1987, p. 28). During the war years the structure of feminine identities was called into question in ways which conflicted with embedded views of domesticity, nurturing and woman as a metaphor for home (Massey 1994).