‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain

Julie V. Gottlieb is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has published widely on the relationship between gender and political history. She is the author of Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement, 1923-1945 (2000), and has co-edited The Culture of Fascism (2004), Making Reputations (2005), and The Aftermath of Suffrage (2013).

"Julie Gottlieb has done the scholarly community an enormous service by providing the first gendered history of British foreign policy in the age of appeasement. ... Guilty Women undoubtedly provides a much-needed and long-overdue corrective to the tendency within the existing literature to position women on the periphery ... . This is a work of admirable scholarship and ambition, and the ever-expanding canon of appeasement literature is richer for the contributions it makes." (Professor Daniel Hucker, Reviews in History, history.ac.uk, July, 2016) "Julie Gottlieb's impressive study is a wonderful example of their complementarity and, in her skilful hands, their combination profoundly recasts the familiar story of the 'Munich Crisis' of 1938. ... Bringing gender and women's history together, Julie Gottlieb has thus provided us with an immensely rich and rewarding analysis of appeasement. ... this work of stunning craftswomanship and path-breaking scholarship." (Marc Calvini Lefebvre, Revue Francaise de Civilisation Britannique, rfcb.revues.org, July, 2016)

• Introduction: Guilty Women? Gendering Appeasement 1. British Women and the Three Encounters: International, European, and Fascist 2. Women's War on Fascism 3. 'Guilty Women': Conspiracy and Collusion 4. 'Guilty Women': Powers behind Thrones 5. 'To Speak a Few Words of Comfort to Them': Conservative Women's Support for Chamberlain and Appeasement 6. 'Women are the Best Friends of Mr Chamberlain's Policy': Gendered Representations of Public Opinion 7. 'Anyway Let's Have Peace': Women's Expressions of Opinion on Appeasement 8. 'Don't Believe in Foreigners': The Female Franchise Factor and the Munich By-elections 9. The Women Churchillians and the Politics of Shame