Social and Cultural History Today – Serie

We know that conflict, and people's memory of it, profoundly shapes both individual selfhoods and social identities. War and the British explores key ideas of British collective nationhood and personal identity, and in particular shines an important spotlight on the impact of gender on Britain's national consciousness, from the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to the end of the Gulf War in 1991.This book builds on current historiography by examining how notions about gender shaped the experiences of the war and how it was remembered in the collective public consciousness. It argues that, despite women's wartime role in 'total war', men in the armed forces were encouraged to regard themselves as being bound together in unity by masculinity and common experience, while women remained individuals with prime responsibilities to home and family. As Lucy Noakes shows, during the Second World War, the British government ensured that lipstick and corsets were never scarce, so that less soldiers returned from war disappointed by the ‘unfeminine’ women who greeted them. Thus, Noakes demonstrates how the conflicts strengthened gender boundaries by grouping men together in a masculine experience of combat from which women were strictly excluded. The 'People’s War' it was not.Now with a new preface, revised introduction and foreword by Penny Summerfield, War and the British provides an incisive analysis of public and private ideas of national identity in times of war and how they were shaped by gender. The result is a valuable addition to scholarly debates, which will be of interest to students and scholars studying the intersection of gender and war in Britain.

The period 1940-1960 was a time of considerable change in British society. It saw the emergence of mass democracy, a world war and then unprecedented affluence. Change brought uncertainty among Britain s elites, which in turn encouraged them to reflect more acutely on the direction the nation was taking. Questions were posed: what was the social role of ordinary men and women in 20th-century Britain? What were their needs, their rights, their responsibilities? How did they stand in relation not only to the State but to their regions and communities? And how were those objects of loyalty or disloyalty defined? Who, in other words, were the British, and by what processes did they come to be so considered?; The contributors explore the development of these ideas by a variety of individuals and organizations, and the relationship between these opinion-makers and political parties. They also examine the extent to which their conclusions were translated into social policy in an attempt to shape the evolution of modern Britain."

What did the Victorians know about desire between men? Was it really 'the love that dare not speak its name'? "Nameless Offences" argues that even before Oscar Wilde and the rise of sexual science there was an open, public and concerted discussion of same-sex desire that went to the heart of Victorian notions of masculinity, civil society, class and identity. How did homosexuality come to be known as a 'secret vice', consigned to a secret place - the closet - when contemporaries regularly described its existence as widespread, threatening and even notorious? "Nameless Offences" asks where the closet came from and how the English learned to describe that which was 'nameless' and indescribable in this way. This groundbreaking book offers the definitive portrait of male homosexuality in the nineteenth century and includes many perceptive insights into what it reveals about the interaction between public and private morality which lay at the heart of Victorian England.

The period 1940-1960 was a time of considerable change in British society. It saw the emergence of mass democracy, a world war and then unprecedented affluence. Change brought uncertainty among Britain's elites, which in turn encouraged them to reflect more acutely on the direction the nation was taking. Questions were posed: what was the social role of ordinary men and women in 20th-century Britain? What were their needs, their rights, their responsibilities? How did they stand in relation not only to the State but to their regions and communities? And how were those objects of loyalty or disloyalty defined? Who, in other words, were the British, and by what processes did they come to be so considered? The contributors explore the development of these ideas by a variety of individuals and organizations, and the relationship between these opinion-makers and political parties. They also examine the extent to which their conclusions were translated into social policy in an attempt to shape the evolution of modern Britain.

Popular memory of World War II was the dominant factor contributing to a sense of national identity in the Falklands War of 1982 and the Gulf War of 1991. This text looks at public and private ideas of national identity, how they were arrived at and the extent to which they were shaped by gender. It provides a synthesis between the key concepts of "national identity", "popular memory" and gender as a social and cultural construct. Recent studies of World War II, and popular memory of the war, have focused on the extent to which it is remembered as a "people's war". This book builds on this work by examining how ideas about gender shaped the experiences of the war and its memory and concludes that despite women's wartime role in "total war", men in the armed forces were encouraged to regard themselves as being bound together in unity by masculinity and common experience, while women remained individuals with prime responsibilities to home and family. Their role as active participants remained "problematic" and remained so even the Gulf War in 1991.