Product Description

How did the Second World War affect the lives of most women? Did their experiences help to liberate them? 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, diaries 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. This is a unique document offering unrivalled insight into women's minds and lives during the Second World War.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37804 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Dorothy Sheridan has been at the Mass-Observation Archive since 1974.

Customer Reviews

Some gems, even if you are a general reader
My link to reading this book was the excellent Mass-Observation based books edited by Simon Garfield (We are at War, Private Battles, and Our Hidden Lives). The women's contributions to those books were generally more thoughtful and interesting, so this seemed like a logical next step.
The book is arranged in 23 chapters averaging around 10 pages each. There are two types of material from the Mass-Observation archive. The less interesting material for me was the summary reports prepared at the time based either on direct observation or a summary of views from written reports. These were deliberately written as summary documents, dealing in general trends, but this only emphasises that it is the human touches and ability to recognise the very human, modern traits of the diarists in Garfield's collections (or the books based on Nella Last's writing) that makes them so enjoyable. I generally skipped this material and looked for the gems among the second type of chapter, the individual accounts and contributions.
Readers of Garfield's books will be pleased to know there is not much overlap at all - Pam Ashford makes a brief appearance writing about the Munich crisis in 1938 and Nella Last has, ahem, the Last word. There are some fascinating contributions, including Amy Briggs, a nurse from Leeds, and Muriel Green, a Norfolk girl working on the land in Somerset. They made me hope someone else will edit and publish more of their work.
Certainly there are a few duds, such as the chapter about an ambulance driving-test which just goers on and on and on, but these are few and far between.
I won't attempt a critique of this book as feminist history, because it is certainly not a topic I am familiar with, but if you are a general reader, you've read Garfield's books or something similar and want more then this is worth considering, maybe through your local library. I paid £10 for my copy through Amazon and it was ok value but I might have been disappointed if I had paid more.

An interesting historical approach
An interesting historical approach to a subject often over looked. From a modern opinion, it is of great interst to see the honest views of women 70 years before, from a range of social and finacial backgrounds. Although it seem to drag towards the end, it was overall delightful and humerous book at times, with a realistic attitude to a serious subject.

Speaking for themselves
A fascinating glimpse of the lives of women during World War 2. As fresh-sounding as if they were written yesterday. The anthology both confirms what we may imagine the lives of women in that period to have been but it throws up plenty of surprises too.