Cultural and Social History 2004; 1: 65–93
Culture and Composure:
Creating Narratives of the
Gendered Self in Oral History
Interviews
Penny SummerŽeld
University of Manchester
The cultural approach to oral history suggests that narrators draw on public
discourses in constructing accounts of their pasts for their audiences. As well
as endeavouring to compose memory stories they seek composure, or personal equanimity, from the practice of narration. But how does gender intersect with these processes and what happens when public discourses have
little to offer on a particular aspect of the past? This article investigates these
questions through oral history accounts of experiences in Britain in the
Second World War. It explores the relationship to personal narratives of
cultural silences concerning, for example, civilian men and combatant
women, and concludes that the achievement of composure is problematic
in the face of lost histories. Cultural and Social History 2004; 1: 65–93
Debates about oral history since the 1970s have been conducted from
three intellectual angles, which one could characterize as the traditional, the social historical and the cultural. From the traditional perspective, oral history is profoundly unreliable compared with the documentary evidence that has been seen as the proper source for historical
writing. Traditionalists would agree with Eric Hobsbawm’s dismissal:
‘most oral history today is personal memory which is a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts’.1 The problems suggested are that
Address for correspondence: Penny SummerŽeld, School of History, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
E-mail: penny.summerŽ [email protected]
1
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1997) p. 206. It
seems a pity to use Hobsbawm as a spokesman for the traditional critics in view of
his otherwise innovatory approach to historical sources, including the use of images,
and his recent publication of his own autobiography. But although critics were
vociferous at conferences and seminars in the 1970s and 1980s, few appear to have
expressed their views in print. See Alistair Thomson, ‘Unreliable Memories: The Use
and Abuse of Oral History’, in W. Lamond (ed.), Historical Controversies (University
College Press, London, 1998).
Ó The Social History Society 2004
10.1191/1478003804cs0005oa
66
Penny SummerŽeld
interviewees are prone to misremembering and exaggeration, that the
presence of the interviewer may stimulate such  aws, and that oral
history is ‘anecdotal’ and unrepresentative of anyone beyond the individual.2
Social historians, particularly those committed to the history of neglected groups such as working-class people, women and black people,
have responded vigorously to such criticisms. The case for oral history
lay in its powerful recovery role, in that it could rescue for the historical
record the lives of social groups for whom other kinds of records were
sparse or non-existent, or in which the angle of vision was only that of
those in power (such as policy-makers, the police or other authorities).
Social historians, led by Paul Thompson, have argued that traditionally
favoured documentary sources were just as problematic as oral sources,
that memory was not as fallible as was suggested, and that careful methodology could correct some of the other problems. Thus written
sources were shown to have problems of bias and omission; it could
be demonstrated that long-term memory and the recall of repeated
and habitual events were relatively reliable; triangulation with other
types of data could address issues of inaccuracy; and creating a large
sample dealt with the problems of anecdotalism and representativeness.3
The cultural approach to history raised another set of complex
issues. This approach suggested that prevailing discursive constructions
of the past ‘contaminate’ memory, in the sense that they overlay it with
later accounts and interpretations of the period of history to which a
memory relates, to such an extent that it is impossible for anyone to
remember what they did and what they thought at the time independently of this ‘patina of historical postscripts and rewritings’. For
example, a History Workshop editorial of 1979 stated: ‘The difŽ culty lies
in the fact that memory does not constitute pure recall; the memory
of any particular event is refracted through layer upon layer of subsequent experience and through the in uence of the dominant
and/or local and speciŽ c ideology’.4 This kind of thinking took cultural historians in the direction of studying the discourses, cultural
constructs or ideologies that shape consciousness and behaviour,
2
3
4
See Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Ž rst published 1978; 3rd edn,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) pp. 77–81, on the ‘nature of the opposition’
to oral history.
Thompson, Voice of the Past, especially ch. 4, ‘Evidence’; Trevor Lummis, Listening to
History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (Hutchinson, London, 1987), especially part
3, ‘Assessing the Interviews’.
‘Editorial’, History Workshop, 8 (1979) p. iii. See also Denise Riley, War in the Nursery:
Theories of the Child and Mother (Virago, London, 1983) p. 191, and Richard Johnson
et al. (eds), Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (Hutchinson,
London, 1982) ch. 6, ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’, where the
problem is posed more positively: ‘What is interesting about the forms of oralhistorical witness or autobiography are not just the nuggets of “fact” about the past,
but the whole way in which popular memories are constructed and reconstructed as
part of a contemporary consciousness’ (p. 219).
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
67
rather than accepting that oral history rendered ‘voices that speak for
themselves’. Post-structuralism has been intimately connected with the
development of cultural history, and part of the post-structuralist argument is that historians who claim that accounts of lived experience
give access to social reality, falsely separate discourse and experience:
experience cannot exist outside discourse, agency cannot exist independently of language.5
The response of a number of historians to the idea that memory
cannot be independent of cultural in uences but is shaped or even
constructed by them has been to see this not as an insurmountable
problem but as an inevitability that needs analysing. The starting point
of the cultural approach to oral history is to accept that people do not
simply remember what happened to them, but make sense of the subject matter they recall by interpreting it. Understanding is integral to
memory and, like any other knowledge, it is constructed from the language and concepts available to the person remembering. The challenge for the historian is to understand the cultural ingredients that
go into accounts of a remembered and interpreted past. Or to put it
another way, the oral historian needs to understand not only the narrative offered, but also the meanings invested in it and their discursive
origins.6
This article seeks to re ect upon and develop the cultural approach.
It begins by introducing the theory of culture and memory and the
concept of ‘composure’. It then discusses the ways in which gender,
as a major social and cultural differentiator, intersects with both culture and memory in oral history.7 Using Britain in the Second World
War as a site of study, it explores both the relationship of gender to
public discourses of the war, and men and women’s take-up of such
discourses in telling their life stories. It draws on two recent oral history
projects: on gender, training and employment in the 1940s; and on
5
6
7
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge,
London, 1990) p. 147; Joan W. Scott, ‘Experience’ in J. Butler and J.W. Scott,
Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, London, 1992) p. 34.
Publications by historians who have responded in this way include: Michael Frisch,
‘Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay’ (1972), republished in Rob Perks
and Al Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (Routledge, London, 1998); Ronald J.
Grele, ‘Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral
History’ in R.J. Grele (ed.), Envelopes of Sound (Precedent, Chicago, 1975); Luisa
Passerini, ‘Introduction’ in L. Passerini (ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1992); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and
Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (SUNY Press, Albany, 1991); Penny
SummerŽeld, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral
Histories of the Second World War (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998),
especially ch. 1; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford
University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1994), especially Introduction and Appendix
1.
Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thompson argue that ‘oral historians have noted the
gendered nature of memory from very early on’ but, for reasons which they explore,
had by 1996 done little to follow up these insights. ‘Introduction’ to S. Leydesdorff,
L. Passerini and P. Thompson (eds), Gender and Memory (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1996) pp. 2, 4.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
68
Penny SummerŽeld
men, women and home defence in wartime.8 It focuses on misremembering and difŽ culties of narration, on the salience of the anecdote to
oral history accounts, and on the problems for composure of cultural silences.
Theorists of cultural or popular memory and the life story argue
that the discourses of, especially, popular culture inform personal and
locally told life stories, in that narrators draw on generalized, public
versions of the aspects of the lives that they are talking about to construct their own particular, personal accounts. This process of life-story
telling is crucial to the construction of the subject – in reproducing
the self as a social identity, we necessarily draw upon public renderings.
A vivid example of this interchange comes from Al Thomson’s work.
He found that Australian and New Zealand veterans of the First World
War described scenes from the Ž lm Gallipoli as if they were accounts
of their own experiences in battle in the First World War. The Ž lm
had been released shortly before Thomson undertook his oral history
research, and it gave powerful expression to enduring notions of Australian masculinity and national identity. In borrowing from it, Thomson’s interviewees constructed themselves as a speciŽ c type of soldier,
the loyal and patriotic yet devil-may-care ‘digger’ of the ‘Anzac legend’,
even though this involved subordinating painful personal memories
that did not Ž t the stereotype.9
On the other hand, it cannot be the case that such public images
come from nowhere. It has been argued that there is a ‘cultural circuit’
at work. Privately and locally told stories of experience are picked up
and enter public discourse in myriad ways, including word of mouth,
newspaper reporting, television interviewing, Ž lm-script research, and
so on. They are adapted, glossed and elaborated, and become woven
into the generalized, public form of those stories which changes over
time: the public account of past events does not stand still. Such versions, given expression in Ž lms such as Gallipoli, tend in turn ‘to deŽ ne
and to limit imaginative possibilities’ for the private and local telling
8
9
Economic and Social Research Council Project R000 23 2048, ‘Gender, Training and
Employment, 1939–1950’, principal investigator Penny SummerŽeld (henceforth
ESRC Project). Leverhulme Trust, Research Project F/185/AK, ‘The Gendering of
British National Defence, 1939–1945: The Case of the Home Guard’, award holder
Penny SummerŽeld (henceforth Leverhulme Project). I should like to acknowledge
the contributions of the research associates who worked with me on these projects,
Nicole Crockett (ESRC Project) and Corinna Peniston-Bird (Leverhulme Project). I
should also like to thank the women and men interviewed for their involvement and
for permission to quote from their interviews. The main publication arising from the
ESRC Project was SummerŽeld, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives.
Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 8, passim. See also his ‘Anzac Memories: Putting
Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia’, Oral History, 18, 2 (1990) pp. 25–
31. The Ž lm Gallipoli, directed by Peter Weir, was released in 1981, and is an
account of male bonding, nationalistic fervour and the waste of war, featuring
reconstructions of the First World War battlefront at Gallipoli in Turkey. Thomson
undertook his interviews from 1982 to 1987.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
69
of experiences.10 But these discursive formulations are inevitably selective; they omit some dimensions and emphasize others, and they are
likely to contain contradictory conceptualizations of experience and
identity, all of which make problematic the construction of subjectivities from them.
The concept of ‘composure’ refers to the process by which subjectivities are constructed in life-story telling. Graham Dawson, in his book
Soldier Heroes, elaborates the double meaning of the term to characterize life-story telling. Composure occurs when a teller composes a
story about him- or herself, so here composure refers to the composition
of the narrative. It also refers to the way in which a narrator seeks a
sense of ‘composure’ from constituting themselves as the subject of
their story. Dawson’s theory suggests that life-story telling involves an
endeavour to achieve the state of being calm and in control of oneself
that is the pursuit of personal equanimity or psychic comfort. The
relationship of composure to cultural representations is that public
discourses are inevitably drawn upon in the composition of a story
about the self. And they are drawn upon in such a way as to produce
a version of the self that the teller can live with in relative psychic
ease. Gerontologists and sociolinguists who study reminiscence and the
telling of life stories suggest that the pursuit of coherence underlies
the achievement of composure in this sense. They emphasize, too, that
the quest is never Ž nally accomplished. Life stories are constantly
revised in a continuing search for meaning.11
There is a further aspect to composure. The telling of a life story is
not, usually, done alone, but, particularly in the case of a life story
elicited through oral history, it is narrated to an audience. An intersubjective relationship is established between the narrator and the
audience, whether it is a casual one of friends or relatives, or a more
formally composed one, such as a group of schoolchildren or an oral
historian. The social recognition offered by the audience ‘exercises a
determining in uence upon the way a narrative may be told, and
therefore, upon the kind of composure that it makes possible’.12 So
public and personal stories are not used indiscriminately. A selection
is made by the teller, who constructs a narrative about him- or herself,
in pursuit of psychic comfort and satisfaction, and in the hope of eliciting recognition and afŽ rmation from his or her audience. But composure may not always be achieved. A particular terrain of memory or
line of enquiry, or an uncomprehending and unsympathetic response
from an audience, may produce discomposure, that is personal dis10
11
12
Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of
Masculinities (Routledge, London, 1994) p. 25.
Charlotte Linde, Life Stories: the Creation of Coherence (Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1993); Peter Coleman, ‘Ageing and Life History: The Meaning of Reminiscence in
Late Life’ in S. Dex (ed.), Life and Work History Analyses: Qualitative and Quantitative
Developments (Routledge, London, 1991).
Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 23.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
70
Penny SummerŽeld
equilibrium, manifest in confusion, anger, self-contradiction, discomfort and difŽ culties of sustaining a narrative.13
To sum up so far, culture, understood as public discourse, has a
relationship to composure, a term with the double meaning of the
composition of a story about the self and the pursuit of personal equanimity. In oral history, composure in this dual sense occurs (or fails
to occur) through an intersubjective process. We shall now explore
how gender, as a key constructor of social difference within power
relations, identities and cultural meanings, intersects with culture
and composure.
Feminist theorists have argued that public discourses concerning
femininity are particularly complex, with consequences for their
uptake by women seeking to compose themselves as feminine subjects.
As Bronwen Davies argues, ‘The discourses through which the subject
position “woman” is constituted are multiple and contradictory. In
striving to successfully constitute herself within her allocated gender
category, each woman takes on the desires made relevant within those
contradictory discourses. She is however never able to achieve
unequivocal success at being a woman.’14 The contradictory character
of the discourses constituting ‘woman’ is particularly visible in the context of Britain in the Second World War. In wartime rhetoric the effort
of the entire people had to be mobilized behind this total war. But
for women this meant a number of requirements that were in tension:
they had both to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort outside the home and
to be at home caring for children and watching and waiting for their
menfolk to return from the front. And there were limits on military
participation, most notably at the boundary between non-combatant
and combatant roles. Wartime Ž lms about the personal changes
experienced by women during the war explored these tensions. They
include, most famously, two Ž lms made in 1943: Millions Like Us, about
a young woman called up into a wartime munitions factory, and The
Gentle Sex, about seven women who joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and became gunners and lorry drivers. Both these wartime recruitment Ž lms vividly evoked the mobility and agency, independent of family constraints, required of young women in wartime in the industrial
and the military spheres. However, both Ž lms ultimately emphasized
continuity with traditional values concerning women’s roles, even
though they envisaged the possibility of a world of greater equality
between the sexes and more ‘modern’ forms of marriage and motherhood than before. Few post-war Ž lms depicted wartime women except
as wives and sweethearts in subsidiary roles. Those with plots which
13
14
Penny SummerŽeld, ‘Dis/composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’
in T. Cosslett, C. Lury and P. SummerŽeld (eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts,
Theories, Methods (Routledge, London, 2000) pp. 93–108.
Bronwen Davies, ‘Women’s Subjectivity and Feminist Stories’ in C. Ellis and M.G.
Flaherty (eds), Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience (Sage, London,
1992) p. 55.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
71
were dependent on female agency, such as the 1950s Ž lms Odette and
Carve her Name with Pride, about women secret agents in France, sooner
or later subordinated the wartime objectives that gave these women
exceptional roles to personal ones related to romance and marriage.
The same is true of more recent Ž lms, including Yanks (1979), Land
Girls (1997) and Charlotte Gray (2002).
Feminist theorists argue that the power of dominant masculinity to
deŽ ne the parameters of identity and behaviour possible to women as
‘others’, and hence to regulate them, has contributed historically to
the conceptualization of the special fragility of feminine subjectivities.
But studies of masculinity suggest that the construction of male identity
within discourses of masculinity is also fractured and insecure.15 In the
particular context of the Second World War, tensions around masculinity focused on the different wartime identities available to men, most
obviously, at a time of intensive military mobilization, the tension
between combatants and non-combatants. Servicemen, particularly
those on ‘active service’ close to battle, were represented as occupying
a higher point in the masculine hierarchy than servicemen serving as
ground staff or in areas remote from action, who were in turn more
esteemed than civilian men. While British wartime images of combatants emphasized youth, patriotism and muscular virility, either images
of civilian men were comical or they strained to establish a parallel
between the male worker and the Ž ghter, as in an ofŽ cial poster
entitled ‘Combined Operations Include You’, which depicted a gunner
and a factory worker in the same posture, one Ž ring a gun and the
other operating a piece of machinery.16 Wartime and post-war Ž lms
about the Second World War rarely if ever featured young civilian men,
apart from those en route for, or returning from, the forces. Examples
include 1940s Ž lms such as 49th Parallel (1941) and In Which We Serve
(1942); 1950s Ž lms such as The Dam Busters (1954), The Colditz Story
(1954) and Reach for the Sky (1956); through The Great Escape (1962),
Yanks (1979), Hope and Glory (1987), to Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Post-war television series on wartime themes tended to send up civilian
men in wartime. A case in point is Dad’s Army (1968–77), to which we
shall return later. This BBC comedy series depicted the men of the
Home Guard either as callow youths or as ‘past it’, while celebrating
the values for which their organization stood. Within wartime trade
union and labour movement literature, as Sonya Rose has shown, the
vigour and virility of men in occupations such as steel making, engin15
16
Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Polity, Cambridge, 1995); David H.J. Morgan,
‘Theater of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities’ in Harry Brod and Michael
Kaufman (eds), Theorizing Masculinities (Sage, London, 1994) pp. 165–82; Dawson,
Soldier Heroes; Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: the Psychic and
Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History
Workshop Journal, 50 (2000) pp. 181–204.
J.D. Cantwell, Images of War: British Posters, 1939–45 (HMSO, London, 1989) plate 44,
‘Combined Operations Include You’.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
72
Penny SummerŽeld
eering and dock work was depicted and celebrated.17 But in more
widely accessible public media, both during and after the war, a cultural veil hung over the presence of the young Ž t civilian male on the
home front, and with it his manhood.
What is the relationship between such wartime and post-war representations and oral history? An example of a remarkably frank telling
of the tension between what a man felt he was supposed to be in wartime, according to contemporary culture, and what he was comes from
the research project on men, women and home defence referred to
above.18 The Home Guard, a volunteer force set up in 1940 to protect
Britain from invasion, was unusual in the way it straddled the civilian
and military spheres. Civilian men joined it to do a few hours’ military
service each week, under the command, at a distance, of the regular
army. Had there been an invasion, members of the Home Guard would
have been mobilized as full-time military personnel.19 Yet the men of
the Home Guard were not seen as proper soldiers. A man interviewed
about his experiences in the Home Guard explained that ‘you couldn’t
pretend to be a soldier, you were Home Guard’.20 However, this interviewee, ‘Christopher Redmond’, composed a story of using his membership of the Home Guard as a disguise by which to pass as a serviceman, such was his desire as a young man in wartime for the identity
of soldier and the enhanced social and sexual prestige it conferred.
Redmond was an engineering draughtsman, which was a ‘reserved
occupation’, meaning that he was not allowed to join the armed
forces.21 He was dismayed about this. A temporary solution was for him
to become a member of the Home Guard, in which ‘I was issued with
a proper uniform and I looked like a soldier’.22 Nevertheless, a member of the Home Guard was not considered a proper soldier, and in
17
18
19
20
21
22
Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003) ch. 5.
The Leverhulme Project involved the collection, by me and a research associate,
Corinna Peniston-Bird, of thirty interviews with men and women who had been
involved in the Home Guard in the Second World War. Interviewees either
responded to notices placed in popular magazines or were identiŽ ed through
contacts. They signed a form giving permission for use to be made of the interview
in research and publication, stating their preference for their name or for a
pseudonym to be used in the archiving and publication of the interview.
The standard works on the Home Guard are Charles Graves, The Home Guard of
Britain (Hutchinson, London, 1943); Norman Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army: The
Story of the Home Guard (Arrow, London, 1974); S.P. Mackenzie, The Home Guard: A
Military and Political History (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
Leverhulme Project, Christopher Redmond (pseud.), interviewed by Corinna
Peniston-Bird (CP-B), 13 March 2000, text unit 244. (‘Text units’ are paragraph
numbers introduced to transcripts by the software package used for indexing.)
The Ministry of Labour used the Schedule of Reserved Occupations to try to balance
the competing demands of civilian industries and the armed forces for workers in
particular trades and skills. It was constantly revised during the war, adding to the
problems of public understanding. See P. Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries
(HMSO, London, 1957) pp. 35, 52, 67, 135; H.M.D. Parker, Manpower: A Study of
War-time Policy and Administration (HMSO, London, 1957) pp. 158–60.
Leverhulme Project, Christopher Redmond (pseud.) interviewed by CP-B, 13 March
2000, text unit 72.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
73
his local community the difference between the part-time Home Guard
living at home and the full-time serviceman posted away from home
was well known. Christopher Redmond managed to get a place on a
special training course in engineering, designed to create a pool of
men qualiŽ ed for speciŽ c trades in the forces. This took him away
from home, just as if he, like most other men of his age, had been
called up. Nevertheless, during the two-year period of training he
remained a civilian. This led him and fellow trainees into a subterfuge
in which the Home Guard uniform was vitally important (Figure 1).
I told you earlier that you wanted to be in uniform … when we went
into the er, joined the Home Guard and we of course had uniforms
and we had, on here we had Home Guard, we had a little strip
which said Home Guard which had been, I don’t know, sewn or
printed or what, Home Guard, and you were issued, well you were
issued these and you had to sew them on here. Well what some of
the lads started to do, and I soon cottoned on to this, was when we
went home for our holidays, our break, our leave, um, went home
in uniform, you see. … I do remember that when we went home
on leave what we did was to take our Home Guard off, the night
before we were going, take our Home Guard off, get a razor blade
and take it off and then, and then, and off our overcoats you see.
And then off we’d go.23
In Christopher Redmond’s memory this pretence was both ‘quite good
fun’ and ‘ridiculous’, but he had a cogent explanation for it:
Figure 1 A Home Guard shoulder badge of the sort that Redmond was forever unpicking
and restitching
Source: courtesy of King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum, Lancaster, with special thanks
to Peter Donnelly, Assistant Curator
23
Leverhulme Project, Christopher Redmond (pseud.) interviewed by CP-B, 13 March
2000, text unit 260.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
74
Penny SummerŽeld
we sort of pretended an awful lot. I think we were sort of masquerading as something that we weren’t quite, because it was terribly
important to us to you know to be recognised as one of the, er we
were Ž ghting for our country and so on and so forth.24
In other words, the appearance of being in the military was vital to his
sense of himself – his sense of composure – as a wartime man. This
remained an important reference point for him. Over Ž fty years later
he could not talk about his wartime experiences without recalling and
explaining his relationship to the male military archetype. But
intersubjectivity worked to enable him to make a confessional account.
In the year 2000, when the link between manliness and military patriotism was weaker in Britain, especially for younger people, than it was
in the Second World War, Redmond composed a story for a woman
interviewer in her early thirties about the lengths to which he went to
achieve at least the appearance of military masculinity in wartime. He
also expressed a justiŽ cation for the subterfuge that drew on the cultural Ž gure of the modern warrior. Yet there was evidently potential
for discomposure in this confession. This interviewee was one of a
small number who asked for a pseudonym to be used in anything published about him.
The relationship of women’s memories to public discourse is also, as
we have seen, complicated. Feminist theorists suggest not only that
discourses of femininity are multiple and contradictory, but that the
creation of public discourses takes place within male norms of action
and control, which locate women within a disadvantaged subject position. When women’s experience conforms to the feminine norms
prevalent in a social context – for example, marriage, wife and motherhood – women may Ž nd a place for their memories within public discourse, but, as Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack explain, when their
experiences deviate from those norms it can be more difŽ cult.25 Thus
women interviewed for the project on gender, training and employment in Britain in the 1940s, referred to earlier, spoke of their frustration that their wartime experiences of contributing to the military
and industrial war effort in relatively ‘masculine’ roles were routinely
omitted from public accounts of war. As a result audiences for their
reminiscences tended to laugh at, disbelieve or ignore them, and they
found it difŽ cult to compose their accounts. For example, ‘Helena Balfour’ described how, as a member of a local social club in Motherwell,
she was asked to speak to the members about her wartime experiences.
She had been a domestic servant before the war and a post ofŽ ce clerk
afterwards, but she was called up for work in an aircraft factory during
24
25
Leverhulme Project, Christopher Redmond (pseud.) interviewed by CP-B, 13 March
2000, text unit 641.
Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack, ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and
Analyses’ in S.B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral
History (Routledge, London, 1991) pp. 11–26.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
75
the war, and she started to talk about this. However, the reactions of
a group of men at the club to her statement ‘I was an aircraft Ž tter’,
made it hard for her to go on:
Well you see they just all giggled and laughed and I said ‘you see
that’s the same reaction that I get from my grandson, from my family, or anybody else that hasn’t lived, you know, through these
things’, I said, ‘they think it’s a huge joke’. And I said, ‘I was a very
good Ž tter.’ %
I think it irritates me slightly that they think women can’t do that
kind of job – I drew them up. But you see, I think young people
should really Ž nd out about these things, you know.26
A similar account of unreceptive audiences for her wartime reminiscences, both within the family and more publicly, was given by a
woman who worked as a wireless-telegraphist in the Women’s Royal
Naval Service, known as the Wrens, during the war. ‘Katharine Hughes’
had been a high-class dressmaker pre-war and worked as a receptionist
and later a caterer after the war. She said:
And even now when I talked to my granddaughter about it, you
know, ‘I don’t believe it Nan, did you used to do this, did you used
to do that?’ Only you know, even my son, I sometimes say something, well, he laughs, ‘No, not you Katie, you couldn’t do this, you
couldn’t do that.’ %
It’s only since the war, when I’ve read things and I’ve thought,
‘Oh God’ you know ‘they don’t realise what women did’. They’re
talking about now what the Wrens do, but they don’t talk about
what the Wrens used to do before. 27
Both women referred not only to the ignorance of their speciŽ c, local
audiences, but also to the absence of public knowledge of women’s
wartime accomplishments, and their desire for their personal memories to Ž nd a place in public discourse.
The historical fact that women worked in wartime as aircraft Ž tters,
as wireless-telegraphists and in other occupations that they had not
commonly done before, from crane-driving to tree-felling, was not
unknown in public discourse from 1945 to 2000.28 But women’s experi26
27
28
ESRC Project, Helena Balfour (pseud.), interviewed by Nicole Crockett (NC) 28 Feb
1992, text units 364, 368.
ESRC Project, Katharine Hughes (pseud.), interviewed by NC, 22 Nov 1991, text
units 246, 330.
Popular productions on women in wartime increased in number under the stimulus
of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. They include, in the 1970s, books
such as Susan Briggs, Keep Smiling Through (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London,
1975), and Alan Jenkins, The Forties (Book Club Associates, London, 1977), both of
which refer to women and war work rather incidentally. In 1980 a documentary Ž lm
about the sexual and racial discrimination experienced by North American women
during and after the war, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, directed by Connie
Fields, was released in the USA and subsequently in Britain. In the 1980s there were
television documentaries, such as Channel 4’s series People’s War (broadcast 1985–6),
which had an episode on ‘The Women’s War’, and popular books such as Pam
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
76
Penny SummerŽeld
ences of involvement in war on the Home Front tended to be omitted
from constructions of wartime national identity, because they did not
involve military activity, the deŽ ning signiŽ er of the nation in wartime
and one that was branded ‘male’. Legends about men are typically not
‘accurate’ or ‘complete’, as we have seen in the case of the privileging
of men in combat roles and the resulting omission from public discourse of men in reserved occupations such as engineering, such as
Christopher Redmond. But equivalent public accounts about women
in wartime have been even less readily available, leading to the silencing of women’s experience that Helena Balfour and Katharine
Hughes experienced. What happened when women’s activities in the
Second World War did involve combat? The transgression of the gender boundary represented by women’s involvement in combat is
depicted in the Ž lms about women secret agents referred to above,
Odette (1950) and Carve her Name with Pride (1958). But it is shown
in these Ž lms as extraordinary, justiŽ ed by the exceptional need for
clandestine operations in occupied countries, in which women could
more easily pass undetected than men. Even in these Ž lms women’s
recourse to the use of weapons was only a last resort, necessitated by
self-defence and in order to protect the resistance organization with
which they were working. Furthermore, such transgressive action took
place well away from the home front.
Women’s participation in the Home Guard is a case in point of the
absence from public representations of women’s home-front involvement in combatant military activity. The little-known history of women
in the Home Guard is, in brief, as follows. Women were involved in
the war effort in Britain in a great many ways, in industry, commerce,
government, on the land and as auxiliaries to the armed forces.29 They
were, however, ofŽ cially excluded from the Home Guard from 1940
to 1943. The reason for their exclusion by the War OfŽ ce is clouded
29
Schweitzer, Lorraine Hilton and Jane Moss (eds), What Did You Do in the War, Mum?
Women Recall their Wartime Work (Age Exchange, London, 1985), and Jane Waller and
Michael Vaughan-Rees, Women in Wartime: the Role of Women’s Magazines, 1939–1945
(Macdonald Optima, London, 1987), as well as the more Ž rmly research-based Out of
the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars by Gail Braybon and Penny
SummerŽeld (Pandora, London, 1987). In spite of the increased attention to the
subject, authors of popular pictorial books on women in wartime were still
complaining about media neglect in the 1990s. For example, Anne Valery in Talking
about the War (Michael Joseph, London, 1991) explained that she ‘tried hard to
interest the television stations in a documentary or drama series’ about the Auxiliary
Territorial Service on the occasion of its Ž ftieth anniversary in 1988. ‘No one was
interested, and the double anniversary of an army that served its country in peace
and in war passed without comment. It was as if we had never existed. Yet an
equivalent anniversary of, say, the Fleet Air Arm, would have been celebrated in the
press, on radio and in television’ (p. 87). A similar tone characterizes Bette
Anderson, We Just Got On With It: British Women in World War Two (Picton,
Chippenham, 1994).
See Dorothy Sheridan, Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for
Mass-Observation, 1937–45 (Macmillan, London, 1990); Penny SummerŽeld, Women
Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conict (Routledge,
London, 1989); SummerŽeld, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
77
in obfuscation, but basically it was not seen as appropriate for women
to be members of a force that had to be armed in order to fulŽ l its
function. However, numerous women at the time challenged this idea,
taking up as ungendered the rhetoric that in a national emergency all
those capable of using Ž rearms to defend their country had a duty to
do so. Led by the Labour MP Dr Edith Summerskill, they formed an
organization called the Women’s Home Defence which was not strictly
legal, since it was an armed force giving military training outside the
authority of the Crown. The organization produced a badge for its
members, a deep-red metal shield with gold edging divided into four
segments by virtue of crossed ri es, with the letters W, H and D positioned in three of the segments and a revolver in the fourth. The
WHD was hounded by the authorities, who tried to prevent its involvement with the Home Guard particularly in the matter of arms training.
In spite of such prohibitions, however, and effectively in deŽ ance of
them, the WHD was invited to co-operate with the Home Guard by
numerous local commanding ofŽ cers, some of whom gave the women
weapons training (see Figure 2).30
Eventually, in April 1943, after three years of refusal, the government
gave permission for a limited number of older women to join the
Home Guard directly, as ‘Nominated Women’, later renamed ‘Women
Figure 2 A member of the local Home Guard gives ri e instruction to a member of the
Watford Woman’s Home Defence Unit
Source: Imperial War Museum Photographic Department, HU 36 277, no date, courtesy
of the Imperial War Museum
30
See Penny SummerŽeld ‘“She Wants a Gun Not a Dishcloth!”: Gender, Service and
Citizenship in Britain in the Second World War’, in G.J. DeGroot and C. PenistonBird, A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military (Pearson Education,
Harlow, England) pp. 119–34.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
78
Penny SummerŽeld
Home Guard Auxiliaries’. They were to assist it with a constrained
range of ‘feminine’ functions, namely driving, catering and clerical
work, but were to have no uniforms, no weapons and no arms training,
and to receive no public recognition. They were issued with no more
than a plastic badge. This was about the size of an old penny, and
depicted the letters ‘HG’ in a grey-gold roundel.
The lack of public recognition at the time was perpetuated after the
war. Women Home Guard Auxiliaries were not entitled to the war service medals which male members of the Home Guard received, and
were not ofŽ cially commemorated alongside the male Home Guard
in, for example, Remembrance Day parades.31 As we shall discuss in
more depth shortly, women Home Guards did not appear in wartime
or post-war Ž lms, and did not feature except in one dismissive episode
(out of 80) of Dad’s Army, the popular television comedy series referred
to earlier, which celebrated and gently mocked the men of the Home
Guard. The silence about the legitimate Women Home Guard Auxiliaries went even deeper as far as the non-legitimate Women’s Home
Defence was concerned. The Ž rst oral history interview with a woman
undertaken as part of the project on home defence revealed a glaring
contradiction. The controversial existence of the Women’s Home
Defence is documented in War OfŽ ce Ž les available at the Public Record OfŽ ce, which were researched as part of the project. But Jeanne
Gale Sharp, who produced material evidence of her membership of
the Women’s Home Defence in the shape of her WHD badge, did not
remember joining the WHD, but ‘remembered’ that she had belonged
to the more publicly recognized Home Guard. A similar confusion
recurred in other interviews, where it was reinforced for some women
by the fact that they possessed both the WHD and the HG badges. Their
ownership of the two badges arose because they were working with the
Home Guard before April 1943 as badge-wearing members of the
WHD and continued to do so afterwards, although now on an ofŽ cial
footing as Women Home Guard Auxiliaries. In this capacity they
received the HG badge.32 Jeanne Gale Sharp’s misremembering was
particularly striking:
JGS
PS
JGS
PS
JGS
31
32
This is one of my treasured possessions. That’s it.
I’m sure. W.H.D.
Yes, Women’s Home Division, not Guard.
Right.
Um I found out. We were always called Women’s Home Guard
but um, I realise that they’ve put Division on that.
‘We Regret to Inform You that We Can’t Give You a Medal – Because You’re a
Woman’, Stockport Express 8 December 1999, pp. 6–7.
In a press photograph of a Women’s Home Defence group in Wallasey, near
Liverpool, on the occasion of their ‘stand-down’ in December 1944, about half of
the women are wearing both badges. Birkenhead Central Library, Wirral Archives,
YPX/75, 1359/2, Wallasey Women’s Home Guard Unit.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
PS
JGS
79
Right, it’s got crossed ri es, and um and a revolver.
Yes, and we were taught how to shoot those, you see.33
This Ž rst interview alerted the interviewer to the possibility that the
boundary between the WHD and the Home Guard was not as clear
cut at the time as women’s formal exclusion from the Home Guard
suggested it would have been, something that further research bore
out. Jeanne Gale Sharp’s interpretation of the badge was signiŽ cant.
She believed that, as a Woman Home Guard, she had been given a
badge stating that she was in a ‘Women’s Home Division’ of the Home
Guard, which suggested that she remembered nothing of the Women’s
Home Defence. Rather than disturb the rapport developing in the
early stages of the interview by challenging this memory, the interviewer waited for the recurrence of the subject of the history of women
in the Home Guard, in which Jeanne Gale Sharp was deeply interested.
Jeanne had a collection of letters from women who had responded to
a small piece she had placed in the personal column of Saga, the magazine of an organization for the over-Ž fties, requesting wartime Women
Home Guards to write to her in support of her campaign for a place
for them in the remembrance parades held on Armistice Day. As
Jeanne Gale Sharp and the interviewer went over these letters together,
the Women’s Home Defence came up again, and at this point the
interviewer contributed some information about it, to which Jeanne
Gale Sharp was receptive (‘it makes you wonder, doesn’t it’).34 She
remembered Dr Edith Summerskill’s involvement in the Home
Guard35 but had not realized what Summerskill had faced in terms of
ofŽ cial opposition.
In spite of her misremembering of the organization to which she
belonged, Jeanne Gale Sharp told a  uent story about her experiences
with the Home Guard. The account was structured by two key cultural
reference points: the ideological purpose of the Second World War
and men’s prejudices concerning women’s wartime roles, as in ‘Men
are so, so chauvinistic aren’t they about things? Apparently we did
nothing, we’ve nothing to do with the war.’36 Jeanne’s account of her
recruitment is representative of her narrative as a whole, and also helps
to explain why she remembered no distinction between the Home
Guard and the organization to which she in fact belonged. Jeanne,
aged about 16 in 1942, was working as a civil defence messenger but
had spare time in the evenings and at weekends. She was living at the
33
34
35
36
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale
Jan 1998, text units 113–125.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale
987.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale
145.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale
Sharp interviewed by Penny SummerŽeld (APS), 8
Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text unit
Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text unit
Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text unit 57.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
80
Penny SummerŽeld
house of a woman doctor in Oxford, for whom her mother was working as a housekeeper:
this young vet lived further down the road and was a friend of the
doctor’s and she came, I suppose she came to see the doctor one
day, and was absolutely desperate. And the doctor said ‘Well ask
Jeanne, my house-keeper’s daughter, ask her if she’d like to come
and help you, because any port in a storm. I know she is fond of
animals, she is very good with my dog, and so on’. And so she did.
And I think I must have known her for only a matter of weeks, when
she came round and she said ‘We’re going to’ – this is typically
Claire – ‘We’re going to join the Home Guard, you and I, we’ve got
to do something.’ And Churchill had said ‘We’re going to Ž ght in
the streets, and the beaches’ and so forth. And ‘we’re going to join
’m, I want to’. I think she had done a bit of shooting probably, you
know, grouse shooting or something. Anyway, ‘we’re going to join
that, and we’re going to sign up tonight. So I’ll be ready, I’ll take
you’, she had a car, she had a bit of petrol too. ‘And I’ll take you
tonight to it.’ And I can’t remember exactly where it was … Abingdon Road, I think, off the Abingdon Road, a Ž eld. And there were
all these Home Guard men and they were going to teach us how to
shoot because we were members. And I was given, well I suppose
given, probably had to buy it, knowing them, I was given this badge
[the WHD badge].37
Jeanne was taught to shoot a .303 ri e ‘which had a kick like a bull’,
as well as to load a machine-gun and plant ‘sticky bombs’, and she had
vivid memories of her involvement in Home Guard exercises.38 But
she Ž nally left in disillusion, feeling that she was inadequately trained
and underused by the men of the Home Guard, who insisted on segregating the women and requiring them to do Ž rst aid work, for which
they were given no preparation. Confronted with a real casualty during
an exercise, Jeanne decided it would be better to spend her time learning what to do in such a situation, and left the Home Guard for the
Red Cross.39
Jeanne Gale Sharp’s account was colourful and expressive, full of
anecdotes that were animated by dialogue and peppered with statements indicating her strong point of view. She evidently enjoyed telling
it, suggesting that it gave her the dual satisfactions of ‘composure’.
However, a number of other women had considerable difŽ culty composing a narrative of their membership of the Home Guard or
Women’s Home Defence. The problem was not that there was a short37
38
39
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text unit
105.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text units
741–9, 239.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text units
239–59.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
81
age of life-story material on which they could draw, but that their narratives persistently glanced off the Home Guard to concentrate in depth
on other life experiences during and after the war. For example, ‘Ellen
Baxter’ talked for an hour mainly about her marriage, family and work
in the 1960s and 1970s, before the interviewer managed to focus the
interview on its ostensible subject, her participation in the Home
Guard during the war. During the Ž rst hour Ellen Baxter’s only reference to the Home Guard was extremely brief, concerning her parents’
anxieties about her safety during the London blitz when she returned
home late at night from dances ‘or from the Home Guard’.40
In the second hour, the interviewer was more persistent about
addressing the topic of the Home Guard. Ellen Baxter was willing to
talk about it, but broke off from the easy, discursive style she used in
the Ž rst hour of the interview to read from notes she had prepared
previously. These gave brief details of her recruitment and training, as
follows. She joined after being told on call-up that she was in a reserved
occupation and so could not go into the Women’s Royal Naval Service
as she had hoped, but had to remain a pay-roll clerk at London Transport. Her father ran the ‘Men’s Home Guard’ at Hammersmith Trolley
Bus Depot, and wishing to ‘do her bit’ Ellen made enquiries about
and enrolled in the ‘Women’s Home Guard’, which her member of
parliament, Edith Summerskill, was organizing locally. With friends,
she trained in physical education and ri e practice, and learned to
throw mortar bombs, use Morse code and load machine-guns. She also
took charge of the refreshment van at the ri e range used by the
Home Guard, and helped with ofŽ ce work.41 Ellen Baxter had both
badges: Women’s Home Defence with its crossed ri es and the ofŽ cial
Home Guard badge of the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliary.
Ellen’s story was fascinating but very brief. When she was encouraged
to enlarge on each aspect, she shifted the account onto other topics,
in the telling of which she regained her narrative facility, free of her
notes. SpeciŽ cally, these topics were the wartime and post-war lives of
women friends (now dead), some of whom had also been members of
the Women’s Home Defence; life in Ellen’s wartime ofŽ ce; her father
and other men of the Home Guard; ageing, health and the pleasures
of going down ‘memory lane’; narrow escapes in the blitz; and the
meaning for the ‘younger generation’ of not having shared wartime
experiences. The account of her experiences in the Home Guard was
both fragmented and de ected. In spite of her declared pleasure in
reminiscence it did not offer her the equivalent satisfactions of composure as these other aspects of her life story. Yet when Ellen Baxter
returned the transcript of the taped interview, sent to her for correction, she crossed through all the sections about her family and working
40
41
Leverhulme Project, Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS, 30 July 1998, text unit 124.
Leverhulme Project, Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS, 30 July 1998, text units 382–
92.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
82
Penny SummerŽeld
life, on which she had spoken so freely. On the release form enclosed,
seeking permission to quote from her interview in talks and publications, she stated that she wished her name to be used ‘only re Home
Guard and wartime experiences’.42 Ellen’s response to the transcript
suggests that she understood that the purpose of the interview was to
elicit an account of the Home Guard, and not of her life as a whole.
But the Home Guard story was not one she had found easy to tell,
whereas she had composed the story of the rest of her life vividly and
readily. We shall seek explanations for Ellen’s difŽ culties of narration shortly.
Another such fragmented and de ected account of the Home
Guard was told by a woman who, like Ellen, was very different from
Jeanne Gale Sharp, but was known by the same Ž rst name, Jeanne
Townend. After a hesitant beginning to the interview, consisting of
short answers to questions about her personal biography and her parents, this Jeanne explained that she ‘had a good time’ in the war
because of the soldiers billeted round Goole. Before making any reference to her involvement in the Home Guard she said, ‘I eventually
became involved with the French airforce, which were at Elvington,
York.’43 The salience of this remark became evident later in the interview. As far as the Home Guard was concerned, she explained that she
was drawn in by her father, a Ž sh merchant, town councillor and at
one time mayor of Goole, who ‘more or less initiated’ the Home Guard
there. She told a story of accepting the role he offered her as his
daughter. Just as she went with him to deliver Ž sh to the local army
camps, she accompanied him to Home Guard meetings. ‘He would be
going down in the car, so I would go with him.’44 A brief account of
learning Morse code, and of her badge (the ofŽ cial round Home
Guard one) and uniform, led to memories of the names of other girls
involved and who they married, which in turn led back to her involvement with the Free French airmen at Elvington. She explained that
she formed a deep attachment to one airman in particular, Roger.
Her cousin married another of the Frenchmen, suggesting that, even
though Jeanne was young, a permanent relationship was a possibility.
But Roger disappeared after his return to France at the end of the
war. Jeanne spoke of her belief that he was killed in Morocco and her
desire but inability to obtain conŽ rmation.45 This account was the longest and most  uent of the interview so far. It led to the confession that
she had permanently changed the spelling and pronunciation of her
name from the English ‘Jean’ to the French ‘Jeanne’ as a result of her
42
43
44
45
A pseudonym has therefore been used in this article, since there are references to
the sections on which ‘Ellen’ did not wish to be quoted.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS, 3 April 1998, text unit
105.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS, 3 April 1998, text unit
239.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS, 3 April 1998, text unit
287.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
83
relationship with Roger. She reminisced about going (underage) to
pubs with him, and recalled the fountain at Elvington under which
the French airmen sobered up after a few drinks.46 Later in the interview she referred to her family’s approval of Roger, and to her distress
at his disappearance: ‘I was heartbroken at the time, the weeping
and weeping.’47
In comparison to Jeanne’s key narrative of her ‘good time’ in the
war, her memories of the Home Guard were sketchy, but both the
Roger story and any nascent Home Guard story were de ected by the
inclusion in the interview’s intersubjective dynamics of her husband,
who was present in the room. He had also been in the Home Guard,
although in another town and long before he knew Jeanne. Joining
the interview from a position as audience at Jeanne’s request in order
to conŽ rm a point of view, he talked  uently about his own Home
Guard and army experiences.48 His intervention reinforced the sense
that the Home Guard was a male story, belonging to Jeanne’s father
and husband, and that the wartime story that Jeanne had to offer, and
that connected her as a young woman of 17 or 18 with world events,
was her romantic affair with a Frenchman in temporary exile. In
response to her transcript, Jeanne signed the release form without reservations, indicating her wish for her name to be used in relation to
the interview. But in her accompanying letter she suggested that there
had been a failure of composure: ‘Did we really make such a hash of
it, our diction seems poor? seems disjointed.’49
Why did Ellen Baxter and Jeanne Townend apparently have difŽ culty recalling Home Guard memories and composing them into continuous narratives integral to the rest of their life stories? Possible
answers relate to memory, trauma and culture. Ellen and Jeanne may
simply have been able to remember little about this particular aspect
of their lives as young women in wartime. Jeanne Townend hinted that
this was so, although whether she was referring speciŽ cally to the
Home Guard or to the war as a whole was unclear: ‘It’s just a small
incident in your life, isn’t it really?’ 50 However, the fact that both
women volunteered to be interviewed suggests that they thought they
would be able to remember more. Further information about how they
came to be included in the project reinforces this. Both of them
responded to the piece placed in Saga by Jeanne Gale Sharp, who
passed their contact details on to me. Ellen Baxter and Jeanne
Townend had evidently not forgotten their roles in the Home Guard,
46
47
48
49
50
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by
275–371.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by
1582.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by
428–742 and 1036–1171.
Letter from Jeanne Townend to APS, 27 June 1998.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by
APS, 3 April 1998, text units
APS, 3 April 1998, text unit
APS, 3 April 1998, text units
APS, 3 April 1998, text unit 19.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
84
Penny SummerŽeld
and agreed with Jeanne Gale Sharp that it was important for them to
be commemorated.
A completely different theory is that there was something traumatic
about the memories, which caused the women unconsciously to
repress them even though they professed to want to remember.51
While it is possible that experiences on the one hand of danger and
on the other hand of social, particularly parental, disapproval might
cause memories to be repressed, neither seems to apply in these cases.
Ellen Baxter referred cheerfully, if brie y, to the hazardous business
of learning to use weapons and evoked the horrors of the London
bombing quite casually. A more obviously traumatic event in her life
was the pivotal drama of her narrative, the sudden death of her husband in 1969. Ellen could not, apparently, talk about her past without
reference to this shocking event, but it had no direct connection with
the Home Guard and the war, and it by no means completely preoccupied her as an unresolved trauma might do.52 Jeanne Townend did
not avoid giving an account of the upsetting disappearance of her Free
French lover following his return to France towards the end of the
war. She also spoke of her insouciance about the bombing of Hull
(shared by the elderly aunt she visited there). Furthermore, these
women did not, apparently, encounter parental disapproval as a result
of joining the unofŽ cial WHD or the Home Guard. In both cases their
fathers were involved in the Home Guard, but as male authority Ž gures
they did not police the gender boundary as some wartime fathers did.53
They supported and, in Jeanne Townend’s case, encouraged their
daughters’ involvement.
It is, however, possible that even though these fathers were not
obstructive, their paternal role in relation to the Home Guard and to
the young women’s lives more generally was an impediment to Ellen’s
and Jeanne’s recall of the experience of Home Guard membership.
Jeanne told a story of accepting a part paternally imposed on her as
a youthful feminine subordinate. Home Guard membership was as
51
52
53
See Thompson, Voice of the Past, ch. 4, ‘Memory and the Self’; Kim Lacy Roberts,
Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson (eds), Trauma and Life Stories (Routledge,
London, 1999), especially Introduction.
Thompson, Voice of the Past, p. 181, refers to ‘repeating the same story of shock and
horror’ as one of the ‘warning signals’ of psychic disturbance of which an oral
historian should be aware. Ellen’s account of her husband’s sudden early death
dominated the Ž rst part of the interview, but it did not have this unresolved and
obsessive quality. She also talked about many other aspects of her past. The point is
that the Home Guard was not one of them.
See, for example, the response of David Robertson, MP for Streatham, to a Miss
B. Gooch, who wrote to him requesting support for the WHD unit in the area. He
refused his support, but stated ‘let me assure you that I hold no old fashioned views
about women. I am the father of daughters, and I am most anxious that women
should go out into the world in all kinds of occasions, which are congenial and
useful to the community. But I am opposed to women Ž ghting’. According to him
women should be nurses in wartime rather than members of the Home Guard.
Public Record OfŽ ce, Kew (PRO), WO 32/9423, Mr D. Robertson to Miss B. Gooch,
2 Oct 1942.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
85
much the product of her daughterly position in the family as of her
relationship to the state, the nation and the war effort or her beliefs in
women’s rights and responsibilities, for all her patriotic and idealistic
appearance. A wartime photograph of her as a Woman Home Guard
shows her proudly wearing a military uniform (Figure 3). Such uniforms were not provided by the state, and their supply to Women
Home Guards was outlawed.54 Jeanne’s battledress and trousers were
obtained by her father. Jeanne explained, ‘probably my father had,
Figure 3 Jeanne Townend in her Women’s Home Guard uniform, 1943–4
Source: courtesy of Jeanne Townend
54
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 388 (20 Apr 1943) 1532–3, oral answers
(announcement of scheme for nominated women in Home Guard).
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
86
Penny SummerŽeld
had asked for it, ’cause we used to do manoeuvres and marching and
I suppose really you needed it’.55 As a town mayor and Home Guard
lieutenant, he was, we may suppose, a loyal citizen, but he acted in
deŽ ance of the ban on uniforming Women Home Guards, presumably
because the inclusion of uniformed women in his Home Guard unit
met his own objectives. His imposition of those objectives may have
had unwelcome aspects for Jeanne that obstructed her construction of
a coherent account, but she did not refer to them. Ellen Baxter did
not talk about her father’s views of women’s membership of the Home
Guard. (She explained that his company, at Hammersmith Trolley Bus
Depot, was separate from the Hammersmith Women’s Home Guard
that she joined). But her memories of him, as an enthusiast who took
the family gramophone and records to his parades for the men to
practise marching to, suggest that he would not have regarded it as
offensive for his daughter to follow in his footsteps. However, Ellen
did experience a major rift with her father, an Irish Catholic, after the
war. She spoke at length of the difŽ culties she encountered with him
when she decided to marry a Protestant, something he would not countenance and which she did without his support. It is not implausible
that the association of Home Guard membership with emotionally
fraught memories of her father may have had an inhibiting effect, even
though the marriage took place after the war, and Ellen’s relationship
with her future husband had nothing to do with her membership of
the Home Guard.
These psychodynamic possibilities are speculative and by no means
persuasive. A cultural explanation of the difŽ culties of narrative composure may, however, provide a more convincing account than
inability for psychological reasons to remember. During the war the
Home Guard was a common topic in three genres of cultural production: Ž lm, cartoons and Ž ction. It featured in some examples as no
more than part of the setting. The Home Guard was a wartime presence readily recognizable to audiences and hence, for authors, artists,
scriptwriters and directors, a convenient signiŽ er of the British war
effort, as in the Ž lms Went the Day Well (1942), This Above All (1942),
Millions Like Us (1943), Mrs Miniver (1942) and A Canterbury Tale
(1944). In other wartime cultural productions, however, the Home
Guard took centre stage. It was crucial to the plot of Ž ction such as
Keep the Home Guard Turning by Compton Mackenzie (1943) and the
thrillers Home Guard Mystery by Belton Cobb (1941) and Murder in the
Home Guard by Ruth Adam (1942), both crime novels. And it was the
subject of several wartime plays, as well as the popular George Formby
Ž lm Get Cracking (1943). Newspaper cartoonists such as Emett, Illingworth, Giles and Joseph Lee regularly featured the Local Defence Vol-
55
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Townend interviewed by APS, 3 Apr 1998, text unit 251.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
87
unteers and the Home Guard.56 In all these representations, whether
serious or comic, the Home Guard Ž gured as a military organization
located on the home front that brought together civilian men within
a structure that offered opportunities for the effective or ineffective
use of arms, the acceptance or deŽ ance of rank and discipline, and
the afŽ rmation or rejection of loyalty, patriotism and engagement with
the British war effort. While female characters occupied important
roles, women were not depicted as Home Guard members.57
After the Second World War there was a dearth of representations
of the Home Guard, apart from those in Ž lms about the war brought
out in the 1940s (such as Whisky Galore, the 1949 Ž lm version of the
novel Keep the Home Guard Turning), until the advent of the enormously
popular television series Dad’s Army. The 80 episodes of this situation
comedy were Ž rst broadcast from 1968 to 1977. Women played
important comic roles as wives and girlfriends in the series (for
example, Mrs Fox, the busty sweetheart of Jones the butcher; Mavis
Pike, Sergeant Wilson’s mistress and mother of Frank Pike, the ‘stupid
boy’ of the platoon; and the heard-but-not-seen Elizabeth, wife of Captain Mainwaring). But women as Home Guard members did not feature, except in one episode. In ‘Mum’s Army’ (1970) the recruitment
of Women Home Guard Auxiliaries – and Mainwaring’s surprising
development of a romantic passion for one of them – placed in jeopardy not only Mainwaring’s leadership but the future of the
Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard as a whole (and the Dad’s Army
series). The woman Home Guard saved the situation by leaving town,
but the message of the episode was that women had no place in the
Home Guard, which was rightly an exclusively (if comically) masculine enterprise.58
The absence of cultural constructions of women’s involvement in
the Home Guard meant that models of participation – equivalent, for
example, to those provided by the Ž lm Gallipoli for Anzac involvement
in the First World War, and by Dad’s Army for men’s Home Guard
experiences – simply did not exist for women. The cultural explanation
of the difŽ culties of narrative composition is that memories of the
Home Guard did not form part of a past that could be composed into
a coherent whole and told to an interviewer, because culture and memory did not mutually inform each other. Without such a cultural frame
of reference, telling was fragmented and de ected within the interview
56
57
58
See Corinna Peniston-Bird and Penny SummerŽeld, ‘“Hey, You’re Dead!”: The
Multiple Uses of Humour in Representations of British National Defence in the
Second World War’, Journal of European Studies, 31 (2001) pp. 413–35.
See Peniston-Bird and SummerŽeld, ‘“Hey, You’re Dead!”’, pp. 430–32, for a single
ambiguous exception.
Graham McCann, Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show (Fourth Estate,
London, 2001) pp. 114–15; Penny SummerŽeld and Corinna Peniston-Bird, ‘Women
in the Firing Line: the Home Guard and the Defence of Gender Boundaries in
Britain in the Second World War’, Women’s History Review, 9, 2 (2000) pp. 243–4.
Some of the ideas developed here are foreshadowed in the last section of this article.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
88
Penny SummerŽeld
context, in spite of a sympathetic and interested audience. Memories
of the Home Guard were not composed into versions of the teller’s
past that could be shared, and that contributed to the narrator’s sense
of composure or personal equanimity. Aspects of their life stories that
were more Ž rmly embedded in cultural representations of femininity,
such as Jeanne Townend’s romantic affair and Ellen Baxter’s widowhood, were more conducive to composure. As another woman
explained about her memory of participating in the Home Guard: ‘it
sort of fades away. I think more of bringing up my children and my
grandchildren, um with my husband’.59 In spite of these women’s willing participation in the oral history project, the interviews edged
towards discomposure.
Why, on the other hand, was Jeanne Gale Sharp able to tell such a
 uent and complete narrative? Extending the cultural perspective, it
is possible to argue that she had access to a discourse of feminine
patriotism which provided her with a language in which to talk about
her membership of the Home Guard. She placed herself within a narrative framework characteristic of wartime cultural productions, such
as the Ž lm The Gentle Sex, in which women heroically took their place
alongside military men to bear the dangers and responsibilities of war.
A sense of equal wartime citizenship to which gender was irrelevant
informed these narratives. As Jeanne Gale Sharp explained more than
once, ‘Churchill said we must Ž ght them in the ditches, so we thought
we should’, and ‘we were quite prepared to give our lives for it’.60
However, her account was permeated by disillusion about the Home
Guard, because of muddle and inefŽ ciency within its ranks (the ‘Dad’s
Army’ image) and also because of the circumscribed terms on which
women were permitted to serve, their prejudicial treatment by male
Home Guards and by the authorities, and the lack of recognition of
the women’s sincerity in joining. Two ingredients combined in her
account: the patriotic version of the role and responsibility of the wartime citizen, and an understanding, informed in part by post-seventies
feminism, of the ways in which gender relations in wartime, as at other
times, worked against women. Jeanne Gale Sharp had an acute sense
of the silencing of the history of women and home defence. For
example, she answered the question ‘Do you think that the women in
the Home Guard weren’t recognized?’ as follows:
JGS
59
60
No, um, I mean, they quietly and conveniently forgot about us
and sat on what they knew didn’t they? I mean, it’s a wonder
that anything, any records were left anywhere, and there’s
nothing, there’s no book being written on it. I mean sure there
must have been a book written about it but it’s not been pub-
Leverhulme Project, Audrey Simpson interviewed by CP-B, 28 July 1999, text unit
741.
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale Sharp, record of telephone conversation with APS,
31 Dec 1997; interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text unit 185.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
PS
JGS
89
lished and um museums and all that sort of thing. I mean
people up here say, ‘Well there wasn’t one’ and I say ‘Oh yes
there was, because I was in it’, you know.
[laughter] Yes.
But ‘Oh no’ and if you talk to any men about it they think it’s
a HUGE joke, huge joke.61
Like the woman Ž tter and the wireless-telegraphy operator quoted
earlier, Jeanne Gale Sharp found that audiences for her reminiscences
were unreceptive and tended to ridicule her. As the quotation above
suggests, she had a strong sense of the historiographical as well as the
cultural silence concerning women in the Home Guard. She was particularly incensed by the omission of women from a television documentary about the Home Guard broadcast in 1998 as part of Channel
4’s Secret History series, for which she (and the author) had been consulted by the producer. The documentary stressed the unfortunate loss
of male lives in the Home Guard due to mistakes and poor training,
but it included nothing about the history of women’s contested membership.62 In the terms of this analysis, Jeanne Gale Sharp’s testimony
about women’s role in the Home Guard proved unable to get round
the sharp curve of the cultural circuit and enter the historical discourse
concerning wartime home defence constructed in television, even with
the backing of a university-based historian.
Anecdotes featured in Jeanne Gale Sharp’s account, including the
one quoted above explaining how she was recruited, and another
about the disastrous Home Guard exercise that persuaded her to leave.
A cultural approach to oral history can recuperate the anecdote, condemned by traditional historians as no more than an unrepresentative
and inaccurate yarn, by regarding it as a well-established cultural form
that bears certain types of meaning.63 Anecdotes function as narrative
snapshots, that is as amusing or dramatic accounts of single incidents
concerning the narrator and/or others. They encapsulate succinctly
the world being described, and its personal and impersonal meanings.
The snapshot depends for its success largely on the recognition by
the audience of the subject matter that is encapsulated. The form was
available to Jeanne Gale Sharp because her reference points were public discursive constructions: the meanings of the Second World War;
wartime possibilities for women to serve as equals with men; the frustration of this outcome by the disadvantageous position in which men
61
62
63
Leverhulme Project, Jeanne Gale Sharp interviewed by APS, 8 Jan 1998, text units
167–73.
‘Secret History: Dad’s Army’, directed and produced by Bernadette O’Farrell,
Channel 4, 8 June 1998.
T.G. Ashplant, ‘Anecdotes as Narrative Resource in Working-Class Life Stories:
Parody, Dramatization and Sequence’ in M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (eds),
Narrative and Genre (Routledge, London, 1998) pp. 99–113.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
90
Penny SummerŽeld
have historically placed women. She rightly assumed that her interviewer would recognize and sympathize with these angles of vision.
Women who remembered being in the Home Guard but who did
not share Gale Sharp’s strong interpretative framework did not, in the
main, produce anecdotes. A surprising exception, however, was Ellen
Baxter, whose otherwise de ected account we discussed above. It was
punctuated by a single very vivid anecdote, which she had also written
down in her notes:
Er, we all felt we were doing our bit. It was quite funny, I had to
wear – I can only wink with that eye. I can’t wink with that. And of
course when we used to have to do our ri e duties, I had to have
an eye-shield on because I couldn’t wink! And I put here – it was
quite funny – I had to wear an eye-shield on my left eye as I couldn’t
wink. This caused a great deal of amusement. They said I would
have to tell the Germans to wait while I put my eye-shield on!64
Ellen Baxter’s single anecdote may have caught, as far as she was concerned, the essence of her Home Guard experiences. It ‘said it all’,
requiring no further narrative elaboration. It spoke of her valour as a
woman in joining the WHD and learning to use a ri e alongside the
men of the Home Guard. It also spoke of the meaning of the war
effort. The punch-line is a good example of ironic British wartime
humour, concerning both the enemy (who of course could not be
expected to wait) and British defence capability (reliant on defenders
who could not wink). The snapshot contained the possibility that
Ellen’s membership was a futile (if sincerely meant) gesture, and that
by implication so too was the formation of the Home Guard as a whole.
By 1998, when the interview took place, it was clear that Britain was
not saved from invasion in the Second World War by the Home Guard,
but by a combination of the Royal Air Force, Hitler’s ambitions on
other fronts and an aggregation of Allied forces that, by 1944–45, outweighed those of the Germans.
Men interviewed about their Home Guard experiences, in contrast
to women, used anecdotes extensively. In the main they addressed
three themes, all Ž rmly located in British popular culture: ‘David and
Goliath’ stories about the potential effectiveness (or otherwise) of the
Home Guard against the German enemy; tales of the Home Guard’s
(competitive) relationship with the British army; and accounts of the
Home Guard as a site in which men individually or collectively endeavoured to outwit their female signiŽ cant others. One anecdote from the
last category stands for many, and is included because this kind of story
offered an interpretation of the meaning for men of belonging to the
Home Guard. George Nicholson joined his father’s Home Guard unit
at the age of 17, but left after a year when he was called up into the
64
Leverhulme Project, Ellen Baxter interviewed by APS, 30 July 1998, text unit 384.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
91
Navy. He came home periodically on leave, to Ž nd that his father was
often absent on Home Guard exercises:
And I come home one Saturday morning, said to me mother
‘where’s father?’ ‘Fishing’. I said, ‘He’s what?’ He never went Ž shing
in his life. She says, ‘Well him and Bill Smith … have borrowed your
gear, the rods and what not, and they have gone to the Home
Guard, Ž shing’. Now of course it was near the end of the war, this.
So anyway I had a chat to me mother, cup of tea, and what not. I
got the bus to Stamford Bridge where the battle was – battle alright!
[laugh]. I could hear them singing before I got there and I went
along the river bank and I pulled one or two rods up, no bait on
them. Anyway I walked in the pub, that was it, oh dear me. [laugh]
He would never have caught owt there.65
George Nicholson also told the story in a letter, adding a punch-line:
‘When I got home my mother asked if they had caught anything. I
thought to myself, only you and a few more wives.’66 In this snapshot
the Home Guard was a club, shaped by drinking culture and based in
the public house, from both of which women were excluded: it was a
masculine enterprise pursued in male space.
The reasons for the silence concerning women in the Home Guard
include this gendered dimension of cultural memory, represented in
popular portrayals of the Home Guard in wartime (Get Cracking) as
well as long after the war (Dad’s Army), and fed by the cultural circuit
between personal and collective memory. But the reasons for silence
are also political and historiographical. In wartime, as we have seen,
the formation of the WHD and the recruitment of women by Home
Guard units went against ofŽ cial policy, which was opposed to the arming of women and their inclusion in the Home Guard. The ofŽ cial
response to the women’s campaign was to treat it as a nuisance, but
not to draw attention to it by, for example, initiating prosecutions
against WHD and HG units for their breaches of the rules.67 Rather,
ofŽ cialdom attempted to bury the existence of women in the Home
Guard under a blanket of silence. After the war, the gender-blind
orientation of historical discourse ensured that little serious attention
was paid to the issue. Historians of the Home Guard who noticed it
followed the government line, that women were creating unwelcome
trouble for home defence policy-makers. They did not question the
gender norms on which this policy was based, and were not interested
in the issue of women’s exclusion or in women’s agency in defying the
taboo behind it.68
65
66
67
68
Leverhulme Project, George Nicholson interviewed by CP-B, 18 May 2000, text units
953–65.
Leverhulme Project, letter from George Nicholson, 15 Dec 1999.
PRO, WO 32/9423, memorandum by Bovenschen, 22 April 1942.
See, for example, Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army, and Mackenzie, The Home Guard.
Exceptions include a brief reference by Di Parkin in her article ’Women in the
Armed Services, 1940–5’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
92
Penny SummerŽeld
Within public discourse concerning men and the Home Guard, the
story of men’s involvement is not a simple one. In popular culture
some of its dimensions have been relatively overlooked, notably the
inclusion in its ranks of young, Ž t men in reserved occupations, and
also its growing proximity to the army, expressed in joint training exercises and in its role in the pre-training of young men under conscription age for the armed forces. Popular representations have also omitted the rival ideological conceptualizations of the force that were
current during the war: the democratic anti-fascist citizens’ army, versus the adjunct of the British army.69 Historians have not emphasized
such aspects because they have hitherto been preoccupied with a different set of historical questions, namely whether the Home Guard was
the product primarily of political decisions concerning morale, rather
than military ones concerning the defence of Britain.70 The resulting
interpretation has been that the Home Guard was unnecessary in military terms and was less a serious defence force than a wasteful joke.
Historians, as well as television scriptwriters, have stressed what was
laughable or scandalous rather than what was functional or ideological
about the Home Guard.
Nevertheless, in contrast to the case of women’s involvement, there
is a recognized history of the male Home Guard, albeit consisting of
numerous stories and interpretations, which has been relayed through
historical writing and popular culture. There is, in short, a Home
Guard legend available to men who engage in composing their memories of the Home Guard, which is simply not available to women. So,
while there are some things men ‘know’ that are not in the ofŽ cial
sources, and some things they Ž nd hard to tell because those things
are either absent from, or muted in, popular representations, the process of composure with respect to experiences in the Home Guard is
not as problematic for men as it is for women.
Let us conclude with some re ections on the relation of culture to
composure more generally. Ordinary people who have memories that
do not Ž t publicly available accounts have difŽ culty Ž nding words and
concepts with which to compose their memories, whether in anecdotal
snapshots or extended narratives. If they cannot draw on an appropri-
69
70
British National Identity, vol. 2, Nations Within Nations (Routledge, London, 1989) pp.
163–4, and of course the recent work arising from the Leverhulme Project, referred
to above: SummerŽeld ‘“She Wants a Gun Not a Dishcloth!”’; SummerŽeld and
Peniston-Bird, ‘Women in the Firing Line’; Peniston-Bird and SummerŽeld, ‘“Hey,
You’re Dead!”’.
Tom Wintringham, John Langdon-Davies and others on the left in the Second World
War believed that the people’s militias and international brigades of the Spanish
Civil War constituted a model guided by which the Home Guard could become a
popular, democratic, civilian army that would not only repel invasion but would be
the harbinger of far-reaching social and political change. See, for example,
Wintringham’s articles in Picture Post: ‘The Lessons of Spain’, 15 June 1940, pp. 9–24;
‘Arm the Citizens’, 29 June 1940, pp. 9–21; ‘The Home Guard Can Fight’, 21 Sept
1940, pp. 9–17.
See, for example, Mackenzie, Home Guard.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives
93
ate public account, their response is to seek to justify their deviation,
or to press their memories into alternative frameworks, or to be able
to express their stories only in fragmentary and de ected accounts.
Audiences for these memories-outside-discourse may not facilitate narration: because they cannot recognize the subject, they ignore the story
or treat it as a joke. The cultural approach to oral history stresses the
importance of the relationship between public discourse and the recall
and recounting of experience. It implies that oral history has a ‘recovery’ role of a special sort. This involves the legitimation that oral history
can give to memories of experiences that have not been legendized,
or that run counter to public discourse. But the oral historian cannot
solve all the problems of cultural silence. Some silences are so profound that they constitute ‘wounds in the tissue of memory’ 71 and create gaps in what can be recalled and told. There is no comfortable
resolution of this dilemma. Oral historians may be able to contribute
to the process of recuperation, but interviews are as likely to stimulate
discomposure as composure unless or until lost histories gain a place
within the dominant culture.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Scripting Histories
seminar series at the Centre for Historical Research, University of Limerick, in December 2002. I should like to thank the participants for
their lively and stimulating response. I should also like to thank Oliver
Fulton for his constructive criticisms, and to acknowledge the special
nature of the research collaboration with Corinna Peniston-Bird on
the Home Guard project. Obviously, I take Ž nal responsibility for the
ideas and arguments presented here.
71
Luisa Passerini, ‘Introduction’ to Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 13.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)