Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives is about the effects of the Second World War on women's sense of themselves. Using oral history it explores the inter-action between cultural representations of men and women in the Second World War, and women's own narrative of their wartime lives. It is the first book to bring together an analysiS of the connections between popular discourse and personal memory. At the heart of the book is the tension in popular culture between two wartime feminine identities: that of the woman who contributed heroically to the war effort in a man's job, and that of the woman far from combat, who stoically endured the pressures and privations of war. The personal accounts, collected through interviews for this book, reveal the often unexpected ways in which women reconstructed their wartime lives. The book breaks new ground in two important respects. It reworks feminist theory and the theory of popular memory to illuminate the processes of oral history, through its exploration of the production and performance of memory. And its original interpretation of a wealth of personal testimony, introduces new and more subtle understandings of the ways in which the Second World War affected gender identities and gender relations.
- ISBN10 071904460X
- ISBN13 9780719044601
- Publish Date 6 August 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 April 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 352
- Language English