The Home Front in Britain explores the British Home Front in the last 100
years since the outbreak of WW1. Case studies critically analyse the meaning
and images of the British home and family in times war, challenging prevalent
myths of how working and domestic life was shifted by national conflict.
The British Women's Institute is more often associated with jam and Jerusalem
than radical activity, but in this book Maggie Andrews explores the WI's
relationship with feminism from the formation of the organisation in 1915 up
to the eve of British feminism's renaissance in the late 1960s.
This book explores the lives of the people of Pershore and the surrounding
district in wartime, drawing on their memories, letters, postcards,
photographs, leaflets and recipes to demonstrate how their hard work in
cultivating and preserving fruit and vegetables helped to win the Great War.
Spanish Flu' killed more than 50million people and afffected millions more
across the globe between 1918 and 1920. Soldiers, POWs and workers in war-
industries all fell victim to this pandemic which brought fear and death to
villages, towns and cities on the homefront, even after the guns of the First
World War battlefields had fallen silent.
Groups of young evacuees, standing on railway stations with gas masks and cardboard suitcases have become an iconic image of wartime Britain, but their histories have eclipsed those of women whose domestic lives were affected. This book explores the effects of this unparalleled interference in the domestic lives of women, looking at the impact on everyday experience and on ideas of femininity, domesticity and motherhood. Maggie Andrews argues that wartime evacuation is important for understanding the experience and the contested meanings of domesticity and motherhood in the 20th century. As this book shows, evacuation represents a significant and unrecognised area of women's war work, and precipitated the rise of competing public discourses about domestic labour and motherhood.