Everyday life had to go on, despite the challenges, privations and sorrows of this new kind of ‘total’ war. Yet it is clear that whichever combatant nation one looks at, there was a diversity of experience on the home front dependent on place – hence local home fronts – but also on class, on age, and particularly on gender. And that these experiences varied over time.
Tag: Robin R. Joyce
Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War & Conflict – Part 2
Poppies at the Tower – Remembering World War I Photography: Robin R. Joyce Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War and Conflict Women’s History Network Annual Conference, 2014 Introduction ‘Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War & Conflict’ was the title and theme of…
Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War and Conflict – Part 1
War created instant history from 1916 and ever since the history of women and the First World War has been a synonym for thinking about a distinctive female contribution, about the politics of gender and the cultural and social history of war. Looking again at the history is a way of thinking about sources and method, thinking again about how far historians ‘disturb the ground on which they stand’ or how far they build new memorials to the past.
Barbara Pym: A Quiet Social Historian
Barbara Pym’s novels provide a social history of the period over which she wrote from the 1920s to 1980. ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’, written when she was sixteen, inspired by the 1920s, is unpublished. Unlike the novels that follow…