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

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 231-255

  Summerfield, Penny ^a   Peniston Bird, Corinna ^a,b  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007212090     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020000200250     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. See Gerard DeGroot (1997) Whose Finger on the Trigger? Mixed Anti-Aircraft Batteries and the Female Combat Taboo, War in History 4, pp. 434-453.
2. Antonia Lant (1991) Blackout. Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, p. 44 (Princeton: Princeton University Press);
3. Penny Summerfield (1996) 'The Girl that Makes the Thing that Drills the Hole that Holds the Spring': discourses of women and work in the Second World War, in Christine Gledhill & Gillian Swanson (Eds) Nationalising Femininity. Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, p. 36 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
4. Leverhulme Research Grant F/185/AK, 1999-2000, Penny Summerfield, Lancaster University, 'The Gendering of British National Defence 1939-1945: the case of the Home Guard'.
5. It is told more fully in Penny Summerfield (2000) 'She Wants a Gun Not a Dishcloth!' Gender, Service and Citizenship in Britain in the Second World War, in Gerard DeGroot & Corinna Peniston-Bird, A Soldier and a Woman. Women in the Military up to 1945 (Harlow: Pearson Education).
6. PRO WO 32/9423, J. R. Eastwood, Director General, Home Guard, Re Employment of Women in the Home Guard, 27 December 1940.
7. See, for example, WO 32/9423, letter from Summerskill to Churchill asking for women to be admitted to the Home Guard and trained in the use of weapons, 31 October 1941. A slip appended says, 'I favour the idea. WSC. Churchill also supported greater use of women in anti-aircraft batteries and the integration of the ATS into the Army. See J. Rosenzweig (1993) The Construction of Policy for Women in the British Armed Forces, 1938-1945, unpublished M.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford.
8. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates (henceforward Hansard), vol. 362, col. 281, 25 June 1940.
9. Hansard, vol. 365, col. 1356, 6 November 1940; vol. 376, col. 2187, Adjournment Debate, 18 December 1941; vol. 391, col. 2199, 3 August 1943; vol. 397, col. 1662-3, 2 March 1944.
10. Hansard, vol. 365, cols 1886-1898 and 1928-1932, Adjournment Debate, 19 November 1940.
11. Hansard, vol. 376, col. 108-9, Debate on the Address, 13 November 1941.
12. Hansard, vol. 376, col. 2156, Adjournment Debate, 18 December 1941.
13. See Alison Oram (1996) 'Bombs Don't Discriminate!' Women's Political Activism in the Second World War, in Gledhill & Swanson, Nationalising Femininity, p. 36.
14. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 376, cols. 2154-2158 and 2187, Adjournment Debate, 18 December 1941.
15. The Times, 22 January 1942.
16. Hansard, vol. 385, cols 1413-1414, Oral Answers, 8 December 1942.
17. PRO WO 32/9423, Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan to War Office, covering memorial recommending the enrolment of women in the Home Guard, 21 January 1942. She also gave WHD practical support, including writing a manual initiating women into organisational and linguistic military practices. H. C. I. Gwynne-Vaughan (1942) Military Correspondence for Volunteers helping the Home Guard in London (London: published for Women's Home Defence by M. A. Lawson).
18. Daily Mail, 29 October 1941: 'THEY BOUGHT THEIR UNIFORM. 50 Home Guard Girls Can Use Rifles'.
19. The Times, 12 November 1941.
20. See also S. P. Mackenzie (1995) The Home Guard; the real story of Dad's Army, pp. 125-129 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
21. Jeffrey Richards (1997) Films and British National Identity. From Dickens to Dad's Army, ch. 12 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
22. H. M. D. Parker (1957) Manpower. A Study of War-time Policy and Administration, pp. 158-160 (London: HMSO).
23. Miss Grant Goes to the Door, Ministry of Information, 1940. Dir/Prod: Brian Desmond Hurst; Screenplay: Rodney Ackland (based on a story by Thorold Dickinson and Donald Bull).
24. For a discussion of the MOI and Short Film Propaganda see James Chapman (1998) The British at War, Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945, ch. 4 (London: I. B. Tauris).
25. See also Sue Harper (1996) 'The Years of Total War: propaganda and entertainment', in Gledhill & Swanson, Nationalising Femininity.
26. Get Cracking, British Columbia, 1943. Dir: Marcel Varnel. Screenplay by Edward Dryhurst, L. du Garde Peach and Michael Baughan, with contributions by John L Arthur. Lawrence du Garde Peach (1943) According to Plan: a comedy of the Home Guard in three acts. London.
27. See Richards, Films and British National Identity, ch. 9.
28. On the relationship between the traitor figure and gender, see Christine Geraghty (1996) Disguises and Betrayals: negotiating nationality and femininity in three war-time films, in Gledhill & Swanson, Nationalising Femininity.
29. For a discussion of the purpose of the film, see Antony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards (1994) Britain Can Take It; the British cinema in the Second World War, p. 122 ff. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, first published 1986).
30. P. Summerfield (1998) Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press), ch. 1.
31. Summerfield (1998) Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives, ch. 3.
32. For the concept of 'composure' in life storytelling, see Graham Dawson (1994) Soldier Heroes, British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, Routledge), pp. 22-23.
33. See Summerfield, Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives, especially ch. 7.