Narratives of family, community and waged work: Latvian European volunteer worker women in post-war Britain

Women's History Review

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 23-55

  McDowell, Linda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645793426     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020400200381     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Diana Kay & Robert Miles (1992) Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain, 1946-1951 (London: Routledge)
2. British Immigration Statistics, from J.A. Tannahill (1958) European Volunteer Workers in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press), Table 1, p. 139
3. See Paul Johnson (Ed.) (1994) Twentieth Century Britain: economic, social and cultural change (Harlow: Longman) and Colin Pooley & lan Whyte (1991) Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: a social history (London: Routledge)
4. Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers
5. Kathleen Paul (1997) Whitewashing Britain: race and citizenship in the postwar era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)
6. Mark Wyman (1998) DPs: Europe's displaced persons, 1945-1951 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; new edition, originally published in 1988)
7. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit undertook a range of interviews with migrants to the city including some EVWs. Most of these interviews are accessible in the Bradford City Library, some as transcripts, others as tapes, but a small number remain sealed until the interviewee's death. Wendy Webster ([2000] Defining Boundaries: European Volunteer Worker women in Britain and narratives of community, Women's History Review, 9, pp. 257-276) and Graham Smith & Peter Jackson ([1999] Narrating the Nation: the imagined community of
8. Ukrainians in Bradford, Journal of Historical Geography, 25, pp. 367-387) used this source. I also listened to the small number of interviews with EVWs from Latvia to corroborate my own interviews but I preferred to undertake interviews myself as the archive interviews barely addressed the issues of work and maternity considered here, as well as being geographically specific. There are only two interviews with Latvian women currently available in the Bradford archive, although there are two others that will become public on the death of these women
9. See, for example, Smith & Jackson, 'Narrating the Nation' and Webster, 'Defining Boundaries'
10. Morris Eksteins (1999) Walking since Daybreak: a story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the heart of the twentieth century (New York: Houghton Mifflin)
11. Agate Nesaule (1995) A Woman in Amber: healing the trauma of war and exile (New York: Soho Press)
12. Carolyn Steedman (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: the story of two lives (London: Virago)
13. See, for example, Jane Lewis (1992) Women in Britain since 1945: family, work and the state in the post-war years (Oxford: Blackwell); J. Obelkevich & P. Catterall (Eds) (1994) Understanding Post-war British Society (London: Routledge); Penny Summerfield (1994) Women in Britain since 1945: companionate marriage and the double burden, in Obelkevich & Catterall, Understanding Post-war British Society, pp. 58-72
14. Hazel Carby (1992) White Women Listen: Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.) The Empire Strikes Back: race and racism in 1970s Britain, pp. 212-235 (London: Hutchinson)
15. Carby, 'White Women Listen', pp. 218-219
16. Richard Dyer (1997) White (London: Routledge)
17. Ruth Frankenberg (1993a) White Women: race matters (London: Routledge) and (1993b) Growing Up White: feminism, racism and the social geography of childhood, Feminist Review, 45, pp. 51-84
18. Dyer, White, p. 100
19. Beverley Skeggs (1997) Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage)
20. Webster, 'Defining Boundaries', p. 273
21. Louise A. Till & Joan W. Scott (1987) Women, Work and Family (London: Methuen). (First edition published in 1978 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston)
22. Linda McDowell & Doreen Massey (1984) A Woman's Place? in Doreen Massey & John Allen (Eds) Geography Matters! chapter 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Sylvia Walby (1986) Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge: Polity Press)
23. Shirley Dex (1985) The Sexual Division of Labour (Brighton: Wheatsheaf)
24. Heather Joshi (1989) The Changing Form of Women's Economic Dependency, in Heather Joshi (Ed.) The Changing Population of Britain (Oxford: Blackwell)
25. Heather Joshi, 'The Changing Form of Women's Economic Dependency'
26. Miriam Glucksmann (2000) Cottons and Casuals: the gendered organisation of labour in time and space (Durham: sociologypress)
27. The memory and narrating of traumatic events clearly raises important theoretical and methodological issues which have been addressed in a rapidly expanding literature about memory, narrative and identity. Recent theoretical work in this area and in post-structural and postmodern theory in general has encouraged a new scepticism about the supposed authenticity of personal or life histories, arguing that reconstructions of past events are unstable textualised narratives, often involving unresolved tensions (Judith Butler & Joan Scott [1992] Experience, in Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott [Eds] Feminists Theorise the Political (London: Routledge), pp. 26-34; Nicola King [2000] Memory, Narrative, Identity: remembering the self [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press]; Penny Summerfield [1998] Reconstructing Women's War-time Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War [Manchester: Manchester University Press]). All recollections involve some reworking of past events in the light of later knowledge and experience and so are composed of a double process of remembering and representation. These women, most of whom were very young in the early 1940s, had lived for over 50 years in Britain at the time when I talked to them, and during that time most of them had not returned to Latvia, at least until it became independent again in 1991. Their memories of their teenage selves and their early adulthood were refracted through their later experiences. Clearly, their lives involved a much more radical break with 'before' and 'after' than many people experience in the transition from youth to adulthood, involving experiences of war, migration, hardship and abuse that make recollection complicated and painful. As well as nostalgia for a lost childhood and a lost homeland, for some of these women, the excavation of memory also involved problematic questions about the extent to which their families were willing or unwilling collaborators with the occupation forces, as well as guilt about their own escape
28. Kathleen Paul (1992) The Politics of Citizenship in Post-war Britain, Contemporary Record, 6, pp. 452-473, see p. 460
29. W.R. Iwaskiw (1996) Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania: country studies (Washington, DC: Library of Congress)
30. Simon Duncan & Rosalind Edwards (1999) Lone Mothers, Paid Work and Gendered Moral Rationalities (Basingstoke: Macmillan)
31. Elizabeth Roberts (1984) A Woman's Place: an oral history of working class women, 1890-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
32. Jane Humphries (1997) Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1, pp. 241-258
33. Vieda Skultans (1998) The Testimony of Lives: narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia (London: Routledge), p. 8