عنوان

Patriotic femininity :

TLets808622

Patriotic femininity :

[Thesis]

Goodman, Phil.

the impact of women's war-time experiences on the reconstruction of female identity.

Manchester Metropolitan University

1996

Thesis (Ph.D.)

1996

The Second World War was a period which witnessed struggles for the definition of appropriate feminine identities and behaviour as much as it placed demands on men and their masculinities. Women's own narratives, as one form of discourse, are central to this thesis because they show how women made sense of their lives within the context of materiality and ideology embedded in lived relations. This is contrasted with other discourses through which their lives were also constructed. The exploration considers women's participation in the work force, the services and on the homefront. By focusing on the processes and practices through which discourses were constructed this thesis challenges some of the myths surrounding women's contribution to the war effort and the effects this had on their lives. It prioritises the analysis of gender relations over the analysis of patriarchy, and critically deconstructs the usefulness of constructs of the 'public' and the 'private' when the gendered fluidity of space and time is made a focus of attention. The constructs 'Patriotic Femininity' and 'for the duration', ideal types in the Weberian sense, have been utilised as heuristic devices to explore the disjunctions between gender ideology, the spatial dislocations that accompanied the war and how they were reconciled. Feminist research methodologies provide important strategies for the grounding of knowledge in women's lives; women's history needs to be connected to main/male stream history; it was a woman's war too. Grounding theory in accounts of lived experiences enables an understanding of women's lives, constructing knowledge that writes women back into his-tory - 'herstories' . The way history has been constructed the heroic myths of the Second World War are male, thus there is a need for other kinds of critical knowledge to be produced to provide an understanding of women's lives and another, feminine kind of heroism. As the research shows, women negotiated their lives through a fractured gender time and space.

Sociology

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester Metropolitan University

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y