Women and Evacuation in the Second World War

Mothers tearfully waving goodbye as small children clamber onto packed trains, and children alighting onto rural train platforms, name tags around their necks, and small suitcases in hand, are central images in Second World War iconography. The popularity of such images might suggest that evacuation is a well-known and well-worn topic, but in Women and Evacuation in the Second World War: Femininity, Domesticity and Motherhood, Maggie Andrews explores an overlooked but essential part of the story—the experiences of the ‘ordinary women whose domestic lives and families were turned upside down’ by evacuation (p. 1). The first section of the book outlines the practical, cultural, and emotional factors that shaped wartime evacuation, including changing discourses of motherhood and childhood and the realities of twentieth-century warfare, which repositioned women and children as the targets of conflict. In these first two chapters, Andrews usefully lays out the different waves and shifting shape of the evacuation scheme, and how this ‘blurred the boundaries of public and private spheres in new ways, as the domestic home and the homemaker were requisitioned for unpaid war work’ (p. 50). Evacuation, like many aspects of the Second World War, accelerated the degree to which motherhood and domesticity were public issues, both because private mothering came under growing scrutiny and because acts of mothering increasingly took place in public spaces

Femininity · Political science · Popularity · Scrutiny · Sociology · World War II · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Gender Studies · Law