Female labour at Bletchley Park
Reality and (romantic) fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21502172 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas Knowles (0000-0002-6341-3297), Chris Smith (0000-0002-1348-189X, corresponding author), Christopher Smith (0000-0002-6049-5514) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 687-706 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Intelligence & National Security (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0268-4527 • E-ISSN: 1743-9019 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02684527.2025.2506282 |
| OpenAlex | W4411699194 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 26 |
The growing importance of Bletchley Park in the cultural memory of Britain’s Second World War – its deployment by political and media commentators as a symbol of British exceptionalism – has been noted by historians. Such is its ubiquity, the Bletchley story has been featured in Hollywood blockbusters, television dramas and documentaries, and its luminaries – most notably Alan Turing – have become household names. With this, the Bletchley Park narrative has contributed to and been shaped by wider wartime mythologies – not least ‘the people’s war’ and conflict as a vehicle for progressive social change, particularly regarding women. One of the latest manifestations of this has been a spate of historical romance fictions, often with a feminist yet also socially conservative reading of the war and the institution. This represents a hugely popular, yet thus far critically neglected body of work and readership which directly speaks to the folk understanding of intelligence work
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Political science · Romance · Sociology · Gender Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
War and social change
British intelligence in the Second World War
The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction
Reading the Romance
‘Treading on sacred turf’
The History Bubble
Recoding Gender
The Government Machine
British Cultural Memory and the Second World War
The Hidden History of Bletchley Park
Women in the British Army
Code Breakers
Men in Reserve
Ultra Goes to War
Post‐feminism and popular culture
A Chaos that Worked
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |