The women of stanley
Internment in Hong Kong 1942-45
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3130003 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bernice Archer (University of Essex), Fedorowich Kent (0000-0002-3000-9028), Kent Fedorowich (University of Essex) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 373-399 |
| Publication date | 1996-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women s History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0961-2025 • E-ISSN: 1747-583X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09612029600200119 |
| OpenAlex | W4254345165, W2020842761 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 3 |
The Stanley internment camp, located on Hong Kong island, was one of the largest unsegregated internment facilities in South-East Asia during the Second World War. Approximately 2800 men, women and children, mainly British, were transported there by the victorious Japanese in early January 1942. Little scholarly work exists on the conditions and privations experienced by the internees, but even less attention has been paid to the women who constituted a substantial number of those interned in Stanley. This essay, which is part of a more extensive study, redresses this imbalance. Using a wide variety of archival and oral testimony, the piece not only examines the experiences of some of the women in Stanley, but, more importantly, it also analyses the roles and contributions to camp life made by these women. Moreover, it provides avenues for further research. Although Stanley was administered along the existing colonial structures and social hierarchies which remained intact during the war, there is evidence to suggest that the women's shared experiences of an enforced communal lifestyle imposed by internment initiated a shift in preconceived social and gender attitudes. Therefore, wartime circumstances allowed the women of Stanley the opportunity to loosen some of these pre-war social and gender constraints. Indeed, long-term imprisonment actually promoted self-assurance, individual freedoms, and a variety of cohesive female group identities which might never have occurred in pre-war colonial Hong Kong
Archaeology · Colonialism · Criminology · Economic history · Imprisonment · Political science · Sociology · World War II · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1997 - 2019 (23) |
| Highly cited | No |