War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-1991

Popular memory of World War II was the dominant factor contributing to a sense of national identity in the Falklands War of 1982 and the Gulf War of 1991. This text looks at public and private ideas of national identity, how they were arrived at and the extent to which they were shaped by gender. It provides a synthesis between the key concepts of "national identity", "popular memory" and gender as a social and cultural construct. Recent studies of World War II, and popular memory of the war, have focused on the extent to which it is remembered as a "people's war". This book builds on this work by examining how ideas about gender shaped the experiences of the war and its memory and concludes that despite women's wartime role in "total war", men in the armed forces were encouraged to regard themselves as being bound together in unity by masculinity and common experience, while women remained individuals with prime responsibilities to home and family. Their role as active participants remained "problematic" and remained so even the Gulf War in 1991.