‘Fit to Fight, Fit to Mix’: sexual patriotism in Second World War Britain
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09612025.2012.751770
ISSN1747-583X
Autores Tópico(s)World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
ResumoAbstract During the Second World War the diversity of the population in Britain by nationality and ethnicity was unprecedented, multiplying British women's opportunities for relationships that crossed ethnic and national boundaries. This article uses evidence from Home Intelligence, Mass-Observation and official policy making to explore the gendered nature of anxieties about a wide range of British women's relationships—with white and black allies and with white enemies. In considering popular and official attitudes to mixing across national and ethnic difference and British women who flouted the rules of sexual patriotism, the article argues that the history of transnational and transethnic relationships in wartime Britain is an important episode in the shift towards a multiethnic and multinational society, commonly dated to the post-war period. Notes I am grateful to the University of Huddersfield for supporting the wider project—'Mixing It: diversity in wartime Britain'—of which this article is part. Thanks are also due to Lucy Bland and Katharina Rowold, editors of this special issue, two anonymous reviewers and Paul Ward for their valuable comments. Home Intelligence Weekly Report no. 191, 2 June 1944. National Archives (NA), INF 1/292. All references hereafter to Home Intelligence Reports and Reviews are from NA, INF 1/292. Quoted in Alan Allport (2009) Demobbed: coming home after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 6. See Paul Addison & Jeremy Crang (2010) Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence reports on Britain's finest hour (London: Bodley Head), p. xvi. See, for example, Graham Smith (1987) When Jim Crow Met John Bull: black American soldiers in World War II Britain (London: I. B. Tauris); David Reynolds (1996) Rich Relations: the American occupation of Britain 1942–1945 (London: HarperCollins); Sonya Rose (1997) Girls and GIs: race, sex, and diplomacy in Second World War Britain, International History Review, 19(1), pp. 146–160; Sonya Rose (1998) Sex, Citizenship and the Nation in World War II Britain, American Historical Review, 103(4), pp. 1147–1176; Sonya Rose (2003) Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Leanne McCormick (2006) 'One Yank and They're Off': interaction between U.S. troops and Northern Irish women, 1942–1945, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15(2), pp. 228–257. Rose, Which People's War?, pp. 254–255. Reynolds, Rich Relations, chapter 18. Rose, Which People's War?, chapter 7. Sunday Express, 8 April 1945. Jeremy Crang (2000) The British Army and the People's War 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Allport, Demobbed, pp. 103–104. 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Additional informationNotes on contributorsWendy Webster Wendy Webster is Professor of Modern Cultural History, University of Huddersfield, UK. She has published widely on questions of ethnicity, imperialism, gender, migration, sexuality and national identity in contemporary British history, including Imagining Home: gender, 'race' and national identity 1945-65 (Routledge, 1998), Englishness and Empire, 1939-65 (Oxford University Press, 2005) and with Louise Ryan, Gendering Migration: masculinity, femininity and ethnicity in post-war Britain (Ashgate, 2008).
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