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Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949
In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's Second World War, through a host of individual women's experiences.
We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed.
Millions Like Us tells the story of how these women loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...
We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed.
Millions Like Us tells the story of how these women loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
30 people are currently reading
1786 people want to read
About the author
Virginia Nicholson
13 books68 followersVIRGINIA NICHOLSON was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1955. Her father was the art historian and writer Quentin Bell, acclaimed for his biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf. Her mother Anne Olivier Bell edited the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.
Virginia grew up in the suburbs of Leeds, but the family moved to Sussex when she was in her teens. She was educated at Lewes Priory School (Comprehensive). After a gap year working in Paris she went on to study English Literature at King’s College Cambridge.
In 1978 Virginia spent a year living in Italy (Venice), where she taught English and learnt Italian. Returning to the UK in 1979 she re-visited her northern childhood while working for Yorkshire Television as a researcher for children’s programmes. In 1983 she joined the Documentary department of BBC Television.
In 1988 Virginia married screenwriter and author William Nicholson. Following the birth of their son in 1989, Virginia left the BBC and shortly afterwards the Nicholsons moved to East Sussex. Two daughters were born in 1991 and 1993.
Living in Sussex, Virginia became increasingly involved with the Trust that administered Charleston, home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell, in due course becoming its Deputy Chairman. Her first book (co-authored with her father) CHARLESTON: A Bloomsbury House and Garden was published by Frances Lincoln in 1997. In 1999/2000 she made a ten-city tour of the USA to promote the book and Charleston itself.
In November 2002 Viking published AMONG THE BOHEMIANS - Experiments in Living 1900-1939 to critical acclaim. Its publication by Morrow, USA in February 2004 was followed by a sell-out lecture and publicity tour round five American cities.
SINGLED OUT - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, was published in August 2007. In this latest book Virginia Nicholson has set out to tell the stories of a remarkable generation of women forced by a historic tragedy to reinvent their lives. Singled Out received a spate of enthusiastic reviews which applauded it as a pioneering and humane work of social history. The work on this book was combined with her continuing commitment to the Charleston Trust.
Virginia grew up in the suburbs of Leeds, but the family moved to Sussex when she was in her teens. She was educated at Lewes Priory School (Comprehensive). After a gap year working in Paris she went on to study English Literature at King’s College Cambridge.
In 1978 Virginia spent a year living in Italy (Venice), where she taught English and learnt Italian. Returning to the UK in 1979 she re-visited her northern childhood while working for Yorkshire Television as a researcher for children’s programmes. In 1983 she joined the Documentary department of BBC Television.
In 1988 Virginia married screenwriter and author William Nicholson. Following the birth of their son in 1989, Virginia left the BBC and shortly afterwards the Nicholsons moved to East Sussex. Two daughters were born in 1991 and 1993.
Living in Sussex, Virginia became increasingly involved with the Trust that administered Charleston, home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell, in due course becoming its Deputy Chairman. Her first book (co-authored with her father) CHARLESTON: A Bloomsbury House and Garden was published by Frances Lincoln in 1997. In 1999/2000 she made a ten-city tour of the USA to promote the book and Charleston itself.
In November 2002 Viking published AMONG THE BOHEMIANS - Experiments in Living 1900-1939 to critical acclaim. Its publication by Morrow, USA in February 2004 was followed by a sell-out lecture and publicity tour round five American cities.
SINGLED OUT - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, was published in August 2007. In this latest book Virginia Nicholson has set out to tell the stories of a remarkable generation of women forced by a historic tragedy to reinvent their lives. Singled Out received a spate of enthusiastic reviews which applauded it as a pioneering and humane work of social history. The work on this book was combined with her continuing commitment to the Charleston Trust.
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January 21, 2020
This is awesome on audio. It's something like a full-cast production: a narrator plus four other actresses who, with different accents, quote from the many diaries and memoirs the book draws on. With these distinctive voices, it's easy to recognise each woman as another excerpt appears, and to follow each of their stories through the years. The variety makes it easier to concentrate than on some audiobooks with just one narrator.
When I first started listening to Millions Like Us in August 2018, I felt the book was basically perfect. (As an audio production, I still think it is.) I didn't want it to end. I found it comforting and supportive at a difficult time, and tremendously interesting. In September - October 2019 I listened to the rest, and still got a lot out of it. However, after an extra year of reading left-wing political content online, I found myself noticing that there was no mention (that I heard) of any BAME women (the BAME population of the UK was not high in the 40s, but there were some servicewomen; see for example here) or of women who had relationships with black GIs - and that there was hardly anything about lesbian life, except for one brief negative mention. (There were two diarists who lived together and one can't be entirely sure whether they were a lesbian couple or straight 'surplus women' [contested term] from the WWI generation sharing a home. There's an account of one diarist's experience in the Women's Timber Corps, which was, by other accounts, a favourite for lesbians going into the services, though this particular diarist was straight, and she doesn't allude to lesbians in what's quoted here.) While the selection of diarists is limited in those respects, and there is a leaning towards the upper and middle classes, because more women from those backgrounds had the time to keep diaries and the confidence to publish memoirs, there is also a range across the class spectrum, including working-class women like Nella Last and others who'd signed up to the Mass Observation project. Many different experiences are covered, including members of all the services open to women, as well as workers in offices and factories; housewives, students, socialites, artists, and writers like Virginia Woolf.
Some stories which still stand out for me, three months after finishing the book:
- Although I'm very interested in wartime food production and the home front (my favourite thing on this is the BBC series Wartime Farm, there was not much new about those in Millions Like Us, so it was other subjects that caught my eye. The nearest to an idyllic life among these diarists was probably Frances Partridge, an upper-middle class woman living with her husband and family in a rural area, able to grow quite a lot of their own food. The biggest worry she had was learning to cope without servants, as maids left to do better-paid war work.
- Helen Forrester's books were ubiquitous in public libraries when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s. I'd always assumed they were family sagas of the Catherine Cookson type and snobbishly avoided them. Forrester is quoted extensively here, and it turns out several of those books were memoirs. She grew up in a crowded, impoverished family in Liverpool and wanted to escape by getting a better education, working for a charity, and getting married so she could leave home. But during the war no fewer than three successive boyfriends of hers died. When she could no longer afford to work for the charity, she was forced into office work, where a male manager insisted that women workers must not have bare legs, but had to wear stockings, famously expensive and difficult to obtain. Forrester led collective action against this, declaring that they would leave en masse if he continued to insist. With most male staff already lost to conscription, and more and more women going into war work, he had no choice but to back down.
- One of the wildest adventures in this book was that of Mary Cornish, a professional musician who volunteered to accompany a shipload of evacuees to Canada; they were torpedoed by a U-boat, and Cornish and several little boys survived over a week in a lifeboat, she leading singalongs to keep their spirits up, until she could no longer speak.
- The Blitz is such an object of nostalgia in England that one rarely hears about its real horrors. Artist Frances Faviell had volunteered as a nurse; her knowledge of anatomy, gained at art school, was useful, often employed to reassemble dead bodies for burial, from piles of limbs, heads and other less identifiable lumps of meat. Walking home one night after an air raid, she was commandeered by a doctor and ARP wardens at a bomb site from which horrible sounds were coming. Faviell was very slight so would be able to fit, lowered upside-down, into the small space where someone was trapped. Inside was a man "crushed to a bloody mess … his face so injured it was barely possible to distinguish the mouth from the rest of … one gaping red mess". Pulled back to the surface, she threw up, before being lowered back down holding a bottle of chloroform and a cotton mask; there was of course nothing else they could do for the man - and there were many like this who had to die alone and unanaesthetised.
- Reactions to the war from well-known writers were sometimes quite in character:
Woolf's rather chilling diary entry on watching a dogfight overhead during the Battle of Britain: "It would have been a peaceful, matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace, playing bowls, this very fine, cool, sunny August evening."
Barbara Cartland organised, among other things, a scheme for the reuse of wedding dresses - and after the war travelled to Switzerland to get dress fabric (one way to escape the strictures of rationing, for those who could afford it).
Barbara Pym, surprisingly, turned out to be a snob, saying "there are no people like us here" - not at all what I expected from this chronicler of genteel poverty.
- Two young women's wartime lives revolved around drama with men, but, at the end of the war, each found herself on the path to important work of her own.
Onetime art student Anne Popham seemed to think about little except her relationship with an older man, separated but taking his time to agree to a divorce. He died in the war, though. After peace was declared, Popham went to Germany to work on the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis, and as her confidence grew, she rose to the rank of Major. (In the book are also her accounts of the severe poverty, homelessness and food shortages widespread in Germany, conditions like those currently associated with the most wartorn developing countries.)
Phyllis Noble took advantage of the sexual freedom created by the war and stretched people's patience to the limit, cheating on her safe, steady fiance, leaving him and going back to him until he'd had enough, and also having a series of flings, including with male colleagues at the bank where she worked. A night class incorporating feminist ideas, and then a serious illness, started to change her outlook. Feeling repentant, she turned up for career guidance at a post-war advice centre, and too shy to say she, a working class girl, wanted to be a doctor, said simply that she wanted to do something really worthwhile. The clerk replied "What, like social work?" She said, "I suppose so." She went on to become not only a frontline social worker helping to implement the new welfare state, but a researcher and textbook author, under her married surname of Willmott; her husband Peter was another social worker and later an influential academic sociologist.
- Someone who had a lot more fun with men during the war was socialite Joan Wyndham, a fabulous character who had worked out how to treat these ephemeral connections more as sport than an emotional investment during her time in the WAAF, and who is here given a deep purring voice that only adds to the sense of her as an adventuress, and gay icon among her circle. At the end of the war, as a celebration, she went to a horse race and won £200 on an outside bet. (It was as if she brought me good luck too; only a few minutes after listening to this very bit, I unexpectedly won £185 - much less in today's money of course - as a result of a routine offer in matched betting.) She went on to have a series of absurd jobs including one for a manufacturer of fishtank ornaments, and managing a hotel whose proprietors turned out to be international criminals - all excellent material for such a Soho raconteur. I hope I have time one day to read Wyndham's memoirs. (And might have enjoyed them even more in my twenties.)
- Lorna Bradey, a nurse on board ships around Africa and Italy, had some stirring stories of tending the wounded and standing up to textbook cases of arrogant surgeons. But what was perhaps most interesting as social history was her return home at the end of the war. Countless novels feature taciturn men who returned after WWII failing to understand the conditions at home, or the experiences of other family members. Bradey wrote that Britain looked drab after sunny climes; her family simply didn't understand what she'd been through, and listened with polite interest at best. When she arrived she unwittingly ate a whole week's butter ration at one meal, and when she went to find her clothes, she was cross that her sister had taken them (not yet realising how severe clothing rationing was).
-The public impact of the Beveridge Report, on its publication in 1942, was considerable (something often lost when histories concentrate only on the politics of the war itself) and a cross-party consensus sprung up towards implementing at least some of its recommendations; "no-one had forgotten the Jarrow Marches" as one speaker said. It gave people an additional sense of something worth fighting for. It seems to land suddenly in the middle of Nicholson's narrative, an unexpected bright promise from and of another world, while everyone is caught up in the grind.
- Nicholson gives the impression of popular currents of feminism over the course of the war whereby at first women were liberated and energised, including some even feeling freer due to the loss of possessions in the Blitz, but that towards the end, increasing numbers were longing for traditional roles and the return of husbands from the front, dreams perhaps fostered by popular reading material like Georgette Heyer novels. How often these were the same women with both sets of opinions at different times, it's hard to say from the authorial narrative sections on public mood (especially in audio), but at this time, most feminist intellectuals opposed the idea of the housewife who had no other occupation. But what I hadn't heard or considered before was that some working-class former housewives called up to do war work, in occupations vacated by men, struggled to juggle a job on top of housework, childcare, and shopping that had to be done in person in fixed locations at limited times. Ration books were registered to specific shops, and shopkeepers were resistant to changing their opening hours. Work, meanwhile, could be miles away on other side of town. Many informal childcarers were now in work themselves, and small children had to be supervised by older ones who would, these days, be considered much too young to babysit. Women demonstrated for nursery provision but were not taken seriously.
- Out of women's dissatisfaction with shopkeepers, and the continuation of rationing after the war, emerged the Housewives' League, begun by a disgruntled vicar's wife's letter to a newspaper. I'd only studied party politics of the era before, and this was something that had previously passed me by - a curious phenomenon whereby what looked initially like a united voice of many women, fed up that their needs and effort were barely recognised, quite swiftly mutated into a strongly conservative organisation for those not prepared to sacrifice any more to help create the new welfare state.
- There is plenty of interesting detail here from both sides of the 1945 general election.
Naomi Mitchison, a name familiar to me from late 20th century childhood anthologies, bookshelves and newspapers, was also a Labour activist - and wife of a candidate. The party could be disappointingly traditionalist, and tried to shoehorn her into a wifely role during campaigning, but she asserted the significance of her own career, and was only intermittently present, usually dressed in scruffy bohemian style. This did not inhibit her husband from becoming an MP, unseating a young John Profumo.
One of the most amusing stories in the book was from Nina Mabey, an Oxford student and Labour campaigner (in the constituency of future Old Labour stalwart Ian Mikardo), who tried to persuade a fellow student, one Margaret Roberts, possessor of a "pretty china doll's smile", against the Conservative Party. Roberts reportedly replied that, whilst Labour was fashionable at the moment, the Conservatives gave one a better chance of getting into parliament because the party members were stodgy, and it was easier to stand out.
- An interesting feature of 1940s feminism, found in the ideas of several women in the book, from Virginia Woolf early in the war, right through to those helping rebuild Germany, was to see Nazism and other atrocities of war as simply an extreme form of masculinity, and in the same vein were expressions of horror at the atom bombs dropped on Japan. Post-war work for international peace, and to make boys and men as individuals less aggressive and more peaceful, were seen as part of the same endeavour. (One can see the roots of the Greenham Common protest movement in this.)
Most of the women in Millions Like Us experienced nothing so horrific and unrelenting as the Soviet female soldiers whose stories are related in Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War. (Something more parochial Anglophone readers could do well with exploring.) And of course the personal stories of British women who had the very worst wartime experiences are missing here, perhaps to make this, over all, an inspiring rather than a disturbing book, though certainly not an insipid one. If that is something you are looking for - with the proviso that this is not the full story, and that these British women were, over all, luckier than their 1940s counterparts in many other parts of the world - it can be fascinating, enjoyable and companionable.
(Listened Aug 2018 & Sept-Oct 2019; reviewed Jan 2020)
When I first started listening to Millions Like Us in August 2018, I felt the book was basically perfect. (As an audio production, I still think it is.) I didn't want it to end. I found it comforting and supportive at a difficult time, and tremendously interesting. In September - October 2019 I listened to the rest, and still got a lot out of it. However, after an extra year of reading left-wing political content online, I found myself noticing that there was no mention (that I heard) of any BAME women (the BAME population of the UK was not high in the 40s, but there were some servicewomen; see for example here) or of women who had relationships with black GIs - and that there was hardly anything about lesbian life, except for one brief negative mention. (There were two diarists who lived together and one can't be entirely sure whether they were a lesbian couple or straight 'surplus women' [contested term] from the WWI generation sharing a home. There's an account of one diarist's experience in the Women's Timber Corps, which was, by other accounts, a favourite for lesbians going into the services, though this particular diarist was straight, and she doesn't allude to lesbians in what's quoted here.) While the selection of diarists is limited in those respects, and there is a leaning towards the upper and middle classes, because more women from those backgrounds had the time to keep diaries and the confidence to publish memoirs, there is also a range across the class spectrum, including working-class women like Nella Last and others who'd signed up to the Mass Observation project. Many different experiences are covered, including members of all the services open to women, as well as workers in offices and factories; housewives, students, socialites, artists, and writers like Virginia Woolf.
Some stories which still stand out for me, three months after finishing the book:
- Although I'm very interested in wartime food production and the home front (my favourite thing on this is the BBC series Wartime Farm, there was not much new about those in Millions Like Us, so it was other subjects that caught my eye. The nearest to an idyllic life among these diarists was probably Frances Partridge, an upper-middle class woman living with her husband and family in a rural area, able to grow quite a lot of their own food. The biggest worry she had was learning to cope without servants, as maids left to do better-paid war work.
- Helen Forrester's books were ubiquitous in public libraries when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s. I'd always assumed they were family sagas of the Catherine Cookson type and snobbishly avoided them. Forrester is quoted extensively here, and it turns out several of those books were memoirs. She grew up in a crowded, impoverished family in Liverpool and wanted to escape by getting a better education, working for a charity, and getting married so she could leave home. But during the war no fewer than three successive boyfriends of hers died. When she could no longer afford to work for the charity, she was forced into office work, where a male manager insisted that women workers must not have bare legs, but had to wear stockings, famously expensive and difficult to obtain. Forrester led collective action against this, declaring that they would leave en masse if he continued to insist. With most male staff already lost to conscription, and more and more women going into war work, he had no choice but to back down.
- One of the wildest adventures in this book was that of Mary Cornish, a professional musician who volunteered to accompany a shipload of evacuees to Canada; they were torpedoed by a U-boat, and Cornish and several little boys survived over a week in a lifeboat, she leading singalongs to keep their spirits up, until she could no longer speak.
- The Blitz is such an object of nostalgia in England that one rarely hears about its real horrors. Artist Frances Faviell had volunteered as a nurse; her knowledge of anatomy, gained at art school, was useful, often employed to reassemble dead bodies for burial, from piles of limbs, heads and other less identifiable lumps of meat. Walking home one night after an air raid, she was commandeered by a doctor and ARP wardens at a bomb site from which horrible sounds were coming. Faviell was very slight so would be able to fit, lowered upside-down, into the small space where someone was trapped. Inside was a man "crushed to a bloody mess … his face so injured it was barely possible to distinguish the mouth from the rest of … one gaping red mess". Pulled back to the surface, she threw up, before being lowered back down holding a bottle of chloroform and a cotton mask; there was of course nothing else they could do for the man - and there were many like this who had to die alone and unanaesthetised.
- Reactions to the war from well-known writers were sometimes quite in character:
Woolf's rather chilling diary entry on watching a dogfight overhead during the Battle of Britain: "It would have been a peaceful, matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace, playing bowls, this very fine, cool, sunny August evening."
Barbara Cartland organised, among other things, a scheme for the reuse of wedding dresses - and after the war travelled to Switzerland to get dress fabric (one way to escape the strictures of rationing, for those who could afford it).
Barbara Pym, surprisingly, turned out to be a snob, saying "there are no people like us here" - not at all what I expected from this chronicler of genteel poverty.
- Two young women's wartime lives revolved around drama with men, but, at the end of the war, each found herself on the path to important work of her own.
Onetime art student Anne Popham seemed to think about little except her relationship with an older man, separated but taking his time to agree to a divorce. He died in the war, though. After peace was declared, Popham went to Germany to work on the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis, and as her confidence grew, she rose to the rank of Major. (In the book are also her accounts of the severe poverty, homelessness and food shortages widespread in Germany, conditions like those currently associated with the most wartorn developing countries.)
Phyllis Noble took advantage of the sexual freedom created by the war and stretched people's patience to the limit, cheating on her safe, steady fiance, leaving him and going back to him until he'd had enough, and also having a series of flings, including with male colleagues at the bank where she worked. A night class incorporating feminist ideas, and then a serious illness, started to change her outlook. Feeling repentant, she turned up for career guidance at a post-war advice centre, and too shy to say she, a working class girl, wanted to be a doctor, said simply that she wanted to do something really worthwhile. The clerk replied "What, like social work?" She said, "I suppose so." She went on to become not only a frontline social worker helping to implement the new welfare state, but a researcher and textbook author, under her married surname of Willmott; her husband Peter was another social worker and later an influential academic sociologist.
- Someone who had a lot more fun with men during the war was socialite Joan Wyndham, a fabulous character who had worked out how to treat these ephemeral connections more as sport than an emotional investment during her time in the WAAF, and who is here given a deep purring voice that only adds to the sense of her as an adventuress, and gay icon among her circle. At the end of the war, as a celebration, she went to a horse race and won £200 on an outside bet. (It was as if she brought me good luck too; only a few minutes after listening to this very bit, I unexpectedly won £185 - much less in today's money of course - as a result of a routine offer in matched betting.) She went on to have a series of absurd jobs including one for a manufacturer of fishtank ornaments, and managing a hotel whose proprietors turned out to be international criminals - all excellent material for such a Soho raconteur. I hope I have time one day to read Wyndham's memoirs. (And might have enjoyed them even more in my twenties.)
- Lorna Bradey, a nurse on board ships around Africa and Italy, had some stirring stories of tending the wounded and standing up to textbook cases of arrogant surgeons. But what was perhaps most interesting as social history was her return home at the end of the war. Countless novels feature taciturn men who returned after WWII failing to understand the conditions at home, or the experiences of other family members. Bradey wrote that Britain looked drab after sunny climes; her family simply didn't understand what she'd been through, and listened with polite interest at best. When she arrived she unwittingly ate a whole week's butter ration at one meal, and when she went to find her clothes, she was cross that her sister had taken them (not yet realising how severe clothing rationing was).
-The public impact of the Beveridge Report, on its publication in 1942, was considerable (something often lost when histories concentrate only on the politics of the war itself) and a cross-party consensus sprung up towards implementing at least some of its recommendations; "no-one had forgotten the Jarrow Marches" as one speaker said. It gave people an additional sense of something worth fighting for. It seems to land suddenly in the middle of Nicholson's narrative, an unexpected bright promise from and of another world, while everyone is caught up in the grind.
- Nicholson gives the impression of popular currents of feminism over the course of the war whereby at first women were liberated and energised, including some even feeling freer due to the loss of possessions in the Blitz, but that towards the end, increasing numbers were longing for traditional roles and the return of husbands from the front, dreams perhaps fostered by popular reading material like Georgette Heyer novels. How often these were the same women with both sets of opinions at different times, it's hard to say from the authorial narrative sections on public mood (especially in audio), but at this time, most feminist intellectuals opposed the idea of the housewife who had no other occupation. But what I hadn't heard or considered before was that some working-class former housewives called up to do war work, in occupations vacated by men, struggled to juggle a job on top of housework, childcare, and shopping that had to be done in person in fixed locations at limited times. Ration books were registered to specific shops, and shopkeepers were resistant to changing their opening hours. Work, meanwhile, could be miles away on other side of town. Many informal childcarers were now in work themselves, and small children had to be supervised by older ones who would, these days, be considered much too young to babysit. Women demonstrated for nursery provision but were not taken seriously.
- Out of women's dissatisfaction with shopkeepers, and the continuation of rationing after the war, emerged the Housewives' League, begun by a disgruntled vicar's wife's letter to a newspaper. I'd only studied party politics of the era before, and this was something that had previously passed me by - a curious phenomenon whereby what looked initially like a united voice of many women, fed up that their needs and effort were barely recognised, quite swiftly mutated into a strongly conservative organisation for those not prepared to sacrifice any more to help create the new welfare state.
- There is plenty of interesting detail here from both sides of the 1945 general election.
Naomi Mitchison, a name familiar to me from late 20th century childhood anthologies, bookshelves and newspapers, was also a Labour activist - and wife of a candidate. The party could be disappointingly traditionalist, and tried to shoehorn her into a wifely role during campaigning, but she asserted the significance of her own career, and was only intermittently present, usually dressed in scruffy bohemian style. This did not inhibit her husband from becoming an MP, unseating a young John Profumo.
One of the most amusing stories in the book was from Nina Mabey, an Oxford student and Labour campaigner (in the constituency of future Old Labour stalwart Ian Mikardo), who tried to persuade a fellow student, one Margaret Roberts, possessor of a "pretty china doll's smile", against the Conservative Party. Roberts reportedly replied that, whilst Labour was fashionable at the moment, the Conservatives gave one a better chance of getting into parliament because the party members were stodgy, and it was easier to stand out.
- An interesting feature of 1940s feminism, found in the ideas of several women in the book, from Virginia Woolf early in the war, right through to those helping rebuild Germany, was to see Nazism and other atrocities of war as simply an extreme form of masculinity, and in the same vein were expressions of horror at the atom bombs dropped on Japan. Post-war work for international peace, and to make boys and men as individuals less aggressive and more peaceful, were seen as part of the same endeavour. (One can see the roots of the Greenham Common protest movement in this.)
Most of the women in Millions Like Us experienced nothing so horrific and unrelenting as the Soviet female soldiers whose stories are related in Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War. (Something more parochial Anglophone readers could do well with exploring.) And of course the personal stories of British women who had the very worst wartime experiences are missing here, perhaps to make this, over all, an inspiring rather than a disturbing book, though certainly not an insipid one. If that is something you are looking for - with the proviso that this is not the full story, and that these British women were, over all, luckier than their 1940s counterparts in many other parts of the world - it can be fascinating, enjoyable and companionable.
(Listened Aug 2018 & Sept-Oct 2019; reviewed Jan 2020)
January 31, 2020
Very good! Well researched with many first hand accounts, it's one of the best non-fiction books I've read about women on the Home Front in Britain during World War II.
March 6, 2014
I saw this reviewed in the Guardian Weekly and knew immediately I wanted to read it; I was not disappointed.
This is a book that can never be written again as it is based on in-depth interviews with some 50 women who lived through WW 2 and its aftermath, chronicling their heroically ordinary lives, fears and thoughts over more than 10 years. For some it appeared to be the only time they had been able to talk honestly about their experiences. Virginia Nicholson’s women weren’t chosen randomly – they were themselves writers – and their contributions were entertaining and literate, but were the millions like them? I think so; the range of experience is huge - from naive protected upperclass girls to the hard-bitten and desperately poor – and many of them did not even take up writing till many years later.
The chapters are chronological, and that makes sense of course. It did give me a bit of a problem distinguishing the women's narratives though, as they were necessarily chopped into short and interleaved reminiscences. (Though someone with better short-term memory might not agree).
Some of the most searing moments occur in recollections that sounded almost throwaway, but of course were not ... a nurse walking home in the blackout, is called over to a bomb site where an unknown number of people are trapped. She has to be lowered head-first through a tiny gap to find someone hideously maimed and beyond hope, and then be lowered again with a wad of chloroform to apply to the remains of the face, having to say “try to keep calm, we’re working to get you out”.
This incident comes up again later in the book and it is interesting that Nicholson understood it to be a desperate life-saving attempt, while I read it as an impossible act of mercy that no-one should be called on to perform. Who is to say? Either way, war for these women was the sum of shocking, numbing experiences like that and probably explains why many never spoke of it until they talked to Nicholson.
The first person accounts like this are riveting; Nicholson’s transcribings to the 3rd person, not so much. She has a few too many descriptions of beautiful nurses falling for handsome and debonair surgeons and at times the effect reads like a bad second-rate romance. Oh yes, there was a lot of sex during the war, but there are only so many ways of describing it. A very minor quibble though.
There is a good balance to this book – the end of the war occurs just 2/3 of the way through, leaving the rest devoted to the aftermath, which after the initial ecstatic celebrations (for some) was a let-down for many. Returning servicewomen were unprepared for the desperation of lives at home: “after the brilliant colours [of Italy], everything looks grey and shabby” said one nurse.
So the Postwar period is at least as interesting to read about: despite awareness at the start of the war that the “old order” of women’s subservience was changing – in the end it didn’t; there was simply weary acceptance of a return to domestic life. The contrast between the feeling in the early years that “women could do anything now”, and that the world would never be the same again, with the end in 1945 when all anyone wanted to do was “just stop working”, was very marked.
Something I never really appreciated was that the rigid dress code of the times would not have been relaxed even under extreme conditions. The misery caused by the absolute rule on wearing stockings - even when unobtainable, which was for most of the war – was mentioned over and over. No trousers allowed in the depths of winter, and when stockings were unobtainable, women resorted to drawing fake seams on bare legs.
One thing I found a bit odd, that symptoms of what we now call PTSD were never mentioned. Many talked about the sudden lack of purpose with the end of the war, when the fear and exhilaration was suddenly turned off, but that’s not the same thing. Yet PTSD must have been widespread, I would have thought. I wonder whether the unutterably grim conditions that prevailed in the UK after the war, only gradually improving over about 10 years, meant that there was no “post” - the contrast between war and peace in fact not being that great?
A terrific book, and its spirit could well be summed up with the words that Nicholson said she heard over and over – “You Just Got On With It”
This is a book that can never be written again as it is based on in-depth interviews with some 50 women who lived through WW 2 and its aftermath, chronicling their heroically ordinary lives, fears and thoughts over more than 10 years. For some it appeared to be the only time they had been able to talk honestly about their experiences. Virginia Nicholson’s women weren’t chosen randomly – they were themselves writers – and their contributions were entertaining and literate, but were the millions like them? I think so; the range of experience is huge - from naive protected upperclass girls to the hard-bitten and desperately poor – and many of them did not even take up writing till many years later.
The chapters are chronological, and that makes sense of course. It did give me a bit of a problem distinguishing the women's narratives though, as they were necessarily chopped into short and interleaved reminiscences. (Though someone with better short-term memory might not agree).
Some of the most searing moments occur in recollections that sounded almost throwaway, but of course were not ... a nurse walking home in the blackout, is called over to a bomb site where an unknown number of people are trapped. She has to be lowered head-first through a tiny gap to find someone hideously maimed and beyond hope, and then be lowered again with a wad of chloroform to apply to the remains of the face, having to say “try to keep calm, we’re working to get you out”.
This incident comes up again later in the book and it is interesting that Nicholson understood it to be a desperate life-saving attempt, while I read it as an impossible act of mercy that no-one should be called on to perform. Who is to say? Either way, war for these women was the sum of shocking, numbing experiences like that and probably explains why many never spoke of it until they talked to Nicholson.
The first person accounts like this are riveting; Nicholson’s transcribings to the 3rd person, not so much. She has a few too many descriptions of beautiful nurses falling for handsome and debonair surgeons and at times the effect reads like a bad second-rate romance. Oh yes, there was a lot of sex during the war, but there are only so many ways of describing it. A very minor quibble though.
There is a good balance to this book – the end of the war occurs just 2/3 of the way through, leaving the rest devoted to the aftermath, which after the initial ecstatic celebrations (for some) was a let-down for many. Returning servicewomen were unprepared for the desperation of lives at home: “after the brilliant colours [of Italy], everything looks grey and shabby” said one nurse.
So the Postwar period is at least as interesting to read about: despite awareness at the start of the war that the “old order” of women’s subservience was changing – in the end it didn’t; there was simply weary acceptance of a return to domestic life. The contrast between the feeling in the early years that “women could do anything now”, and that the world would never be the same again, with the end in 1945 when all anyone wanted to do was “just stop working”, was very marked.
Something I never really appreciated was that the rigid dress code of the times would not have been relaxed even under extreme conditions. The misery caused by the absolute rule on wearing stockings - even when unobtainable, which was for most of the war – was mentioned over and over. No trousers allowed in the depths of winter, and when stockings were unobtainable, women resorted to drawing fake seams on bare legs.
One thing I found a bit odd, that symptoms of what we now call PTSD were never mentioned. Many talked about the sudden lack of purpose with the end of the war, when the fear and exhilaration was suddenly turned off, but that’s not the same thing. Yet PTSD must have been widespread, I would have thought. I wonder whether the unutterably grim conditions that prevailed in the UK after the war, only gradually improving over about 10 years, meant that there was no “post” - the contrast between war and peace in fact not being that great?
A terrific book, and its spirit could well be summed up with the words that Nicholson said she heard over and over – “You Just Got On With It”
November 13, 2018
This is a highly readable anecdotal account of British women's experiences during World War II. It's a worthy addition to the shelf of similar books, but there's nothing new here in information or insight.
January 25, 2013
A rather sobering story about the women in Britain during the second world war - with examples from many different women, through their diaries, biographies and interviews with them now, women from all parts of society and all parts of the country. Their experiences (both similar and different) give a vivid picture of some really hard and trying times. It's not dramatic as war time stories usually are, because their lives were seldom at the front, their lot was to make the everyday life work, and trying to take care of the jobs left by the men who had left for war (and of course, helping out in the army in many important ways). The problems were many, all the way from not being able to buy stockings (which might sound like a silly problems, but when working in offices that forbade women wearing trousers and the rationing of fabrics which made the skirts even shorter during the war, it really was a problem) to being bombed out of your home and to loose your loved ones...
It is an interesting read, and it gives a vivid pictures of all the problems these women had to face. It's not an upbeat story, but it can very well bring you to tears from time to time.
I also really like that a large portion of the book also is devoted to what happened afterwards - which is quite important too - when things were beginning to return to the way they had been before, but with people whose lives had been heavily influenced by these trying years.
It is an interesting read, and it gives a vivid pictures of all the problems these women had to face. It's not an upbeat story, but it can very well bring you to tears from time to time.
I also really like that a large portion of the book also is devoted to what happened afterwards - which is quite important too - when things were beginning to return to the way they had been before, but with people whose lives had been heavily influenced by these trying years.
April 3, 2022
This is an immensely readable broad history of British women’s lives during World War II. Women from all classes and parts of the country, and who did all kinds of different things during the war, from factory work, farming and doing all kinds of things in the service, including nursing, anti-aircraft work and intelligence work.
This is mostly drawn from first-hand accounts, so we hear from the women themselves how the war disrupted their lives and the roles they normally would have had, how they coped under bombing raids, rationing, and keeping their families and households going on their own, and how their lives radically changed once again when the war ended.
It’s fascinating to read about those women who thrived under the challenges and enjoyed being part of the working world, and those who just “got on with it” until they could return to home and hearth at war’s end. The main focus is on a handful of women whom the reader gets to know. One loses two (successive) fiancés during the war, one tends to a rescue boat of children being evacuated to Canada when their ship is sunk by a U-Boat, one becomes an intelligence officer working in Cairo and elsewhere around North Africa and is disappointed by the lack of an important mission, and cold, wet, drab and rationed England when she is finally demobilized.
Author Nicholson puts these stories in the broader context of how the war changed not only sex roles, but also views about work, welfare and social class. After all their wartime sacrifices, the middle and lower classes expected a reward, and immediately voted in the Labor Party with its platform of universal health and welfare programs.
If you are considering reading this book, I can recommend the audio version in particular. It’s a multi-cast recording, so each woman’s account is read in a dedicated voice, mimicking the accent that goes with the real woman’s place of birth and social class.
This is mostly drawn from first-hand accounts, so we hear from the women themselves how the war disrupted their lives and the roles they normally would have had, how they coped under bombing raids, rationing, and keeping their families and households going on their own, and how their lives radically changed once again when the war ended.
It’s fascinating to read about those women who thrived under the challenges and enjoyed being part of the working world, and those who just “got on with it” until they could return to home and hearth at war’s end. The main focus is on a handful of women whom the reader gets to know. One loses two (successive) fiancés during the war, one tends to a rescue boat of children being evacuated to Canada when their ship is sunk by a U-Boat, one becomes an intelligence officer working in Cairo and elsewhere around North Africa and is disappointed by the lack of an important mission, and cold, wet, drab and rationed England when she is finally demobilized.
Author Nicholson puts these stories in the broader context of how the war changed not only sex roles, but also views about work, welfare and social class. After all their wartime sacrifices, the middle and lower classes expected a reward, and immediately voted in the Labor Party with its platform of universal health and welfare programs.
If you are considering reading this book, I can recommend the audio version in particular. It’s a multi-cast recording, so each woman’s account is read in a dedicated voice, mimicking the accent that goes with the real woman’s place of birth and social class.
November 18, 2012
This was a fascinating book about the way lives of British women were transformed during the Second World War. Left behind to run every think from families to bomb products and making aircraft. Britain could not have done what she did without the use of millions of women while their men did the fighting. They were involved in many roles from administration through to heavy industry and even gunnery in anti aircraft guns. This very sympathetically and well written account of different women’s live during the war shows that so much of societies norms where suspended for the duration. The power drama and thrill of during useful things for the war effort gave women’s lives a focus and meaning that they had never had before and would take many years to regain. I wanted to talk to my mum about some of the issues. The sorrow and fear of the woman who sent their children away as evacuees to the nurses who went to the front lines in North Africa and Europe. Women did things that they never thought them selves capable of. The make do and mend attitude which worked well during the war led to a sense of anticlimax in the peace. An indebted broken Britain found it difficult to rebuild and deal with the shortages. Many women went back to the role f housewife and mothers at the end of the war but many others would never be the same again. The great reforms for women in the 1970’s began in the liberation of the war years but it was a long time coming if it has really got there yet. Nic will enjoy this read.
September 11, 2016
I have really enjoyed Simon Garfield's selections of Mass Observation diaries, such as Our Hidden Lives, and I adored Nella Last's War. This book is in the same vein and is full of vivid, sometimes shocking, reminiscences by women from a wide range of backgrounds, about their war experiences and the often very difficult adjustments afterwards. Fascinating; my major criticism was that with so many women and a decade-long story told in chronological order, it was hard to keep track of who was who, and for this reason I didn't feel I got to know them the way I got to know Nella and Jean Lucey Pratt. And sometimes Nicholson's prose is a bit overblown. A very worthwhile read if you are interested in women's lives in this period though.
February 12, 2015
LOVE LOVE LOVE.
Why do more people not know about this book? It's truly amazing. I don't read very much nonfiction, but this book makes me want to read more. It is shocking, heartbreaking, funny, tragic, uplifting, terrifying, and fascinating. Nicholson brings together dozens of individual lives--so different, but all with one glaring thing in common: They were the women of World War II.
They were factory workers, nurses, housewives, code-breakers, "clippies," ambulance drivers, mothers, singers, and air raid wardens. Nicholson shows us how extraordinary ordinary women can be, how they dreamed and feared and lived in the chaotic world of the Second World War.
I bought this book at the wonderful WW2 museum in Caen. It was the best museum I've been to, and I wanted something to remember it by. I could have not made a better choice by buying this book. I highly recommend it for everyone.
Why do more people not know about this book? It's truly amazing. I don't read very much nonfiction, but this book makes me want to read more. It is shocking, heartbreaking, funny, tragic, uplifting, terrifying, and fascinating. Nicholson brings together dozens of individual lives--so different, but all with one glaring thing in common: They were the women of World War II.
They were factory workers, nurses, housewives, code-breakers, "clippies," ambulance drivers, mothers, singers, and air raid wardens. Nicholson shows us how extraordinary ordinary women can be, how they dreamed and feared and lived in the chaotic world of the Second World War.
I bought this book at the wonderful WW2 museum in Caen. It was the best museum I've been to, and I wanted something to remember it by. I could have not made a better choice by buying this book. I highly recommend it for everyone.
February 16, 2018
I adore history, particularly that which deals with women, and Nicholson has presented her information so well in this book. She states that she ‘wanted to find out not only what the did in the war, but what the war did to them and how it changed their subsequent lives and relationships’. Nicholson has focused upon a wealth of women from so many different walks of life, merging history with biography, and bringing some fascinating characters to the forefront of her work. We meet, through her words, famous diarists like Nella Last and Mollie Panter-Downes, the privileged in society, and novelists such as Nina Bawden and Barbara Cartland. The chronological structure which Nicholson has adopted works so well, as did the sectioning of information into short chapters, all of which dealt with a different element of wartime life for women – from rationing to conscription.
July 25, 2013
This book was an excellently written and enjoyable study of the period. I couldn't put it down.
I recommend it to anyone interested in women's lives, British history and/or the Second World War.
I must say, however, that I found it regrettable that the book completely ignored lesbians. For such a thorough and well-researched book about women of all ages, walks of life and regions -- a book that put great emphasis on their love and sex lives -- it was a shame that the only mention was of one woman being hit on by a scary, mannish lesbian once.
From reading the book, one would think everyone in Britain in the forties was straight. Even a quick mention of the hidden and taboo aspect of these lives would have been better than silence.
I recommend it to anyone interested in women's lives, British history and/or the Second World War.
I must say, however, that I found it regrettable that the book completely ignored lesbians. For such a thorough and well-researched book about women of all ages, walks of life and regions -- a book that put great emphasis on their love and sex lives -- it was a shame that the only mention was of one woman being hit on by a scary, mannish lesbian once.
From reading the book, one would think everyone in Britain in the forties was straight. Even a quick mention of the hidden and taboo aspect of these lives would have been better than silence.
November 23, 2016
Very informative and highly readable. Some excellent excerpts from published and unpublished writings of women of this era, supplemented by interviews carried out in old age.
But also quite irritating with it's airey fairy editorialising, its sweeping generalisations and its huge unconscious class bias.
I have blogged at length about this and Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War on my blog http://gertsamtkunstwerk.typepad.co.u...
But also quite irritating with it's airey fairy editorialising, its sweeping generalisations and its huge unconscious class bias.
I have blogged at length about this and Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War on my blog http://gertsamtkunstwerk.typepad.co.u...
October 30, 2012
In my final term at university, I studied a module on 1940s Film and Literature and basically I fell in love with a whole different time period. You may or may not have noticed that I love history on a completely amateur basis. For me, this is the best way, I seriously considered studying it at university but decided not to, this way I don't have to do the research, I just read the books so I still get the stories. For me, history at its best is a collection of well-written stories and in this respect Virginia Nicholson delivers and then some. This book is fantastic.
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspo...
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspo...
July 28, 2020
I generally read fiction about WW11 but this grabbed my attention. I thoroughly enjoyed it as it was about the lives of those women who lived during those times either doing vital war work, either in the services or in a variety of jobs whilst trying to feed families on meagre rations. Entries included are from Nella Last who wrote a diary for the Mass Observation project and excerpts from many women who kept very detailed 'war diaries'. They all speak of highs, the sheer delight in one lady's case , of being able to buy a new tablet of soap and the loss when answering the door to see the telegram boy standing with almost certain life changing news. It follows these women right through to demob, to their expectations post war and, in the last chapter, how their lives had panned out. A strong book and highly recommend this.
August 3, 2023
Unlike the majority of books written on this subject, Nicholson tells the story of the women’s Second World War. Covering a range of experiences from serving in the WAAF’s to making bombs in the munitions factories, this book is a well-researched compilation of women’s first-hand experiences of the war.
I listened to the audio version of this book, as although I also own it in hardback, it is a chunky book to carry around. I see that other readers loved the audio version, but this wasn’t the case for me. As there were so many characters in the book, it felt very disjointed and difficult to distinguish between the characters. I have to admit that the accents used by the narrators were getting worse as the book progressed, especially when the Americans joined the war and the ‘American’ accents starting creeping in. Being a 20 hour audible book, this did begin to grate on me after a while.
But that is nothing to do with the content of the actual book, which I really enjoyed reading.
I listened to the audio version of this book, as although I also own it in hardback, it is a chunky book to carry around. I see that other readers loved the audio version, but this wasn’t the case for me. As there were so many characters in the book, it felt very disjointed and difficult to distinguish between the characters. I have to admit that the accents used by the narrators were getting worse as the book progressed, especially when the Americans joined the war and the ‘American’ accents starting creeping in. Being a 20 hour audible book, this did begin to grate on me after a while.
But that is nothing to do with the content of the actual book, which I really enjoyed reading.
November 29, 2021
This a very interesting, factual, gritty book!
I gave it 4 stars as I enjoyed the first person accounts more than the third person portions (which were much of the book); and, though the biographical accounts for each woman are written chronologically I did get a bit mixed up with which stories went with each character - listening at a slightly quicker pace probably didn’t help though.
Extra: Social and gender inequality. Lots of focus on the sexual activities of the war years; bed hopping/extra marital affairs, rape, “randy” G.I’s, ‘surprise’ pregnancies, and, horrific “butchering” abortions (nearly killed a few of the women). Domestic & workplace violence. Controlling parents/spouses.
I gave it 4 stars as I enjoyed the first person accounts more than the third person portions (which were much of the book); and, though the biographical accounts for each woman are written chronologically I did get a bit mixed up with which stories went with each character - listening at a slightly quicker pace probably didn’t help though.
Extra: Social and gender inequality. Lots of focus on the sexual activities of the war years; bed hopping/extra marital affairs, rape, “randy” G.I’s, ‘surprise’ pregnancies, and, horrific “butchering” abortions (nearly killed a few of the women). Domestic & workplace violence. Controlling parents/spouses.
July 25, 2014
A brilliantly, meticulously researched book and a pleasure to read. Such a range of experiences from women in all walks of life and in a variety of situations - hospitals, Bletchley, factories, farms, town, city, countryside. Amusing, distressing, frightening and uplifting stories in the words of the women who lived them. For anyone who wants to get an incite into those who lived through the Second World War off the battlefield, then I can highly recommend Millions Like Us. I look forward to reading another of Ms Nicholson's books, currently sitting on my shelf, Singled Out, about women after WW1.
September 16, 2016
This was a great read that I enjoyed reading a great deal . It portrays the lives of women who lived during the Second World War. The ones who joined the war effort and the many fresh opportunities that it gave to women that had never existed before the war, it also covers the range of difficulties the women faced with the restrictins of rationing and the dangers of bombing Aslso the worries over their menfolk who were fighting overseas, this is a great read for anyone who has an interest in womens history
May 12, 2016
A fascinating read, following the lives of a dozen women of various ages and backgrounds and the changes inn their lives over the course of WW2.....and, most interestingly, what happened once peace came. The seeds of the feminist revolution that came a few decades later were sown, but many were keen for life to resume as it was, which made things very complicated. Absolutely enthralling to read and an impressive piece of work, I highly recommend it.
May 6, 2011
Radio 4 "Book of the Week" May 2-6, 2011
2.5 stars; probably works better as a physical book where you can flip pages back. The abridgment gave me plenty of good bits of stories and a general sense of the attitudes of the time, but I was never able to keep track of who was who or if it was even important. I had a near identical experience with another BBC reading from this same author.
2.5 stars; probably works better as a physical book where you can flip pages back. The abridgment gave me plenty of good bits of stories and a general sense of the attitudes of the time, but I was never able to keep track of who was who or if it was even important. I had a near identical experience with another BBC reading from this same author.
June 28, 2012
Very sobering and in-depth look at the experiences of all sorts of seemingly ordinary women during a war that challenged british strength and pysche. Based on the mass observation findings, diaries, interviews and other original sources "Millions Like Us" weaves their stories chronologically throughout the Second World War.
October 26, 2012
The recollections and reflections of a number British women during World War II, from various social classes and working in a variety of jobs--military, industrial, agricultural, forestry, marine, infrastructure, transport, etc. These material was wonderfully managed by Nicholson, who neatly incorporates individual experiences with the broader view.
July 14, 2013
Fascinating - a look at how the lives and expectations of women were turned upside down by the second world war. A particularly interesting read in conjunction with another book by Nicolson - Singled Out which complements this nicely being about how the "excess" women after WWI carved careers and influenced society
March 6, 2014
Ooops - I had been logging the episodes to another book with the same title and same subject, by Jennifer Hartley and published 1997. So was there a need for this book at all? LOL
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 29, 2012
Now I've got past the introduction, I can't put this book down, it's really informative and written in a very accessible way. Highly recommended if you're interested in the social history side of WW2.
March 29, 2016
Drawn from countless first person narratives (many of which I'd like to read in their entirety), this is very readable, and just plain fascinating. Sadly, I don't think it's in print in the US, and I ended up buying a copy from England via Amazon.
Want to read
July 14, 2011Attracted to this by a wonderful review at thingsmeanalot.
June 16, 2017
Really enjoyable, documenting all types of women with many different roles during the world. Brilliant to have a book about the war solely from a female perspective.
June 21, 2017
I took a while to get into the form of jumping quickly between different characters - then next thing I knew, I was crying on the bus reading about a nurse in the Blitz.
February 22, 2013
Amazing book. Absolutely recommend it.
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