Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain

by Susan Kingsley Kent

Making Peace provides a fresh context for understanding gender relations in interwar Britain, seeing in the emergence of a powerful ideology of motherhood and a reemphasis on separate spheres for men and women a corollary to the political and economic restructuring designed to reestablish social order after World War I. The war had often been explained and justified to the British public by means of images that portrayed women as hostile or frightening--or as victims of sexual assault, as in the Belgian atrocity stories. These sexualized interpretations of war then shaped postwar understandings of gender, as psychiatrists, psychologists, and sexologists drew on metaphors of war to talk about relationships between men and women, likening any conflict between the sexes to the terrible chaos of the war years.

Drawing on materials from posters to popular songs, from government reports to journalistic accounts, from memoirs and novels to diaries and letters, Making Peace is a penetrating analysis of how gendered and sexualized depictions of wartime experiences compelled many Britons to seek in traditional gender arrangements the key to postwar order and security. In the interwar period, many feminists compromised their earlier positions in an effort to contribute to postwar recovery, and justified their demands--for birth control and family endowment, for example--in conservative terms that ultimately hampered their movement.

Genres: History

204 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Kent's style. Her history is readable and it flows easily from one idea to another. She digs beneath the surface of historical "facts" and interprets them in a way that creates meaning and insight. Her main argument here is that, while feminists won a lot of formal legal gains leading up to and immediately after WWI, the fear of returning to the "sex war" after the end of the Great War led to the new strand of feminism, which emphasized the differences between the genders instead of taking a hard line on equality in all matters. The need of many Britons to have something familiar and easy to fall back into - to return to "normal" after the suffering and trauma of the war - resulted in psychological sexism, which, despite the legal victories for women, was in some ways much more harmful to their progress in British society than life before the vote had been.