Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (review)

Penny Summerfield's fascinating book on women's lives during the second world war will stimulate and provoke questions for researchers from a range of disciplines. It raises complex methodological issues about the use of life histories; it challenges us to think again about historical accounts (including her own) of the effects of the second world war on women; and it draws attention to the ways in which historical subjectivities, both individual and collective, are produced.

Summerfield draws on forty-two interviews conducted by herself and two research assistants in which women were asked to tell their stories of wartime work and training. The narratives thus produced are used to explore the ways in which cultural discourses and personal memory intersect to create individual accounts of wartime experience. Summerfield argues that "[p]ersonal narratives draw on the generalised subject available in discourse to construct the particular personal subject," and that it is therefore "necessary to encompass within oral history analysis and interpretation, not only the voice that speaks for itself, but also the voices that speak to it, the discursive formulations from which understandings are selected and within which accounts are made" (15). This central theoretical insight is deployed in the analysis, contextualizing, and interpretation of the interview data. Personal testimonies are therefore read not as representing a coherent, already given sense of a historical "self," but as a process in which memory is produced and reproduced from the range of discursive formulations available both then and now. As a result, Summerfield is able to show the myriad, and often contradictory, ways in which the women's accounts drew on understandings of gender and a woman's role prevalent in the 1940s to explain their wartime experiences. For example, while some women drew on those wartime discourses that represented the war as liberating for women, others used more traditionalist understandings in which the war was perceived as a temporary disruption of "normal" gender relations. The narratives thus produced challenge the idea that any unitary understanding or interpretation of the effects of the second world war on women's post-war experience is possible.

The purpose of the book, Summerfield argues, is not to intervene in the debates about the meaning of the second world war in women's lives: she is not concerned to offer any kind of revisionist synthesis of these debates. Instead, her purpose, as she states it, is to demonstrate that the "numerous public accounts of how women have been and should be do not now and have not in the past constituted a unified culture of femininity. The fragments, nevertheless, powerfully define, regulate and hence control the stories which it is possible to tell about oneself" (285). In her recognition that oral testimonies are stories that we tell about ourselves, Summerfield raises questions about the ways in which life stories, whether biographical or autobiographical, are produced. In particular, she draws on Graham Dawson's idea of "composure" and the need people have when "composing" stories about themselves to establish an acceptable self for their particular audience. Thus, Summerfield's framework for the analysis of oral accounts includes the specific identities and subjectivities of the interviewers as well as those of the interviewees. And equally important, it makes possible the analysis of those moments when the interviewees' attempts to "compose" a coherent narrative of the self falter under the weight of competing and contradictory fragments of popular myth, personal memory, and public discourse. It is these slippages that offer opportunities for understanding the ways in which interiority and public discourse intersect in individual women's voices.

Public discourses of women's wartime work were contradictory. On the one hand, the female war worker was...