Wartime Women: A Mass-observation Anthology of Women's Writing, 1937-1945 Book

Too few Americans know about the fascinating Mass-Observation project initiated in England in 1937 (and coming to an end in the late 1940s) with the aim of documenting, without bias, the lives of ordinary people, typically through diary installments by volunteer contributors, and also through directives or questionnaires. Regular contributors included a Miss Pringle, aged 24, a teacher from Liverpool who had been responsible for helping to fit the schoolchildren with gas masks during the Munich crisis of 1938: "In the girls' department there were more cases of fright but the staff in both departments said how well-behaved and plucky the children had been. They also said how difficult it was to keep saying the same cheerful inanities and yet be fitting the children with equipment such as that. Some children thought that the gas was in the defense valve and said they could smell it. Actually it was the Izal used for disinfectant." The Mass-Observation Archives are housed at the University of Sussex, and from these, editor Dorothy Sheridan has skillfully culled an engrossing selection of excerpts touching on women's attitudes and experiences during the war, including the class snobbery and racism that they unconsciously revealed. Although the project foundered after the war, giving way to commercially driven market research, the hundreds of thousands of pages of information (much still unread) generated by Mass-Observation are a priceless historical resource, as engaging as a stranger's diary or a letter left on the seat of a bus. --Regina Marler Read More