Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945. By Geoffrey G. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. x plus 405 pp. $125.00)

Abstract

For nearly seven decades, the Second World War has held a hallowed place in the British national imagination. As Geoffrey Field notes in his critical and compelling study of the war years, Britain had a “good war,” experiencing no divisive occupation, fewer deaths than in the previous world war, and—in the end—a resounding victory. According to this triumphalist narrative, the conflict was a “People's War,” where social divisions melted away as everyone came together to fight the Nazi scourge. But as Field and others have shown, the war years were not without controversy. Field's thesis is straightforward. Wartime issues involving women, children, soldiers, labor, leisure, and politics, and the discourses surrounding them, were greatly inflected by issues of class. Class divisions, for example, did not simply disappear in the countryside, as evacuated working-class children from London negotiated the starkly different social terrain of village life, nor amongst young women in munitions factories whose social standing was immediately betrayed the very moment they opened their mouths. The war years were a crucible of class tensions as Britain's social strata came in contact with each other in new and different ways. These experiences reflected, deepened, and reshaped class identities. And yet, while Field seeks to rescue the working classes as historical subjects and class, in general, as an historical lens, he does not ignore the advances made since the cultural turn. He rightly gives consideration to gender, race, age, religion, and other social cleavages.