Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices: Disciplining Lesbianism in the WAAF and the ATS during the Second World War

Abstract

During the Second World War the two largest women's services, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), responded pragmatically to the presence of lesbians in their ranks. Such disinterest arguably stemmed from the need to retain valuable personnel in a time of great instability. This article seeks to illuminate the responses of both services within the context of wider understandings of lesbianism in Britain during the inter-war period and during the Second World War. It argues that the responses of senior officials were rooted in received understandings of lesbianism as both an acquired vice and as an innate psychopathic infirmity. Overwhelmingly, however, classification fell in the former category, underpinned as it was by notions of middle-class boarding school desire.