Representations of women and home defence

Abstract

This chapter explores the place of women in popular representations of the Home Guard, official and unofficial, serious and comic. In spite of their substantial history of participation, women were rarely represented as Home Guard members in their own right, even after their partial official recognition in 1943. Even though authors and artists did not depict women as members of the Home Guard, wartime films, fiction, plays, prose, cartoons and comic verse about the force featured female characters. In Murder in the Home Guard by Ruth Adam, issues of social class are again at stake, but so are those of gender, and women are central to the action. Women Home Guards were almost non-existent in wartime popular culture. But there was not, in fact, a complete absence of representations of female agency in home defence.