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1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Joy Damousi
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Summary

I am a war widow’ explains Pat Medaris, whose husband, Jack had served in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

I think it fills me in with Jack because he was away so much at Vietnam and Korea, Malaysia, but I feel I'm part of that, you know what I mean? Part of his thing, by being a war widow … By association I feel that I'm actually a war widow through him, so therefore what I am is part of him. It keeps me connected with him.

The role of this connection between the past and the present in shaping identity is one of the key concerns of this book. Through an analysis of seventy interviews conducted with war widows, my aim is to explore how memory and identity are linked. What does it mean to be a war widow? How have memories shaped that identity? How do women convey their life histories?

This study is based on interviews conducted with Australian war widows whose husbands died either during wartime, or afterwards because of a war-related injury. Using oral testimonies as the basis for a study of war widows opens up possibilities that official sources do not allow in the same way, for the emotional detail of widows' experiences is not documented in such material. Rather than consider war widows primarily as welfare recipients – as others have done – I shift the attention to the emotional experience of widowhood during the post-war period.

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Type
Chapter
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Living with the Aftermath
Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia
, pp. 1 - 8
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Introduction
  • Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne
  • Book: Living with the Aftermath
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511549618.001
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  • Introduction
  • Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne
  • Book: Living with the Aftermath
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511549618.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne
  • Book: Living with the Aftermath
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511549618.001
Available formats
×