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SEX, GENDER, AND ROMANTIC INTIMACY IN SERVICEMEN'S LETTERS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2019
Abstract
This article explores sex and romance as under-examined aspects of wartime masculinities through a focus on letters from servicemen recipients of woollen ‘comforts’ to girls and women who knitted for them during the Second World War. It examines the tension between the cultural ideal of ‘temperate heroism’ that formed the hegemonic masculinity during the Second World War and evidence of predatory male sexuality and sexual violence, both in combat and on the home front. Servicemen's letters to anonymous knitters reveal many aspects of their emotional lives, including the widespread deployment of romance as a mechanism for maintaining morale. They also reveal that some men were able to manipulate their image as ‘heroes’ and make use of the comforts fund as a vehicle for engaging in sexually explicit correspondence and transgressive and deviant behaviours. A foregrounding of romance and sexuality suggests that we need to look again at arguments relating to the contiguity between military cultures and middle- and working-class civilian codes of respectable masculinity and male heterosexual expression. The article further engages with critiques in the history of masculinity of the neglect of working-class masculinities and the tendency to focus on cultural scripts about masculinity rather than what men actually did or felt.
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Footnotes
I would like to thank Chris Hopkins, Alan Malpass, Helen Rogers, Matthew Stibbe, Cornelie Usborne, and Nicola Verdon for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and also the anonymous readers at the Historical Journal for their positive and clarifying suggestions.
References
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70 Sam Gibbs to Mollie Baker, 8 Sept. 1940.
71 Sam Gibbs to Mollie Baker, 13 Dec. 1940.
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73 Bill Stewart to Mollie Baker, 25 Apr. 1945. The term ‘B knitters’ is both a play on ‘Knitting B’ and a reference to Stewart's playful use of the phrase the ‘Blessed Knitters’.
74 Sam Gibbs to Mollie Baker, 24 Oct. 1940.
75 Sam Gibbs to Mollie Baker, 13 Dec. 1940.
76 Sam Gibbs to Mollie Baker, 8 Sept. 1940.
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78 Bill Stewart to Mollie Baker, 27 Aug. 1940. See also J. Plumstead to Doris Dockrill: ‘Personally, when much younger, I could do a bit of plain, but when it came to more complicated stuff like purl – well I was at a loss. How the Dickens you manage to get round corners without breaking needles is beyond me.’ 22 June, no year.
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107 Jim Gilbert to Norah Hodgkinson, 28 June 1942.
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