Published in 2013 (first published 1987)
352 pages
Gail Braybon (1952-2008) was an independent historian. She was the author of Women Workers in the First World War and also wrote, with Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars.
Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of personal narrative, notably Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007).
What is this book about?
Originally published in 1987, Out of the Cage brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars.
Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up, their personal reactions to war, their feelings about pay and the company at work, the effects of war on their health, their relations with men and their home lives; they speak too about how demobilisation affected them, and how they spent the years between two World Wars.