2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This workshop brings together historians and cultural theory practitioners to critically analyse comparative interplays of race and gender through an examination of representations of women who developed various intimacies with allied troops on a range of homefronts during World War Two. Not all women became mothers but they were potentially mothers; those who did mother children from these liaisons were singled out for particular criticism from various quarters for a range of reasons, including “giving their children up”. This project promises to tease out the various complex, often contrasting but also common experiences of sexually active women on the homefronts in India, Britain, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific nations and Australia. The focus is particularly on mixed-race liaisons and includes women of colour, women Indigenous to the countries in which troops were stationed, and those who had relationships with men of colour, that is African or native American and also British or Dutch servicemen.

Moreover, this project will illuminate the particular forms of misogyny that operated globally in times of war, when huge disruptions to ordinary lives occurred, when vast numbers of men, and civilians, were mobilised for the purposes of war and when the needs of women and children were totally consumed by “the war effort”. Overlaying all of this is the ongoing, even heightened sexuality of men in times of war, and also that of women in times of uncertainty and change.