Newcastle University

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It has been said that the Second World War is such a pervasive feature of British life that it isn’t necessary to have lived through it to ‘remember’ it. Across the generations since 1945, popular culture has kept British imaginations well stocked with accounts of it, but what does it mean to ‘remember’ something one hasn’t experienced direct? Are there generational and gender differences to this kind of memory, and how can a historian explore these issues? Drawing on a 2009 Mass Observation survey, this lecture looks at patterns of remembering ‘the war’, which do not coincide neatly with generational differences. The ways in which people respond are less governed by generation: gender is the more important factor.

A graduate of the University of Sussex, Penny Summerfield completed her DPhil in 1982. She taught at the Universities of Durham and Lancaster before becoming Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester in 2000. Publications include Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (1986); Women Workers in the Second World War (1989); Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (1998); and Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard (2007).

Penny was Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University (1990–1994), Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at Manchester (2002–2006), and Chair of the Social History Society UK (2008–2011). Currently an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow and Councillor of the Royal Historical Society, her current research is the popular memory of the Second World War in Britain, to which this lecture relates.