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The evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940 has an iconic place in British culture. This article draws on a concept of popular memory that suggests that rival versions of the past compete for cultural centrality, to ask how Dunkirk acquired this position. During the war, accounts stressed the importance of the sea in the 'deliverance', but while some focused on the Navy, others concentrated on the civilian small boats, and criticism was rare. Immediately postwar there was a lull in representations. In the 1950s, attention switched to the land and to the problematic place of the defeated Army in the story, culminating in Ealing Studios' film Dunkirk (1958). Ealing attempted to synthesize previous emphases and struggled to achieve agreement about the representation of the evacuation. The film ensured the public prominence of the memory of Dunkirk, yet its reception was fractured along class and gender lines, indicating the instabilities of Ealing's negotiated consensus. The history of the contested inscription of Dunkirk in British culture emphasizes that at no point since the events occurred has the representation of the second world war been secure; the popular memory of the war is continually subject to construction, contestation and revision.

Zu den Konsequenzen, die das Erleben des Zweiten Weltkriegs für die Frauen in Großbritannien hatte, werden unterschiedliche Thesen vertreten. Sowohl eine emanzipative als auch eine polarisierende, die bestehende Ungleichheit vertiefende Wirkung werden für möglich gehalten. Eine dritte Position betont die Kontinuität im Leben der Frauen. Die Verfasserin legt Ergebnisse narrativer, biographischer Interviews zu dieser Frage vor (n=42), die sowohl mit ehemaligen Militärangehörigen weiblichen Geschlechts als auch mit Frauen geführt wurden, die zivilen Kriegsdienst geleistet hatten. Im Erzählverhalten der Frauen wird eine deutliche Polarisierung sichtbar. Während dienstverpflichtete Frauen den Zweiten Weltkrieg nicht als ein ihre Stellung veränderndes Ereignis sehen, konstruieren Frauen, die sich freiwillig gemeldet hatten, ihre Lebensgeschichten nach dem Erzählmuster der Veränderungen. (ICE)

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