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Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects' tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints left behind. These efforts are a part of the making of history, and when the process is as personal as many of our contributors' research has been, it is also the working of memory. The implication here is that memory is intimate, and that the layering of narrative fragments that recovery involves brings us in touching distance to ourselves.
These are not the stories of the brave little woman at home; they are stories of the woman who calculated the main chance and took up with the Nazi soldier, or who eagerly dropped the apron at the door and picked up a paintbrush, or who brazenly bargained for her life and her mother's with the most feared of tyrants. These are stories of courage and sometimes of compromise - not the courage of bravado and hype and big guns, but rather the courage of hard choices and sacrifices that make sense of the life given, even when that life seems only madness.
Working Memory brings scholarly attention to the roles of women in World War II that have been hidden, masked, undervalued, or forgotten.
List of contents
- Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II, edited by Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault
- Introduction
- The Lives and The Archives Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar
- Prologue
- "Things Gone Astray..." The Work of Archive Marlene Kadar
- 1. "People Dealt This Fate to People": The War and the Holocaust in Zofia Nalkowska's Life Writing Eva C. Karpinski
- 2. Re-Dressing Women's History in the Special Operations Executive: The Camouflage Project Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino
- 3. Two Sisters: Contrary Lives Charmian Brinson and Julia Winckler
- 4. From Planter's Daughter to Imperial Soldier and Servant in Britain's War Patrick Taylor
- 5. Resisting Holocaust Memory: Recuperating a Compromised Life Marlene Kadar
- 6. "Snow White in Auschwitz": The Tale of Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt Natalie Robinson
- 7. Perpetual Pioneers: The Library of Congress Meets Women Photojournalists of World War II Beverly W. Brannan
- 8. "Girl Takes Drastic Step": Molly Lamb Bobak's "W110278-The Diary of a C.W.A.C." Tanya Schaap
- 9. "These Dutch Girls are Wizard!" The Dutch Resistance as Matriarchy in One of Our Aircraft is Missing James D. Stone
- 10. Facing Death: The Paintings of Australian War Artist Stella Bowen Catherine Speck
- Index
About the author
Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women's studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies.
Jeanne Perreault is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary and is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography.
