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Art and citizenship in conflict examines the work of British women artists who were charged with documenting the efforts of millions of their countrywomen on the home front and beyond during the Second World War. Evelyn Dunbar, Mary Kessell, Ethel Gabain, Stella Schmolle, and Laura Knight, among others, worked under the auspices of the War Artists' Advisory Committee to record the labour of nurses, women in agriculture and manufacturing, and those who joined the WAAF, the ATS, or the WRNS, among other wartime positions. The visual records produced were part of a broader scheme to uphold morale and promote much-needed service on the home front. Yet they also reveal the challenge of fulfilling the unique demands of citizenship in the context of the People's War. Women were expected to uphold conventions associated with being a wife, mother, and homemaker. And yet assembling Churchill tanks, felling trees and milking cows, and positioning anti-aircraft guns also became part of their wartime remit. The artists who undertook the representation of women's work subsequently found numerous ways - often subtle, sometimes humorous - to show the host of opposing expectations that British women faced in their efforts to be 'good' wartime citizens. This is an essential text that combines art history, visual studies, gender history, and the history of conflict to examine, in depth, the impact of the Second World War on the lives of British women.
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Lucy D. Curzon is professor of art history at the University of Alabama
