A Million Forgotten Women: Voluntarism, Citizenship, and the Women’s Voluntary Services in Second World War Britain

This thesis examines the ways in which female civilian volunteering was imagined and experienced in Second World War Britain, and how it has been remembered since. Focusing on the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS), it develops the existing historical literature in two important ways. First, this study addresses a long-standing omission in the historiography of the Second World War by exploring the story of the WVS in detail within the context of war, gender, and citizenship. Moving beyond reductive interpretations that focus on welfare and social control alone, this thesis challenges current thinking on the place and significance of female volunteers and emphasises their centrality to our understanding of the ‘people’s war’. Second, this thesis develops a new perspective by foregrounding the voices of volunteers themselves, and placing personal narratives – including diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories – at the heart of the analysis. It interrogates the ways in which ordinary members of the WVS exercised individual agency to embrace, adapt, resist, and reject various duties of wartime citizenship, shaping and reshaping what citizenship meant from the bottom up.

The following analysis makes three significant contributions to the field. Firstly, studying volunteers demonstrates the need for more nuanced and inclusive definitions of ‘service’ and ‘war work’ that account for the broad range of ways that women participate in total war. Secondly, volunteers complicate dominant historiographical narratives about contested wartime femininities, by revealing a version of wartime citizenship that was deeply rooted in an idealised, ‘traditional’, and domestic conception of femininity. Finally, centring volunteers’ voices emphasises the subjective and relational nature of citizenship, adding to historiographical debates on discourse and experience by showing the necessity of exploring citizenship from an individual perspective. Together these arguments reshape our understanding of what it meant to be a volunteer, a citizen, and a woman in Second World War Britain.