Appearance, citizenship and clothing controls in Britain, 1939-1951

Appearance was central to the cultural construction and the social interpretation of citizenship in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It played a vital role in judging the traits that characterized the good citizen – decency, respectability and adherence to the law – traits that made citizens who possessed them into desirable members of the national community. Citizens who had a respectable appearance were deemed to hold certain moral values and were judged to be good citizens. Historiographical discussions of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain have thus far overlooked the part that dress and appearance played in its construction, largely due to the immediacy of judgements of appearance, which make them difficult to observe in historical records of everyday life. The Second World War and the reconstruction period that followed it, particularly during the decade between 1939 and 1949, provide a unique opportunity to examine the role appearances played in understandings of citizenship. During this period, the introduction of clothing controls temporarily imposed new meaning on appearance, bringing to the fore existing social, cultural and political interpretations of it. Examining the ways citizens discussed the relationship between citizenship, appearances and the state during this time illuminates the ways appearances were used to judge civic conduct during, before and after the period of controls and opens up new avenues for understanding the ways citizens thought about citizenship in relation to themselves and others. This thesis takes a case study approach, focusing on civic interpretations of appearance in three specific populations and analysing the ways they negotiated new and old meanings of appearance in the context of their relationship with society and the state.