4 - Defending Our Way of Life: Gender, Class, Age, and Other Oppressions

Summary

Second World War propaganda frequently claimed that the war was going to defend a ‘way of life’, but this was steeped in values that most people reject today. Mobilisation efforts were organised along the lines of institutionalised gender-, class-, and age-related oppression. Curiously, these divisions were almost exactly the same in both Britain and Japan, despite the fact that the countries were at war and were claimed to be culturally irreconcilable. When analysing the war experience along its social and economic lines, it is clear that the strongest divisions were not international, but internal. That is why wartime states must, in every context, preach the evangel of national unity in spite of the fact that workers, young people, and women in Japan had more in common with their counterparts in Britain and around the world, than they did their countrymen back home.