Claire A. Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 240 pp. $55.00 cloth

Extract

Claire Culleton's study of working-class women in First World War Britain is an ambitious project that aims at a “comprehensive analysis of the complexities that conspired to link women's lives, their work, and their writings” (8). The book is positioned as a study that redresses what Culleton views as the marginalization of working-class women's experience in historical and literary studies of the period. She attempts, therefore, to write a history “from below” that provides both historical analysis of the experience of working-class women who labored in Britain's wartime industries, and an analysis of their culture, as revealed through the 1970s oral history testimonies of the Imperial War Museum and the literature they produced for factory newspapers. She states that she will tie this experience and its “costs” to changes in British society that “no longer permit[ed] sentimentality of hearth and home ( . . . )” (2). Culleton notes that the book is aimed at specialists on the subject and general readers. The analysis presented in the book, however, falls short of the author's stated goals and adds little to the existing scholarship on working-class women in First World War Britain.