Imagining Home: Gender, `Race' and National Identity, 1945-64.

Behar, Joseph ; Colwill, Elizabeth

Imagining Home: Gender, `Race' and National Identity, 1945-64, by Wendy Webster. Preston, England, University of Central Lancashire Press, 1998. xxiv, 185 pp. $19.95 U.S.

In April, 1948 the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, addressing a conference of women's organizations on the integration of European migrants into British society, proclaimed that "the British way of life is not found in Hansard nor in newspapers, it is found in our homes." Her words reflected an ongoing change in the definition of Britishness that had as much to do with decolonization as with domesticity. British identity, once defined by conquest and paternal rule overbenighted (and dark-skinned) heathens, came to be defined, in a period of imperial decline, by the "English way of life," by the feminine sphere of (to quote Chris Waters) "home and hearth rather than sword and sceptre." In recent decades British historians have thus turned their gaze toward the domestic sphere, for clues to the nature of British identity. This has made for some interesting historiography. For one thing source material has diversified, encompassing materials such as school textbooks, oral testimony, literature, and film. For another, theoretical and interdisciplinary work has connected the embrace of domesticity in the postwar period with phenomena such as "race relations" and feminism. Wendy Webster's Imagining Home: Gender, `Race' and National Identity, 1945-64, which sets out to look at "ideas and images of home in Britain in the period 1945-64 and their significance in constructions of gender, race and nation"(p. ix) thus treads in a somewhat worn but still fascinating path.

Webster attempts to deconstruct the interstices between class, race, and gender in this period. Home, she argues, meant different things for indigenous women than for colonial or European migrant women, and for working-class as opposed to middle-class women. She also focuses on women who were "mothers rather than daughters" in this period, claiming rightly that they have been under-represented. She offers five moderately brisk chapters in exposition of these themes, looking in turn at the restrictive implications of domestic myth-making on indigenous women, indigenous men, male colonial migrants of colour, female colonial migrants of colour, and female European migrants.

Webster uses a variety of interesting sources. Oral testimony features prominently throughout the book. These snippets, rarely more than a paragraph or two long, can be quite evocative, as when a West Indian migrant tells of her shame at having to take menial work upon first arriving in the U.K., and the difficulty of finding decent housing in the face of racial discrimination. It is always illuminating to hear such firsthand accounts, and the cameos quoted here, though by now more familiar and therefore less revelatory, still resonate with nuance and authenticity.

As intriguing is Webster's analysis of film and literature. National cinema, in particular, has become a popular historical archive in the last few years, and she dives into it with fairly positive results. Her analysis of race relations in such films as "Flame in the Streets," or "Simba" for example, bring out fascinating points about the portrayal of white women and black men in 1950s and 1960s British celluloid.

The bibliography and notes are strong, and offer useful entries into the extant literature on gender and national identity. The theory offered in the introduction and in the first few chapters reflects the state of these fields as well, right down to the awkward jargon which has become their calling card; there is the usual minefield of lingo to negotiate -- "foregrounding" and "constructing within situational contexts." The writing is strongest where Ms. Webster discusses actual case studies, as she did in her first and only other book, published in 1990, on the career of Margaret Thatcher. There she visited many of the same themes she looks at in this book, particularly the ambiguity of women's position in the 1950s and 1960s: on the one hand, the welfare state made it easier for women to raise children while pursuing a career; on the other hand, social mores trapped women in domestic roles.

With Mrs. Thatcher, Webster was dealing with a white woman in a privileged position. Interestingly, though she purports to broaden her scope in this book, her most in-depth analysis in Imagining Home is also reserved for white indigenous women. Black women in the 1950s, she claims, were invisible because they did not fit easily into the domestic, procreative role envisaged for white women. Alas, in this book the experience of black women is also under-represented, perhaps (but surely not?) because of a dearth of sources.

Imagining Home is a useful introduction to gender and national identity issues in the postwar period. If Wendy Webster does not meet all of the goals she sets in the introduction, she nonetheless wrestles with questions of class, race, and domesticity that are not only current, but important.

Joseph Behar

Mt. Allison University