Women and Evacuation
21st April, 14:00 - 16:00
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Assembly Rooms, Chichester
The image of young evacuees standing on railway platforms with gas masks and cardboard suitcases has become iconic — but their stories have overshadowed those of the women whose domestic lives were transformed by the government evacuation scheme. In this talk, Prof Maggie Andrews explores how the care of evacuees became a significant yet unrecognised area of women's war work, and how this unprecedented interference in women's home lives had a lasting impact on ideas of femininity, domesticity and motherhood.