'Social Agency and Women's Internment Experience during the Second World War: A Case Study of Rushen Camp on the Isle of Man, 1940-1945
Date(s): 2005
Creator(s): Sheard, Grainney
Scope & Content: BA dissertation submitted to the University of Edinburgh in which the author considers the profile of Rushen Camp using past internees' accounts. She offers a general overview of the ways the camp was gendered in its organisation and administration compared to men's camps and analyses the extent to which women's experiences were determined by a complex range of factors including gender, class, age, race, nationality, politics, religion and marital status. The internees' perspective includes disputes between internees resulting from inappropriate living arrangements. Chapter three aims to demonstrate how the personal attitude toward coping with internment conributed to a highly personal experience, revealing 'the diversity of women's responses and the ways in which they took control over their powerless status as interned 'enemy aliens'. Examples of collective social agency as well as individual personal autonomy account for the ways in which these women took charge of their wartime internment in order to determine an experience on their own terms.' (page 15). The writer examines the ways in which women did or did not cope with the vast array of difficulties and hardships and considers how internees took charge of their billeting arrangements, internee representation, the service exchange (the emergencey of a camp economy) and education within the camp. An appendix of location plans for Rushen Camp, 1940-1945 and a bibliography are included.
Language: English
Extent: 55 pages
Item name: dissertation
Collection: Manuscript Archive
Level: ITEM
ID number: MS 14234
Record class: Private
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