| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Penny Summerfield. Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. New York: Manchester University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 338. Cloth $79.95, paper $29.95.

Penny Summerfield's book is "must" reading for scholars who analyze first-person narratives, those interested in the construction of historical memory, and those particularly concerned with the history of British women in World War II. It grew out of Summerfield's own dissonance-producing experience, which she sometime later reinterpreted, having encountered particular new theoretical approaches in feminist analysis. In the late 1970s, she gave a talk to an adult education group emphasizing women's detachment from the war effort, the "continuity of expectations regarding their . . . relationships with men," and the centrality of home versus work (p. 2). She was confronted by two angry members of the audience whose personal experience contradicted her depiction of women's subjective responses to the war. As a consequence, she resolved not to attempt to "interpret women's wartime 'consciousness' directly" (p. 3). 1

But Summerfield's engagement some years later with poststructuralism led her to see how she could use oral histories to investigate subjectivities. She became convinced that past experience is always reconstructed in terms of the discursive possibilities that have been available. Furthermore, subjectivities are not totally constituted or unified through a single discourse. Rather, there are competing discursive possibilities that are always available. Additionally, Summerfield turned to theories about the construction of popular memory and argued that in reconstructing their lives, people compose stories about themselves, smoothing out contradictory and fractured discourses in relation to an audience. . . .

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