What did your granny do in the war?

national | miscellaneous | press release Thursday November 13, 2003 14:02 by Mary Muldowney - TCD History Department muldownm at tcd dot ie 087 798 8330

Introductions needed to women who travelled from Northern Ireland to work in the U.K. during the Second World War.

I’m completing a Ph.D. thesis on the impact of the Second World War on women in Dublin and Belfast using oral history interviews as the basis for my research. These interviews are with so-called ‘ordinary women’, whose experiences have generally been omitted from the writing of history. Until relatively recently, the gender division of social roles had a largely negative impact on the writing of history because it contributed to the invisibility of women, who were not considered to have played a significant part in the shaping of events. This was especially true of women who worked outside their homes, because the workplace was designated as a masculine sphere in which class issues were defined by the perception of the male worker as breadwinner.

One chapter in my thesis is about women who went to work in the U.K. during the war years for various reasons, including the fact that there were better employment opportunities there. I have already interviewed several Dublin women who did this and I would like to interview some Belfast women, to compare their reasons for going and their experiences.

If anybody out there has a female relative who went from Belfast (or anywhere in Northern Ireland) to work anywhere in the U.K. during the Second World War, I’d be really grateful if you could persuade them to talk to me. I’ll travel to wherever they live and the interview can be as long or as short as they wish. Unfortunately, I cannot submit my thesis without completing this chapter, so there is some urgency attached to this request. I can be contacted by email at muldownm@tcd.ie and any help you can give will be acknowledged.