Civvies explores the experiences of middle-class men on the English home
front during the First World War. Although the conflict continues to
attract enormous interest, most attention remains focused on the
experiences of servicemen, rather than the majority of adult men who
were not enlisted into the armed forces: we still know very little about
those men who spent the war years on the home front. This book thus
focuses on those middle-class English men who did not join the armed
forces not because of moral or political objections to war, but for a
variety of other (much more common) reasons, notably exemption, age,
family responsibilities or physical unfitness, questioning whether and
to what extent practices, relationships and identities were disrupted by
the experiences of war on the home front.
Civvies focuses on four inter-linked areas that were central to most
English middle-class men's lives, and where the challenges of war on the
home front forced middle-class men to rethink conventional
understandings of appropriate, 'manly' conduct: the war effort, work,
family and relationships, and consumption and leisure. The ways in which
middle-class men navigated their way through these areas of life and
negotiated the pressures and hardships of war on the home front, as well
as their shifting relationships with 'others', either combatants or
civilians, are all considered.
Overall, this book questions whether, at a time when strong links were
forged between manliness and military service, middle-class civilian men
found themselves automatically condemned to 'unmanly' status, or did
they develop alternative ways of being 'manly' civilians?
