You Can Help Your Country
English children’s work during the Second World War
Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow
•April 2011 •£25.99/US$42.95
•PB •329 pages •ISBN 978-0-85473-889-2
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"Another major contribution to the sociology of childhood by two
pioneers in the field."
– Sarane Spence Boocock, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Rutgers
University, USA
Bringing in the harvest. Watching for enemy aircraft. Rescuing
survivors from the wreckage of bombed houses. Keeping the family
business running when parents were enlisted into war-work. These
are just a few examples of how children and young people made
substantial contributions to the war effort during the Second World
War.
You Can Help Your Country: English children’s work during the
Second World War reveals the remarkable, hidden history of children
as social agents who actively participated in a national effort during a
period of crisis. This highly-illustrated volume draws on interviews with
people who were school-age during the war, on archives and on
school histories which recorded wartime activities as well as children’s
accounts of their experiences at the time. Children expressed both
positive and negative views of their work: exhilaration and exhaustion,
pride and resentment, delight in new freedoms and anger at
deprivation.
Applying a sociological approach, the authors outline the social history
of childhood during the first half of the twentieth century, documenting
heated debates about the ‘proper’ activities of children and analysing
the thinking that questioned class-based childhoods and schooling
and promoted better health and better educational opportunities. In
this context, they examine how children responded to appeals to ‘do
their bit’ as urged through government poster campaigns, BBC radio
broadcast programmes for schools, propaganda films and children’s
fiction.
This is a stimulating, entertaining and scholarly contribution to the
history of childhood, which will enable the reader to think about ideas
of childhood today and their rights, as citizens, to participate in the
social and political life of their society. It will be essential reading for
academics, researchers and students in the field of educational
sociology and more widely, and will appeal to anyone with an interest
in social history and war studies.
“In raising questions about the nature of children/childhood, this
is a timely, relevant, and accessibly written book, and is an ideal
text for students in education, history, and sociology.”
– Harry Hendrick, Associate Fellow, University of Warwick
About the authors
Berry Mayall is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Institute of
Education, University of London (IOE). She has worked for many
years on research projects studying the daily lives of children and their
parents. In the last 25 years she has participated in the development
of the sociology of childhood, contributing many books and papers to
this process, including Towards a Sociology of Childhood (Open
University Press, 2002).
Virginia Morrow was Reader in Childhood Studies at the IOE until
2010. She is currently Senior Research Officer in the Department of
International Development, University of Oxford. Her main research
interests are sociology and history of childhood; child labour and
children’s work; children’s rights; methods and ethics of social
research with children; and children’s understandings of family and
other social environments. She is the author of numerous papers and
reports and co-edits Childhood: A journal of global child research.
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