Guilty women, foreign policy, and appeasement with Professor Julie Gottlieb

War Studies

Did British men and women react in the same way to the imminence of the Second World War? How did women feel about the Munich agreement - the notorious false dawn of ‘peace in our time’? Since they had been given the vote in 1928, women’s political power and influence was a matter of concern, coinciding in the 1930s with the deepening anxieties about the potential and increasing probability of another world war. In this episode we talk to Professor Julie Gottlieb, historian of modern British political history, including women's history and gender studies, from the University of Sheffield, about her book Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain. Casting new light on the gendered representation of appeasement, it looks at the so-called ‘woman’s peace’ – the perception that women were behind the push for appeasement and that their emancipation through the vote had “sown the seeds of national decline”. We discuss whether there’s any truth behind these claims as well as how the rhetoric of women’s pacifist movements in the late 1930s started to blur uncomfortably with that of anti-war Nazi-sympathising women on the far right. We also take a look at the turn to international affairs in feminist politics between the wars, and the extent to which it reveals how British women were deeply invested in foreign policy and diplomacy at the time.