A search on eBay for the term ‘land girl dress’ returns more than ten pages of results. Some are fancy dress costumes, but the majority are 1940s/1950s vintage-style tea dresses (eBay.co.uk 2019). The dresses are generally made from floral or polka dot fabric and are modelled by women wearing their hair in ‘victory rolls.’ None, not even the fancy dress costumes, bear any resemblance to the actual land girl uniform and most, other than their generic ‘vintage’ aesthetic, have only a slight resemblance to authentic dresses from the period.
Therefore, the term ‘land girl’ and its associated imagery has enough cultural purchase that eBay sellers use both to assist with the sale of an item. This is at least the case in the UK market, although, given that eBay is an international company, the impact may also be further afield. It matters little that the dresses are not ‘authentic’ in terms of the fashion of the period or that they do not replicate the land girls’ uniform as evidenced in surviving photographs. This suggests that the sellers are tapping into a popular perception of the land girl rather than a strictly historical one.
Images of the Second World War are ubiquitous throughout British culture, particularly in film and television, and women feature strongly in such imagery. However, the Women’s Land Army (WLA), of which land girls were members, is a relatively unknown and little-celebrated body in ‘official’ histories, images and documentation. For instance, it was only in 2008 that veterans of the WLA were invited to participate in remembrance events at the Cenotaph in London. Conversely, there have been several significant representations of land girls in popular culture. In Went the Day Well (Cavalcanti, 1942), produced by Ealing in co-operation with the Ministry of Information , two land girls assist with the retaking of a small English village occupied by German soldiers. ITV’s situation comedy Backs to the Land (1977–1978) followed a group of land girls working for a lecherous farmer. In 1998, David Leyland directed The Land Girls starring Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel. In 2004, an episode of the long-running British detective series Foyle’s War (ITV 2002–2015) centred on the murder of a farmer in Hastings in which three land girls were suspects. Finally, the BBC released Land Girls (2009–2011), which followed the lives of a group of WLA recruits living and working on a manor farm.1
Therefore, despite the relative lack of historiographical information concerning the WLA, a popular image of it, and specifically its members, has built up in mainstream media representations . Such media representations are consequently a primary site from which the public gains information and understanding about the land girls: who they were, what they did, and how they looked and dressed. Despite any historical inaccuracies or divergences, these representations therefore become important sources for the generation of historical ‘knowledge’ and, as such, must be interrogated and understood.
As products of the contemporary moment, television drama, a primary site of engagement with representations of the Second World War, is shaped and inflected by the ideological needs of that moment. Specifically, as all of the texts considered here were created either in 2009 or later, they are products of the period immediately following the 2008 financial crash, a period which led to fears ‘of broad male economic obsolescence and questions regarding long held assumptions regarding men, women and gendered work’ (Negra and Tasker 2013: 346). The 70th Anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War was also marked in 2009, meaning that all of the series listed above were produced in a cultural moment that was geared towards public remembrance and heightened nostalgia . They are also inflected by the prevailing postfeminist media climate that has enjoyed a hegemonic position since the 1990s and is in turn indelibly linked to what Fredric Jameson has described as ‘late capitalism,’ a concept that we now tend to describe as neoliberalism (1991). Rosalind Gill (2007) has suggested that this amounts to a pervasive postfeminist sensibility, which encourages us to believe that political struggle is located in the past and that there is no need to imagine alternative ways of being.
Rather than occupying a codified and discrete ideological position, postfeminism is constituted and (loosely) defined in media products that reveal its characteristics. For the majority of people, as with conceptions of female participation in the Second World War outside of the academy, the primary site of engagement with feminism and postfeminism is in such media texts. Indeed, the ubiquity of postfeminist norms and characteristics in dramas depicting female participation in the Second World War, and women’s history more generally, contributes to their naturalisation and dehistoricisation . Rather than a product of a specific and recent political moment, postfeminist values are thereby eternalised as an essential aspect of normative femininity.
In the case of both postfeminism and women’s history, then, television is a central source of the construction and consumption of meaning. As a domestic medium that has long been associated with the feminine, television presents unique opportunities for analysis. Considerable work has been carried out on war films and their depiction of women.2 However, little attention has been paid to similar depictions on television. Similarly, substantial research has been carried out on postfeminist television but very little on postfeminist television set in the past.3 This book therefore addresses a gap at the intersection of scholarship regarding television, postfeminism and women’s history, and draws conclusions as to the productive potential of that intersection. It will identify and deconstruct postfeminist norms within four drama series produced after 2008, Land Girls (BBC 2009–2011), The Bletchley Circle (ITV 2012–2018), Marvel’s Agent Carter (ABC 2015–2016) and Home Fires (ITV 2015–2016). It will demonstrate the inadequacy of postfeminist discourses of ‘empowerment’ through personal choice rather than political struggle and discuss the culpability of these discourses, and the television dramas in which they are constituted, in the perpetuation of systemic inequality and patriarchal oppression.
Establishing Relations
In order to establish the theoretical framework that underpins the following analysis, it is necessary to understand the relationships and productive tensions that exist between feminism and postfeminism, and history and memory. In studying postfeminism, its amorphousness quickly emerges as its defining feature.4 Postfeminism as a concept is unknowable in terms of a comprehensive and exhaustive definition, rather it becomes apparent in cultural artefacts that are identifiable as postfeminist or as having a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill 2007). Academic interactions with postfeminism have largely consisted of critical engagements with second wave feminism to expose perceived limitations, or critical dissections of the results of these engagements and their implications for broader feminist and gender discourses (Brooks 1997). Susan Faludi’s 1991 monograph, Backlash, on the other hand, envisions postfeminism as a retaliation...