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Imagining Home: gender, `race' and national identity, 1945-1964 WENDY WEBSTER, 1998 London, UCL Press 240 pp., 45/$19.95 hardback, ;E12.95/$19.95 paperback ISBN 1-85728-350-3 hardback, 1-85728-351-1 paperback
As a child born to immigrant parents from the West Indies in the period reviewed by Wendy Webster, I read this book with much anticipation. I hoped in particular to gain a greater understanding of the context and conditions that shaped my mother's understanding and relationship to home. In Imagining Home, I found an exceptionally clear and well-written account of the gendered and raced nature of popular constructions of home in Britain during the period 1945-64. Drawing on government documents, film and oral narratives, Webster explores how the notion of the ideal home became centrally tied to women's labor within the private sphere, and the way the women sought to appropriate and resist these assigned roles. Drawing upon the twin discourses of family well-being and national identity, she documents the dilemmas faced by the British government in the 1950s in its need for women's productive labor in the public sphere and its need for their reproductive labor in the private sphere for family re-creation. Much of this ambiguity was resolved through the immigration and recruitment of black women to low-paying feminized jobs in the public sphere.
Looking closely at the discourse of nationhood and belonging, Webster problematizes the position that black women immigrants from the West Indies faced in this period of reconstruction. Branded as immigrants of unsuitable `human stock' (p. 34), most were recruited for their labor, with little or no provisions made for their familial or domestic needs. Webster argues that the discourse of racial...