Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first scholarly history of the
British working class in the Second World War. It integrates
social, political, and labour history, and reflects the most recent
scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of
identities. Geoffrey G. Field examines the war's impact on workers
in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the
workplace, local communities, and the nation. Previous studies of
the Home Front have analysed the lives of civilians, but they have
neglected the importance of social class in defining popular
experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy,
and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view
the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of
social unity in Britain, Field argues that the 1940s was a crucial
decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar
decades was "remade," achieving new collective status, power, and
solidarity. He criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has
downplayed the significance of class in British society.
Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and
letters, the records of trade unions, and numerous other
institutions, Blood, Sweat, and Toil traces the rapid growth of
trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war
years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories
and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into
the army, showing how these experiences shaped their social
attitudes and aspirations. Using opinion polls and other evidence,
Field traces the evolution of popular political attitudes from the
evacuation of 1939 and the desperate months of late 1940 to the
election of 1945, opposing recent claims that the electorate was
indifferent or apathetic at the war's end but also eschewing
blanket assumptions about popular radicalization. Labour was an
active agent in fashioning itself as both a national progressive
party and the representative of working-class interests in 1945;
far from a mere passive beneficiary of anti-Tory feeling, it gave
organizational form to the idealism and the demand for significant
change that the war had generated.
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