The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives. The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a selection from the Mass-Observation archive which offers unique insights into cinema-going trends, particularly in the years of the Second World War. This is a great reference work on the role of the cinema in national morale and other social effects during the war years with details of people's behaviour at the cinema and their opinions of the films and the newsreels they saw at the movies.

The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives. The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a selection from the Mass-Observation archive which offers unique insights into cinema-going trends, particularly in the years of the Second World War. This is a great reference work on the role of the cinema in national morale and other social effects during the war years with details of people's behaviour at the cinema and their opinions of the films and the newsreels they saw at the movies.

A unique document offering unrivalled insight into women's minds and lives during the Second World War. The Mass-Observation organisation was set up in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life in Britain. Dorothy Sheridan has plundered its astonishingly rich archives to put together this anthology of women's experience in the Second World War. What was this experience? How far did it go to liberate women? Was it the opportunity that so many expected or was it simply six years of deprivation, hard work and pain? WARTIME WOMEN allows us to explore these questions through the writings of women living through the war years. Dorothy Sheridan has chosen extracts from the whole range of Mass-Observation material including research reports, letters, dairies and detailed questionnaires. The range of contributors is enormous from a fish and chip shop worker in Birmingham to Irish immigrant munitions factory workers, young women welders in Yorkshire and a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Essex. 'My horror of all this war business is qualified by an eagerness to be a unit of it. I feel as if I have been waiting for this all my life and I have just realised it' A young woman writing in her diary in September, 1939.