`Good´ Mothers: Woman´s Life Writing of World War II

This project explores the notion of the `good` mother in auto/biographies of World War II by women on both sides of the Atlantic. Studying narratives published in English and German by women in nations on both sides of the Atlantic, and of the ideological divide (Austria, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States), the project seeks to complicate existing conceptions and readings of wartime motherhood. Notions of maternal goodness and good mothering are emotionally, culturally, and politically freighted at any time. In times of war they move to the centre of discourse and collective awareness: understandings of what constitutes a good mother are revised to fit the wartime context, and maternity is put in the service of both war and peace to exemplify particular national virtues (cheerfulness, serenity, steadfastness, thrift). In addition, later created historical meanings, including of wartime gendered experience, necessarily rely on personal memory and narrative, making such meanings contingent and unstable. "`Good` Mothers" is situated at the complex intersection of memory, narrative, gender, and ethics. It places these concepts in a single analytic frame to probe the maternal figure while reading women`s war stories against a politics of memory deeply implicated in the narrated identity. Such an approach attends to the contemporary context of narration and the (re)shaping of memory by its politicizing as a source of authority and identification but also as a site of struggle. Working with a definition of life writing that encompasses autobiography as well as biography, the project selectively examines a range of writings published during more than seven decades and reaching into the present, from accounts by `bomb girls` and `land girls` to stories by pacifist mothers and to intergenerational postmemory narratives by intensely invested (imagined) daughters. The project probes the histories and identities constructed as well as their moral entailments. "`Good` Mothers" takes the form of a multidisciplinary and comparative literary and cultural study. An intercultural comparative approach sheds light on the similarities and differences between (re)constructions of mothers` wartime experiences and identities as well as between the contexts of narration. Such an approach considers `women` not as a static and essentialized category but as differently constituted under different social and cultural conditions; it thus expands and blurs the boundaries between models and stories of motherhood. Along with women`s memory and postmemory narratives, the project also makes use of historical studies and cultural products (pamphlets, magazine advertisements, film, and posters), not only to fill in the historical context but also to undermine the false separation of discourse and experience.