Abstract
In 2005, as part of the sixtieth anniversary of the conclusion of the war, a memorial to the British women of World War II was unveiled in London’s Whitehall (see Figure 13.1). Every aspect of this memorial was controversial. As ‘the most public component of the material culture of war remembrance’ (Moriarty, 1997, p. 655) war memorials represent conflict in the context of – or even in the service of – peace. Memorials create interfaces between the public and the private, between the present and the past. There is a dynamic interplay between time periods which meet through the commemoration of an event, the design chosen, through the date of the conception and execution and the responses provoked. The heated debates this memorial provoked reveal the potential for tension between diverse communities of remembrance and the depth of personal investment in these symbols. The invocations of popular constructions of the meaning of the war by critics and advocates of the memorial also attest to the power of these constructions.
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© 2012 Corinna Peniston-Bird
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Peniston-Bird, C. (2012). War and Peace in the Cloakroom: The Controversy over the Memorial to the Women of World War II. In: Gibson, S., Mollan, S. (eds) Representations of Peace and Conflict. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292254_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292254_14
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