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You Can Help Your Country: English Children's Work during the Second World War. By Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow. London: Institute of Education, 2011. xvii + 310 pp. $42.95 paper.
You Can Help Your Country examines an important and overlooked part of English children's lives during World War II: their work and contribution to the war effort. Complementing other histories of British children during WWII, which tend to focus almost exclusively on evacuation, Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow concentrate instead on the ways all children were urged to help with the war effort. They contemplate children's agency as well as how childhood was understood in markedly different ways than it is today. In addition to elucidating the ways the young were imagined as citizens who were expected to help with the war effort, their book charts the ways children were increasingly viewed as "learners not earners." Indeed, Mayall and Morrow reveal how the war years helped consolidate the "scholarisation" of childhood: "the tendency to value childhoods only in so far as they are specifically childhoods spent under adult tutelage in schools" (pp. 13-14). Their book thus documents a fascinating and intertwined history: children's significant contribution to the workforce and war effort during WWII alongside the growing shiftin imagining children as exclusively schoolchildren.
After laying out the book's themes within social policy, history, and sociology, Mayall and Morrow examine the early twentieth-century, interwar, and WWII history of children's work and education in Britain. For example, they look back to the president of the...