| Title | 15. Danny Told Me a Thing or Two |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Alison Twells(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0461.15 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0461/chapters/10.11647/obp.0461.15 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Alison Twells |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-11-10 |
| Long abstract | Chapter 15: Danny Told Me a Thing or Two, opens with Norah’s diary accounts of Danny’s visits in January and April 1943 and explores her evident sexual ignorance and conflicts of respectability and desire. I discuss attitudes to sexuality with which she will have grown up, which emphasise women as sexless and men as having uncontrollable desires. I use other women’s diaries – the published Mass Observation writers, Jean Lucey Pratt, Olivia Crockett and Doreen Bates -- to explore the struggle to cast off modesty and shame. I examine the argument that attitudes to sex were liberalising in the 1940s, and the ways in which this was countered in the women’s magazines that Norah read. Norah’s friend Connie clearly had a sense of Norah’s ignorance and vulnerability when she gave Norah a book on birth control. |
| Page range | pp. 161–168 |
| Print length | 8 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Alison Twells is Professor of Social and Cultural History at Sheffield Hallam University. A widely published scholar, her work primarily explores 19th-century local and global history, with a focus on empire, antislavery and missions, and C19th and C20th women’s life-writing. Her academic publications include The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas, 1792-1850 (Palgrave, 2009) and Women in Transnational History: Gendering the Local and the Global (Routledge, 2016)), and numerous articles and book chapters. Her recent publications include contributions to History Workshop Journal, The Historical Journal, and Women’s History Review, focusing on creative historical methods, servicemen’s letters and wartime intimacy, and explorations of emotion in ordinary pocket diaries. Always uneasy with academics writing only for each other, Alison is actively engaged in public and creative history initiatives. She has been a pioneer in developing community-facing history in UK universities and has written resources for history education in schools and a city walk about the life in late-C19th Sheffield of activist Edward Carpenter. She has talked about Norah, writing working-class lives, and history, fiction and life-writing, at various events. See www.alisontwells.com