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Peter R. Mansoor and Williamson Murray (eds), The Culture of Military Organizations

they had no financial need to work. McCarthy thus rejects stale debates over whether work is inherently ‘liberating’ for women, or whether women have a timeless ‘maternal instinct’ that draws them back to the home, insisting that what we should be interested in are the material conditions and the gendered ideologies which govern women’s work, and the lived experiences they produce. While attentive to the differences between different social classes throughout, the decision to focus on the working lives of women of colour predominantly in a separate chapter – ‘Newcomers’, which examines the experiences of migrants from the new Commonwealth, Ireland, Poland and elsewhere in the postwar period – means that issues of race and racism are concentrated in this chapter. It would have been interesting to hear more about women of colour before 1948 – slim though the sources might be – and, indeed, to investigate more fully the experiences of Irish migrants in the nineteenth century and in the Great War when, as McCarthy notes, many women came from Ireland and elsewhere in the Commonwealth to work in the munitions factories. This is a small criticism, however, of a book which so deftly weaves together the economic context with social and cultural history. Written for a wide readership, the text is light on explicit references to historiography; nevertheless, McCarthy’s book will be of great interest to those working on women’s and gender history, for its distinctive and important interventions into debates on the causes of the expansion of married women’s paid labour and the link between work and liberation.