March 05, 2018

5 March 1918 - Sylvia Graham (Season 13 start)

11 minutes

On this day in 1918, the post office stated in the Times that it accepted no liability for post lost due to enemy action, and in Folkestone, Sylvia receives a letter from her son.

Written by Sarah Daniels

Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Notes

By 1918, some of the inevitable consequences of creating a large, paid, female workforce, and relying more than ever on educated women to run organisations supporting the war, were beginning to scare the establishment horses. Women were too free, and their freedom was too dangerous. Creating an impossible ideal of womanhood, and then attacking all other women for their immorality (read freedom) was a means of control then, and hasn't entirely died out.

And hand in hand with praise for women's femininity came the other side of the coin - a celebration of purely masculine men, with an inevitable condemnation of any femininity in men.

Season Thirteen of Home Front - A Woman's Place - is set back in Folkestone, which feels overrun with women, and where anxious pillars of the establishment are flustered by the proximity of all these women to all these men.

Women themselves are emboldened politically by the recent introduction of female suffrage, and suppressed in turn by various measures - including the draconian DORA 40D amendment empowering the police to detain and examine women suspected of giving venereal disease to members of His Majesty's Forces.

The action of Season 13 revolves around three households - Meadowthorpe (a utopian female household), The Old Rectory (a brothel) and Keepers Lodge (a home for unmarried mothers) - which are popularly taken to be much of a muchness.

Season 13 is story-led by Sarah Daniels, with episodes by Sarah, Lucy Catherine and Katie Hims.

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By BBC Radio 4

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