Dear Laughing Motorbyke: Letters from Women Welders of the Second World War

Valentine Morche trained as an artist and worked in advertising during the 1930s, but at the beginning of World War II she helped the cause by taking up her father's occupation as a welder. She commanded the skill of welding easily and soon began to teach other women. Valentine was also a contributor to the Mass Observation Archive and at the end of the war, along with her diary included a collection of letters from the women she had trained. Written over the summer of 1942, these letters not only record the realities of war work, relationships between families and friends, and the experiences of wartime courtship, but they give an insight into the larger social patterns of their time. Margaretta Jolly draws out their significance for debates about the effect of the war on women's lives, controversies over war-work liberated women, class barriers and sexuality. She argues that working-class women were not only more literate than expected but that they used letters as a popular and private form of creativity.