Women's correspondence offers evidence of social change after service in France

John Bull recalls a doctoral study of letters exchanged among wives and girlfriends before and after their partners' service in France. Its evidence came from preserved friendship networks, rather than only letters between soldiers and their partners. Such collections were difficult to reconstruct because women's informal correspondence had often not been considered worth keeping. He reports that the letters showed changes in intimate relationships after the men's return and connects those experiences with wider American social change in the 1920s. He also mentions the relevance of close contact between servicemen to LGBTQ history. The researcher and paper are not identified in the conversation, so this remains his account of the research and its interpretation.