‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain

For more than 75 years the historiographical debate surrounding the appeasement policy of the 1930s has centred upon the notorious 1940 publication Guilty Men, in which a trio of left-leaning British journalists unleashed a vitriolic polemic castigating those men responsible for leading a hopelessly ill-prepared Britain into a catastrophic war. Thereafter the contours of the historiography are well known. The ‘orthodox’ interpretation ushered in by Cato’s Guilty Men and reinforced by early post-war accounts (notably Churchill’s The Gathering Storm) held sway until the mid-1960s, when the opening of archives dovetailed with disciplinary and temporal factors to facilitate a ‘revisionist’ defence of Neville Chamberlain and his fellow appeasers that accentuated structural constraints rather than individual culpability. Subsequent developments have included efforts to formulate a post-revisionist synthesis, a counter-revisionist rehabilitation of the orthodoxy (restoring the primacy of individual agency over structure), and most recently a revival of revisionist defences of the ‘guilty men’. Cross-disciplinary analyses of the 1930s have flourished too, political scientists, international relations scholars, psychologists, and many others finding the paradigm of 1930s British appeasement a fertile ground for inquiry. Beyond the academy the appeasement analogy retains its lustre, contemporary villains routinely equated with Adolf Hitler and any perceived appeasers tarnished with the ‘guilty men’ brush. In short, appeasement remains a subject of endless scholarly and popular interest.