Dr. Conekin's essay gives a good example of how the war divided people's lives into the 'before and after' of pleasures and guilt. Unlike WWI, where nobody won and most everyone was killed, and all of Europe ended up ashamed, the stark moral issues of WWII required individuals to figure out what had to change now and for them. Women like Lee Miller--who had experienced the war at the front -- and women who got nowhere near it -- were alike being counted (at least among themselves) as moral agents. I think Conekin is absolutely right to make this point in the case of MIller.
But I also think that Miller's post-war life as Conekin and her witnesses attest, is about the problems of being a beautiful woman who grows old: the anecdotes of her getting fat and losing her hair sound like symptoms of menopause: there was no HRT therapy around then. The comments by those around her remind me of the fate of her contemporary Barbara Skelton, who had started out as a model for Schiaparelli and became one of the central figures who wrote for and edited Cyril Connelley's important journal, HORIZON, all the while choosing husbands and lovers from Fitzrovia and beyond (she figured as the temptress Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME). Skelton's brilliantly hilarious two-volume autobiography details her frustration and surprise at becoming an older woman whose former lovers were now loving women decades younger than Skelton herself. In her case, some of her rebellion against age took the form of her satirical writing about the coterie in which she had been the Femme Fatale.
Certainly Skelton was furious at being deprived of the kind of sex life that she, like many others who had been known for their beauty and seductiveness, had considered to be part of who they were. But that fury doesn't speak its name -- in Skelton's case, it was called alcoholism.
Great essay -- lets learn more about how women deal with sex and appearance all the way through their lives, and about how War changes everything.
