This article challenges historians’ concentration on the self in the interwar years with relation to elite women’s lives. It argues that the focus on the interior self has both diminished the importance of service in constructions of women’s identities between the wars, and overlooked how ideas of service were changing in this period to accommodate new thinking about women’s personal psychological development. The argument is developed in the context of four broader contemporary debates: the redrawing of late-Victorian ideas of goodness, social purpose and happiness by university-educated women in response to women’s professionalization; second-generation suffragists’ critiques of women’s family roles and sex; interwar debates about mass democracy and the ‘voluntary citizen’; and the purpose of women’s voluntary organizations. Readdressing writings by celebrated figures Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Macadam and Maude Royden alongside women who have received less attention — Violet Butler, Lettice Fisher, Grace Hadow, Emily Kinnaird and Christine Jope-Slade — the article examines how educated and elite women recalibrated service in the years after the First World War to emphasize the mutuality of self-fulfilment and community development, not self-sacrifice or the neglect of the self. My focus is on the intellectual, moral and psychological tensions women confronted in this process. The article’s contribution is in its retrieval of service as a vehicle for negotiating competing ideas of the interwar feminine self, in which feminist perspectives on self-reliance and personal initiative were tested by forms of women’s self-expression in conformity with social and spiritual models of companionship and inter-personal encounter.

中文翻译：

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两次世界大战期间英国的女性、服务和自我实现*

这篇文章挑战了历史学家在两次世界大战期间对与精英女性生活相关的自我的关注。它认为，对内在自我的关注既降低了战争期间服务在女性身份建构中的重要性，又忽视了服务观念在这一时期如何变化以适应关于女性个人心理发展的新思维。这一论点是在四项更广泛的当代辩论的背景下发展起来的：受过大学教育的女性为了应对女性的职业化而重新描绘了维多利亚时代晚期的善良、社会目标和幸福观念；第二代女权主义者对女性家庭角色和性别的批判；两次世界大战期间关于大众民主和“自愿公民”的辩论；以及妇女志愿组织的宗旨。重新讨论了著名人物维拉·布里顿、温妮弗雷德·霍尔特比、伊丽莎白·马卡丹和莫德·罗伊登的著作，以及不太受关注的女性——紫罗兰巴特勒、莱蒂斯·费舍尔、格蕾丝·哈多、艾米丽·金奈德和克里斯汀·乔普-斯莱德——这篇文章探讨了受过教育的女性和精英女性如何重新校准第一次世界大战后的服务强调自我实现和社区发展的相互性，而不是自我牺牲或忽视自我。我的重点是女性在这个过程中所面临的智力、道德和心理紧张。这篇文章的贡献在于将服务作为一种工具来协商两次世界大战之间女性自我的竞争思想，