Happy Families?

This chapter explores the tremendous impact of refugee camps on family life. These camps served as spaces to experiment with broader definitions of “family,” while still tying certain forms of aid to traditional norms of sexual morality. Camp authorities used politics of family separation and reunification to intervene in the emotional lives of refugees, and refugees deployed British stereotypes about gender and family to their own ends. This chapter looks at how “single” refugees were disadvantaged with regard to housing, and the efforts of Ugandan Asian wives to gain entry to Britain for their “stateless” husbands. We can see both tremendous intrusions into the intimate lives of refugees, and fierce resistance to these interventions. The experience of encampment is part of the larger story of the reconstruction of family life in twentieth-century Britain.