Alison S. Fell

Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War

As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, public commemoration of the war has often been dominated by a focus on the men in the armed forces, who risked or lost their lives for causes that at the time may or may not have seemed heroic, noble or simply unavoidable. The visual spectacle of Paul Cummins’ ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, the art installation at the Tower of London in which 888,246 ceramic poppies filled the moat from 17 July to 11 November 2014, was the most visited artistic response to the war in its centenary years, while Jeremy Deller’s ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, commemorating the first day of the Battle of the Somme, provided a widely seen and moving memorial to the victims.22. ‘We’re here because we’re here’ marked the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Hundreds of volunteers, working with the artist Jeremy Deller, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the National Theatre and 1914–18 NOW, commemorated the centenary by re-enacting as soldiers in cities, towns and the countryside around Britain. First World War soldiers were seen at train stations, shopping centres, beaches, car parks and high streets. This vision of the conflict, focusing exclusively on the combatant dead, should not, however, become the only history of the conflict. There are, as the research brought together here demonstrates, multiple histories of the First World War.

Nurse-Martyr-Heroine: Representations of Edith Cavell in Interwar Britain, France and Belgium

After her 1915 execution in occupied Brussels for her role in organizing an escape network for French and British soldiers, British nurse Edith Cavell became a household name, and her fame as a ‘martyr-heroine’ persisted in the decades following the Armistice. This article compares and contrasts a range of sculptures, monuments and films featuring Edith Cavell that were produced during the interwar years in Britain (and what were then the Dominions), France and Belgium. Whereas existing studies of Edith Cavell have tended to focus on those produced in the Anglophone world, and to argue that she is universally made to embody female martyrdom against a ‘barbarous’ enemy, this article reveals that the different and evolving national and political contexts in which these cultural representations were produced resulted in important variations in the ways in Cavell was depicted.

The republic of men. Gender and the political parties in interwar France

This book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship focusing on the role played by gender in French political discourses in the interwar period. Read studies the gender discourses of French republican political parties on both the left and the right, mining as his primary sources the political press and the speeches and writings of French politicians. Some of the conclusions he reaches are perhaps unsurprising. As he notes in his deft survey of existing scholarship in his introduction, the work of historians such as Laura Frader has already provided ample evidence for the dominance of the ‘breadwinner’ model, in which women are primarily positioned as wives and mothers, across the political spectrum in interwar France. Biological essentialism was rarely challenged in this period—even by campaigners for female suffrage, as Read notes in his final chapter, which summarises the gendered arguments of the proand anti-suffrage camps. However, this study does add something new to existing analyses. It explores the extent to which references to ‘men’ in French political discourses usually meant ‘white men’, and, in turn, the extent to which pronatalist debates about women’s reproductive ‘duty’ as real or potential mothers were frequently tinged with a racialist conception of the nation. He also adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the variations in political gender constructions—of both masculinity and femininity—that did exist in this period. In Chapter 2, for example, he explores the new versions of dominant gender norms in the communist and fascist political press in the wake of the First World War, with both constructing an idealised ‘new man’ who was ‘virile, militaristic, obedient, physically fit, anti-intellectual and potentially violent’ (10). This chapter also focuses on the brief flourishing of a more radical and unconventional ‘new woman’ in the communist press in the early years of the 1920s—an ideal that was to be soon replaced by more traditional formulations in communist parties both within and without France. Throughout the book, building on the work of Siân Reynolds amongst others, Read acknowledges the tensions that existed between the constructed models of femininity that generally positioned women in the home, and the new possibilities of a political or ‘public’ identity that became increasingly available to women within interwar political parties. Chapter 5 is particularly interesting in this regard with its focus on attitudes towards working women and women in politics. As Read notes, the interwar years saw France’s parties and leagues include women as members and support workers ‘in unprecedented numbers’ (145), and this is reflected in the pages of the parties’ publications, despite women’s continued disenfranchisement. Here, as in other chapters, the illustrations from the political press are concise and vivid ways in which to demonstrate the contradiction between politically constructed ideals and the lived experience of female adherents of French political parties. Overall, this is a very readable study that will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists alike, including undergraduate and postgraduate students.

The Colour of War Memory: Cultural Representations of Tirailleurs Sénégalais

This article examines French and francophone cultural representations of the roles played by tirailleurs sénégalais during the First and Second World Wars. It analyses how such representations (produced by authors from both within and outside this group) can be considered as examples of what Max Silverman has defined as ‘palimpsestic memory’, containing traces of the present and the past. Key myths and stereotypes of French African troops have reappeared with relative frequency in images, texts, and films. This article explores the ideological and political purposes to which these representations have been put at different historical moments up to the present.

Introduction: Untold Legacies of the First World War in Britain

Abstract The current centenary of the First World War provides an unrivalled opportunity to uncover some of the social legacies of the war. The four articles which make up this special issue each examine a different facet of the war’s impact on British society to explore an as yet untold story. The subjects investigated include logistics, the history of science, the social history of medicine and resistance to war. This article introduces the four which follow, locating them in the wider historiographic debates around the interface between warfare and societies engaged in war.

Remembering French and British First World War Heroines

Although few are remembered today, the First World War produced scores of heroines who became household names in their respective nations.1 From summer 1914 onwards, both British and French journalists, artists, and writers sought out women who could be constructed as heroic and lauded them in the press, in posters, and in popular fiction. First World War heroines tended to have a double function: firstly, although cast as exceptional, they were equally set up as gendered embodiments of the finest qualities of a ‘race’ or a national identity, as role models to bolster morale and mobilize the nation for the war effort. Secondly, their gender was used to underscore the ‘barbarous’ and ‘uncivilized’ nature of the enemy. It was usually activities on the front line that marked women out for heroine status. This proximity to the front, along with the patriotic and heroic qualities of courage, devotion, selflessness, tenacity, and sang-froid with which they were endowed, meant that heroines were often discussed in terms normally reserved for male combatants.

Kitty's War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton.

and a record of a certain way of analysing Aboriginal politics and history. The ten-minute ‘riot’ and its rather longer aftermath are approached from different perspectives, but of two main types. One is the lens of deconstruction, especially of media discourses around Aboriginal behaviour and Aboriginal politics, but also attending to police and legal constructions of the same. In other chapters Morris zooms out for a broader view of what these events might tell us about the political preferences of the time and the characteristics of the nation in its seeming ‘postcolonial’ phase. The result in each case is an account that speaks of a long intellectual engagement with the events and their context, captured at a particular moment of time. Although the book bears signs of a very long gestation (occasionally signalled by its discussion of 1980s facts as though they remained the same today), Morris pits himself against some more recent prominent and influential analyses of indigenous politics and welfare in Australia, notably the positions of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton. Against their critiques of the enervating effect of welfare policy and economic subvention, Morris insists on the primacy of understanding what he calls the ‘structural violence’ that over-determines the position of Aboriginal people in Australia today (7). For this reader, however, the intellectual apparatus of the book overwhelms the stories at the heart of it; the deaths of young Aboriginal men in police or prison custody, the mourning and rituals of remembering that marked their death, the conflict with police and with some whites in the rural townships of western New South Wales. Moreover the theoretical tools which Morris deploys in analysing the period often seem more hindrance than help. Morris links the struggle over Indigenous rights during the late 1980s to a period in which a loosely defined neoliberalism came to dominate political preferences, for the worse. Neoliberalism however has many faces. The major neoliberal intervention in Australian politics of that time was the revolution in macroeconomic policy of the Hawke–Keating years. Such economic policies could sit alongside progressive and often quite interventionist social policy, or not. Moreover such certainties as Morris reflects in applying the ‘neoliberal’ frame to his data leads to some questionable stereotypes. ‘The critique of “interest groups” and the “Aboriginal industry” was self-serving and selective’, suggests Morris, adding in parentheses that ‘the lobbying efforts of industry are never subjected to the same sort of moral critique’ (67). We don’t have to rely only on the very recent history of the Australian car industry to call into question such a hasty judgement. It has been a common neoliberal charge since the 1980s to question any advocacy for Australian industry as always inherently self-interested. Arguably this critique has had more success in driving economic policy than it has ever had in directing Aboriginal affairs. Disagreement with its intellectual apparatus is not to devalue the contribution of such a text to a continuing debate about the reproduction of social harms and the very long-term consequences of the settlement of one people’s country by another. Barry Morris has recorded a moment in that history, its events and ways of thinking about it, in a way that will continue to repay future investigators of this country’s history.

Introduction: The Women’s Movement and the First World War

The First World War marked a crisis for the burgeoning women’s movements in Europe and in the United States and tested the strength of the international bonds that the movement had been working to establish since the late nineteenth century. The outbreak of the war forced those active in the women’s movement to make a choice between supporting their own country in a time of crisis and remaining true to the dominant vision of the ‘natural’ pacifism and international sisterhood of all women. In most of the combatant nations, the call to arms polarized women, often dividing those who had worked closely together, with some rallying unproblematically to their nation’s flag, others suspending their struggle for women’s advancement and turning their backs on their international contacts ‘for the duration of the war’, while yet others remained (or became) staunchly pacifist, developing and refining their ideological position as the war progressed.

Gendering the War Story

Abstract Historically there has been resistance to the very idea that gender and war could or should have anything to do with one another. Recent academic interest, however, has focused not simply upon women and war, but more particularly on the ways in which discourses of gender intersect with political debates about and cultural representations of war. From this perspective, gender and war are not seen as incongruous, but as inevitably intertwined. This position paper outlines the directions of new research on war and gender studies, as well as examining some of the debates and controversies that have surrounded the issue.