Angela K. Smith

The pankhursts and the war: suffrage magazines and first world war propaganda

Abstract With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst dramatically changed the course of their militant campaign. Instead of fighting against the Government, they joined forces with their old Liberal adversaries, including Lloyd George, to support the war effort. Accordingly, they employed their periodical of the preceding years, The Suffragette, as a valuable resource for spreading the new word, renaming it Britannia to reinforce their patriotic and imperialist intent. On the other side of London, in the East End district of Poplar where she had set up her headquarters, Sylvia Pankhurst, the renegade sister, also changed the emphasis of her social campaigning. Sylvia had broken with her mother and sister two years earlier, when it became clear that the differences in their political ideas were irreconcilable. Sylvias path lay in the fight for social reform for the working classes of the East End; men, women and children. A feminist she remained, but a socialist feminist, and, with the onset of the War, a pacifist as well, fervently articulating her views on all three ideologies through the mouthpiece of her organisation, The Womans Dreadnought. This article explores the literary response of the Pankhursts and their associates to the War, contrasting the patriotic zeal of Britannia with the radicalism of The Dreadnought, asking how these New Women used the press to win support for their various ideas. What devices did they employ and how successfully were they received by their contemporary readers?

Outsider Positions: Negotiating Gender, Nationality and Memory in the War Writing of Enid Bagnold

ABSTRACT In 1918, Enid Bagnold published A Diary Without Dates, a revealing book that kept few secrets about life in a wartime hospital. Bagnolds book has helped the construction of the mythology of disillusionment that has clouded memory of the First World War for a century. In 1920, Bagnold published The Happy Foreigner, a novel that is much less easy to categorize. As her protagonist, Fanny, drives across the derelict battlefields of France, she reflects on the ways in which those battlefields may be recalled in later cultural memory. However, there is a curious optimism in Fanny that is quite at odds with these later constructions of disillusionment. France in 1919 is a melting pot of different people, military and civilian, men and women, representing many different nations as the first understandings of memory crystallize. This essay explores Bagnold’s two war books in terms of the ways in which she negotiates gender and nationality. What does it mean to be a woman in a hospital? How do different nationalities interact in the post-war landscape, questioning these myths of disillusionment before they are even constructed? By considering these outsider positions, the author argues that Bagnolds role in helping to shape the memory of the First World War is far more complex than it might at first appear.

How to remember: War, Armistice and memory in post-1918 British fiction:

Post-1918 literature has played a major part in determining the way the First World War has been remembered in the British national consciousness. The post-war literary boom in the late 1920s and early 1930s has shaped many impressions of the war, allowing images of the Western Front to dominate memory. This article, however, explores alternative ways that post-war literature has commemorated the war, beginning with the Armistice, to track the significance of memory in Britain in the immediate post-war decades. My concern here is the focus on memory in non-war fiction and some memoir: those stories written in the inter-war decades that do not look backwards, but instead deal with the aftermath, By considering the fiction of writers such as Irene Rathbone, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers and Winifred Holtby as they engage with the complex issues surrounding how to remember, I will examine whether these writers, as women, endorsed the culture of disillusionment or offered alternative modes of remembrance.

Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War. By Ana Carden-Coyne

at killing cannot be separated from the anxiety of fighting for one’s life (p. 18). What finally emerges from The Secret Battle is an awareness of the inter-relational complexity of human experience in warfare: the connectedness between individual personality and collective struggle, bravery and domestication, front and home. In this rendition, war experience is shaped less by language than by fluctuations and continuities in the emotional and psychological landscape: the non-arrival of a food parcel or cigarettes as well as the enduring relationships that lasted a lifetime.

Seduction or Instruction? First World War Posters in Britain and Europe. By Jim Aulich and John Hewitt.

the importance of siting of texts within a host of cultural and political practices. Kafka’s work, on the other hand, is sited within the ebb and flow of private and public spaces and the café culture of Prague. In spite of a more interior, private context for his works, Kafka negotiates the conduit of movement between the two spheres andMcCracken explores the subtleties of Kafka’s take on what constitutes the public arena (such as newspapers, wherever they are read). This is quite a difficult task as some of Kafka’s work does not have an immediate, easily identified conceptualizing of the public sphere. The whole work is a brave attempt at negotiating the complexities of masculinity in the context of modernist fiction and its relationship to the public sphere. McCracken also acknowledges the work of feminist commentators on the subject of the New Woman and her status within modernist fiction and the public sphere. His willingness to engage with feminist academic literature is one that other commentators in this area of research would do well to follow. In routing the study via the teashop and the café, McCracken has opened up the possibilities of further research into specific contextual spaces, and new possibilities for mapping the complexities of gender and the production of fiction.

‘The Woman Who Dared’: Major Mabel St Clair Stobart

The moment was 1907. The self-confessed feminist was Mabel St Clair Stobart, a woman who, as she states, had good reason to understand that women had the ability to achieve much more than convention gave them credit for. She had lately returned from a four-year-long adventure in the Transvaal, during which she and her husband St Clair (a masculinist by her own admission) had set up a frontier farm, Mabel herself taking charge of a ‘Kaffir’ store that sold a range of products to the local people as well as to white settlers and missionaries. This move to Africa had been precipitated by a financial disaster that had put an end to the comfortable married life filled with golf, tennis, fishing and other leisure pursuits that the Stobarts had enjoyed for almost 20 years.