White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War
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White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War Nicoletta F. Gullace On August 30, 1914, Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald, an invet- erate conscriptionist and disciple of Lord Roberts, deputized thirty women in Folkstone to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame "every young 'slacker' found loafing about the Leas" and to remind those "deaf or indifferent to their country's need" that "British soldiers are fighting and dying across the channel."1 Fitzgerald's estimation of the power of these women was enormous. He warned the men of Folkstone that "there is a danger awaiting them far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle," for if they were found "idling and loafing to-morrow" they would be publicly humiliated by a lady with a white feather.2 The idea of a paramilitary band of women known as "The Order of the White Feather" or "The White Feather Brigade" captured the imagination of numerous observers and even enjoyed a moment of semi- official sanction at the beginning of the war. According to the Chatham News an "amusing, novel, and forceful method of obtaining recruits for Lord Kitchener's Army was demonstrated at Deal on Tuesday" when the town crier paraded the streets and "crying with the dignity of his ancient calling, gave forth the startling announcement: 'Oyez! Oyez!! NICOLETTA GULLACE is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. The author would like to thank Tom Laqueur, Eliga Gould, Sue Grayzel, and Susan Kent for advice and encouragement on drafts of this paper. She would also like to acknowledge the staff of the Imperial War Museum for their abundant help in conduct- ing the research. The research and writing of this article were supported by the Fulbright Hays Commission, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, and the John M. Olin Foundation in conjunction with the Interna- tional Security Program at Yale University. 1 "Women's War: White Feathers for 'Slackers,' " Daily Mail (August 31, 1914), p. 3. 2 Ibid. Journal of British Studies 36 (April 1997): 178-206 © 1997 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/97/3602-0003$02.00 178 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universitätsbibliothek Bern, on 11 Jul 2018 at 13:16:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1086/386133 WHITE FEATHERS AND WOUNDED MEN 179 Oyez!!! The White Feather Brigade! Ladies wanted to present the young men of Deal and Walmer ... the Order of the White Feather for shirking their duty in not coming forward to uphold the Union Jack of Old En- gland! God save the King.' "3 Numerous women responded to the cry and began to comb the city placing white feathers in the lapels and hat bands of men wearing civilian clothes.4 The practice was widely imitated by women all over the country and continued long after conscription was instated in 1916, creating one of the most persistent memories of the home front during the war.5 Dr. M. Yearsley is one of many diarists who recalled that' 'young girls of all ages and styles of beauty, but particularly those of the type called 'Flappers,' were parading the streets offering white feathers to young men in mufti, with a fine disregard of discrimina- tion. ... [I]t is an established fact," Yearsley insisted, that "one of these inconsequent children offered her emblem of cowardice to a young man on leave who had just been awarded the V.C."6 Despite such vivid recollections, the white feather campaign has generally received only passing attention from historians of the war. Feminist scholars in Britain and America, influenced in the early eighties by the women's peace encampment at Greenham Common, have focused almost exclusively on the much celebrated history of feminist pacifism.7 Responding to the work of Arthur Marwick, David Mitchell, and others,8 3'' 'White Feathers' a Novel Method of Making Young Men Enlist," Chatham News (September 5, 1914), p. 8. 4 Ibid. 5 Although white feathers were given out in many parts of the country, the practice was most common in London and in port towns where the long history of impressment may have created a culture favorable to such coercive practices. For a sense of the geo- graphical range of white feather incidents, see Imperial War Museum staff, "Great War Index to Letters of Interest," n.d., Imperial War Museum, London (henceforth IWM). According to one contemporary, the "idea spread like a virulent disease." It is unclear exactly how the practice caught on, but it is probable that rumor, newspaper reports, and the depiction of the practice in popular theater and fiction helped spread the idea. See Francis Almond to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), May 25, 1964, IWM, BBC Great War Series [hereafter BBC/GW], vol. ALL-ANT, fol. 339. 6M. Yearsley, "Memoirs," IWM, Documents, DS/Misc/ 17, p. 19. 'See, e.g., Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (Iowa City, 1990); Cather- ine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens, Ga., 1989); Jill Liddington, The Road to Greenham Com- mon: Feminism and Anti-militarism since 1820 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1989); Margaret Kames- ter and Jo Vellacott, eds., Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War (London, 1987); Jo Vellacott, "Feminist Consciousness and the First World War," His- tory Workshop 23 (Spring 1987): 81-101; Joan Montgomery Byles, "Women's Experi- ence of World War One: Suffragists, Pacifists and Poets," Women's Studies International Forum 8, no. 5 (1985): 473-87; Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London, 1985). 8 Arthur Marwick, Woman at War, 1914-1918 (London, 1977), pp. 35-36; David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (Lon- Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universitätsbibliothek Bern, on 11 Jul 2018 at 13:16:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1086/386133 180 GULLACE who recounted graphic tales of female war enthusiasm, the Greenham Common school tended to dismiss the white feather campaign as primar- ily misogynistic propaganda meant to discredit women and hide the more significant achievements of feminist pacifists.9 Although recent work in women's history has shifted attention away from the exclusive focus on pacifism,10 feminist scholarship has nevertheless failed to produce any detailed study of the very issue so painfully emphasized in the older historiography: that of women's participation in the recruiting campaign, particularly their wielding of the language of sexual shame to coerce young men into military service.11 The general exclusion of white feather giving from the feminist his- toriography, I would argue, is more the result of the shameful meaning this practice acquired after the war than of any absence of convincing sources testifying to its contemporary prevalence. Although Virginia Woolf may have been one of the first to suggest that the white feather campaign was more a product of male hysteria than of actual female practice, she has by no means been the last, and the continued skepticism surrounding this practice necessitates some discussion of historical sources.12 The contemporary evidence consists primarily of local and na- don, 1966). This tradition has also been passed down by word of mouth, in the form of anecdotal evidence that is often repeated but has not inspired much detailed investigation. 9 See, e.g., Claire M. Tylee, " 'Maleness Run Riot'—the Great War and Women's Resistance to Militarism," Women's Studies International Forum 11, no. 3 (1988): 199— 210; and Anne Wiltsher, p. 1. 10 Several excellent studies of women's involvement in various aspects of the war have recently appeared, showing the growing breadth of interest in the diversity of wom- en's experience. See, e.g., Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, 1994); Philippa Levine, " 'Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should': Women Police in World War I," Journal of Modern History 66, no. 1 (March 1994): 34-78. 11 Most feminist work that has dealt with this aspect of female militancy has been in the fields of literary criticism and political science and has focused on images of women in literary culture. See, e.g., Sandra M. Gilbert, "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), p. 208; Helen M. Cooper et al., eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), pp. xiii-24; Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London, 1994), pp. 89-129; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York, 1987), pp. 163-79. 12 Commenting on the psychological basis of bestowing white feathers and its seem- ingly disproportionate historical legacy in the memory of those men who witnessed, expe- rienced, or heard about these acts, Virginia Woolf noted that' 'external observation would suggest that a man still feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with cowardice by a woman in much the same way that a woman feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with unchastity by a man." Woolf rightly argues that the number of women who "stuck feathers in coats must have been infinitesimal compared with those who did nothing of the kind" but goes on to blame what she calls "the manhood emotion" for the exaggerated psychological Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.