1 Women, Gender and the First World

WOMEN, GENDER AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR: HOME FRONTS AND WAR FRONTS

10th October 2015, University of Portsmouth Park Building

Supported by the AHRC funded Gateways to the First World War Public Engagement Centre, the Southern Region of the Women’s History Network and the Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR), University of Portsmouth

You come into Floor 1 from the steps into Park and the Conference is held on Floor 2, up a flight of stairs or a lift for those who need it.

9.00 – 9.30 am Registration and Coffee (Room 2.05)

9.25 Few words of welcome (Room 2.05)

9.30 – 10.15 Panel 1 Chair: Laurel Forster (Room 2.01)

Maggie Andrews: Salting the Pig, Picking and Preserving the Fruit: Rural West Midlands on the Home Front

Jennifer Doyle: ‘War – to the knife and fork!: The Home Front as a War Front – patriotic encouragement of housewives and unemployed women during the First World War

Nicola Verdon: Women, Work and the Countryside: a case study of the Women’s War Agricultural Committees

9.30 – 10.15 Panel 2 Chair: Brad Beaven (Room 2.07)

Zacharoula Christopoulou: Through the male gaze: the construction of women’s identity in First World War men’s narratives

Gill Clarke: Land Girls and Munitionettes: witnessing war on the Home Front in the First World War

Kate Macdonald: Gender and the impaired body in popular fiction of the First World War

9.30-10.15 Panel 3 Chair: Lee Sartain (Room 2.09)

Emma Ferry: ‘So teach us to number our days’: Women and Cropthorne War Memorials (1920)

Martin Foote: The War Work of Mississippi’s Black Women

Emma Hanna: ‘[A]ngelic choirs sang, and angelic musicians played to us’: Mary Maud MacCarthy and Founding the Festival of Remembrance

COFFEE 10.15- 11.15 (Room 2.05)

TOILETS can be found in both the corridors of Floor 1 of Park which is the floor you enter into from the steps. As you come into Park, the corridor to your left also has a toilet for the disabled. Further, at the top of the first flight of stairs from Floor 1 there is a Women’s Toilet and a Men’s opposite.

11.15- 12.30 Panel 4 Chair Maggie Andrews (Room 2.01)

Jessica Meyer: ‘Necessary’ and ‘Minor’ Items: Nurses, VADS and Nursing Orderlies in British Home Hospitals

Samraghni Bonnerjee: Patriotism and Pacifism: Contrasting Motivations for Front Nursing among German and British nurses of the First World War

Susan Cohen: Women and War Work

11.15 – 12.30 Panel 5 Chair Jonathan Rayner (Room 2.07)

Krisztina Robert: Women’s Military Organisation in First World War Britain: Refining the Double Helix Model

Alison Fell: Back to the Front: French and British Female Veteran Groups in the 1920s

Lucie Whitmore: Wartime Reality as Fashion Fantasy: Austerity, Mourning and Practicality as Fashion Trends During the Great War

11.15-12.30 Panel 6 Chair Sue Bruley (Room 2.09)

Nicola Smith: ‘Soft Hands at work in the Stables’: women who joined the remount service in World War One

Katherine Storr: Grace Charlotte Vulliamy, C.B.E., Forgotten War Heroine

Lucy Noakes: ‘My husband is interested in war generally’: Gender, Generation and Commemorating the Great War

LUNCH 12.30 – 1.30 (lunch not provided, please bring own or buy from local outlets)

If you walk out of Park, a short distance on your right is The Fleet, a pub selling reasonably priced food such as salads, baked potato etc. A few paces after The Fleet is Wetherspoons Isambard Kingdom Brunel also selling reasonably priced food. If you want sandwiches, coffee bars etc turn sharp right at the entrance of Wetherspoons into Guildhall Walk where there is a Sainsbury, Yates Bar, Starbucks and other places.

1.30 – 2.45: Panel 7 Chair Sue Morgan (Room 2.01)

Alice Kelly: Edith Wharton’s Fighting France and Women’s First World War Reportage

Catherine Lee: ‘Giddy Girls’ and a ‘Burst Bubble’: the War Baby Panic of 1914-15

Anne Logan: Public or Private? A Consideration of Women’s War Diaries as Historical Artefacts

1.30 – 2.45 Panel 8 Chair Jessica Meyer (Room 2.07)

Sarah Hellawell: ‘Perfect Unanimity of Motherhood’: Maternal Identity in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom during the Great War

Emma Lyons: To ‘succour the brave men now fighting for our rights and liberties’: Lady Augusta Dillon and the Women’s War Effort in Galway

Jonathan Rayner: The Carer, the Combatant and the Clandestine: Images of Women in the First World War in War Illustrated Magazine

1.30-2.45 Panel 9 Chair Lucy Noakes (Room 2.09)

Mary Clare Martin: Race, Indigeneity and Gender: the Baden-Powell Girl Guides in the British World 1914-1919

Amanda Phipps: What the Women Did: Remembering or Reducing Women from the First World War on the Contemporary British Stage

Laura Seddon: Expressions of War Through Gendered Sound

TEA 2.45 – 3.15 (Room 2.05)

3.15- 4.45 Panel 10 Chair Laura Seddon (Room 2.01)

Ingrid Sharp: Love as Moral Imperative and Anti-War Strategy in the International Women’s Movement 1914-1919

Alyson Mercer: The Eviction of Edith Cavell: a Study of the Changing Nature of Exhibiting First World War Collections Relating to Women at the Imperial War Museum over the Past Century

Rachel Richardson: ‘In a curious way, we were worth it’: Gender, Motivation and Value of War Work on the Balkan Front

3.15-4.45 Panel 11 Chair Martin Foote (Room 2.07)

Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre: The Role of Women in the Italian Veterans Association (1915-1923): Notes and Research Perspectives

Cafer Sarikaya: Food Narratives in Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother (who is Armenian)

Sevinc Elaman: Women, War and Ethnicity in Narratives of Turkish Nationhood: Representations of ‘Islamised’ Non-Muslim Women in Turkish Literature

3.15-4.45 Panel 12 Chair Maureen Wright (Room 2.09)

June Purvis: What happened to the women’s movement in Britain during the First World War? The English Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union

Sarah Pedersen: Suffragettes and the Scottish press during the First World War

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS

Salting the Pig, Picking and Preserving the Fruit: Rural West Midlands on the Home Front Maggie Andrews, University of Worcester

The history of rural women in the Wartime Britain has tended to focus on the Women’s Land Army (WLA) and to a lesser degree the formation of the Women’s Institute Movement (WI) often perceived as representing two distinct aspects of women’s experience, differentiated by their age and marital status. WLA are perceived to be single women who work outside the home producing food; whilst the WI are often seen as wives and mothers consumers of food. This paper draws upon an examination of the Home Front in the West Midlands to problematize these distinctions and instead suggests that rural housewives contributed to both domestic food production and preservation. The first global war, and the removal of many men, both husbands and sons, into the armed forces disrupted the gender divisions of rural life in smallholdings, allotments and gardens. In the first years of the war initial concerns were to ensure vegetable and fruit crops were harvested and preserved. Letters from some servicemen reveal their anxiety at the strain placed on their wives by their absence in the forces which meant men were, for example, no longer able to sharpen the kitchen knives or help salt the family pig. As food shortages became more severe and food increasingly became a weapon of war, so the role women played in small- scale agriculture and horticulture became more significant. New skills had to be mastered, waste avoided and housewives were under pressure to find innovative methods of preserving the food the food produced. Rural women, individually and collectively, found ways of coping as their domestic roles were stretched, extended and reworked in order to maintain food supplies for their families and the nation in wartime.

Patriotism and Pacifism: Contrasting Motivations for Front Nursing among German and British Nurses of the First World War

Samraghni Bonnerjee, University of Sheffield

The nurses of the First World War seem to exist in a no man’s land, belonging neither to the brotherhood of the trenches, nor to the female community at home. The dominant image associated with the nurses as “angels in white” harks back to the cult of Florence Nightingale as “the lady with the lamp”. In the writings of the nineteenth century historian A. W. Kinglake, and The Times Crimean War correspondent W. H. Russell, all nurses were projected as Madonnas sacrificing everything to set sail for the horrific battlefields only to tend to the wounded fallen soldier. In pre-War Germany too, there was a widespread idealisation of the vocation of nursing, especially in children’s books. It was this construct that voluntary nurses of the First World War—both from Britain and Germany—inherited as they were growing up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, the hard reality of front nursing contrasted sharply with this idealisation. In this paper, I intend to compare the contrasting motivations of British and German nurses to volunteer and set

5 out as War nurses during the Great War, despite having been brought up with similar ideals. I will be looking at Frontschwestern: Ein deutsches Ehrenbuch, a collection of diary and memoir fragments by fifty-one German nurses of the First World War, published in 1936, and Gertrude Bäumer’s autobiography, Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (1933) for the German perspective; and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Florence Farmborough’s Nurse at the Russian Front (1975) for the British nurses’ point of view. The female counterpart to the Langemarck generation found a voice in the War nurses of Germany. Their urge to be “off to the field” implied not only their desire to leave the stifling atmosphere of the mother houses where they were trained, or the rigours of urban civilisation, but also to participate in the soldiers’ world where blood was sacrificed for a higher purpose. They juxtaposed nationalist and professional stereotypes in a manner that was different from the soldiers who had gone to fight at the front. As Gertrude Bäumer wrote in Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende, “The feelings of the entire people were torn from the moorings of calculation and raised up to the world of values: home, soil . . .” This is in sharp contrast to Vera Brittain’s disillusionment with the War, as she writes in Testament of Youth, Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re- dedicating themselves—as I did that morning in Boulogne—to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.

Her cynicism leads to pacifism, which was quite common amongst British nurses. The German nurses, on the other hand, remained resolutely nationalistic until the very end. This paper will look at the archaic and fantastic quality of their resolution vis-a-vis the single- minded pacifism of British nurses.

Through the male gaze: the construction of women’s identity in First World War men’s narratives

Zacharoula Christopoulou, Affiliation: University College London

Paul Bäumer, the protagonist of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, comments regarding a Red Cross nurse: “She called me ‘comrade’ and that really was the limit”. For Bäumer comradeship was a sacred bond between men fighting in the trenches and not a title that could be assumed by any woman, no matter what her contribution to the war effort was. This instant is indicative of a wide breadth of approaches of female presence in connection to the war. In my paper I will be looking at the portrayal of women in WWI novels written by author-soldiers, aiming at presenting the ways in which women’s identities are constructed through male writing in the new context of Total War. Ranging from the ‘angel in the house’ that keeps ‘the home fires burning’ to the women that had an active presence in the war, there is a definite effort on the part of the authors to come to terms with the complication of the loss of boundaries between home and war fronts. The novels that will be considered are Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Henry Barbusse’s Under Fire, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Stratis Myrivilis’ Life in the Tomb. In these works, gender identities are recast in comparison, divergence or

6 convergence forming an important part of the novels’ plot and consequently of WWI memory culture.

Land Girls and Munitionettes: Witnessing War on the Home Front in the First World War Gill Clarke, Otter Gallery and University of Chichester

Women experienced the First World War in diverse ways: their class, age, race, location and occupation impacted on their wartime work whether it was in fields, factories or the home. This illustrated paper employs a biographical and narrative approach to explore some of their roles in the Home Front workforce, many of which had been the preserve of men. Posters, paintings and photographs will be utilized to portray women’s wartime service particularly in the Women’s Land Army and Munitions factories. In so doing the contributions and experiences of artists such as Randolph Schwabe, Cecil Aldin and Ursula Wood who recorded the work of Land Girls and Anna Airy, Fred Farrell and A. S. Hartrick that of Munitionettes are considered. Insights thereby are additionally offered into the work of war artists whose work encompassed far more than battle scenes.

Women and War Work Susan Cohen, Independent Scholar

The proposed paper would look at the experiences of Queen’s Nurses, members of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses, who were given leave of absence, enabling them to undertake war time nursing, at home and abroad. These women became reservists with a variety of organisations, including the Territorial Force, Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, the French Flag Nursing Corps, the Friends’ Expedition for the Relief of War Victims, the Scottish Women’s Hospital and Mrs Stobart’s Serbian Relief Fund. It will also consider the impact that their absence had on district nursing at home.

‘War – to the knife and fork!’: the Home Front as a War Front – patriotic encouragement of housewives and unemployed women during the First World War

Jennifer Doyle, Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College London

Not all women worked during the war, or engaged with the war effort in a paid capacity. For a significant portion of the female population, household and child responsibilities prevented them from taking up positions in factories, offices or working on the land. In order to encourage a practical engagement with the war, such women were encouraged to view the kitchen as their theatre of war. They were asked to think of the Home Front as a War Front. This paper shows how the contemporary print media attempted to manipulate its female readers to support national food economy by questioning their patriotism. In doing so it addresses the nature of government propaganda and will argue that this manipulation of women was unconscious, that it was an editorial decision rather than as a result of a government mandate. Drawing on a variety of methodologies and literature from

7 the fields of history and sociology, this paper applies sociological theories of modern magazine reading retrospectively. It will present an analysis of articles, editorials and advertisements that utilize the theme of food to prompt female engagement with the war. Using a selection of magazines aimed specifically at a female audience, this paper analyses the homogenized view of wartime society presented to women and how they were encouraged to contribute to the war effort. Using the language of food as a medium, it will show how food economy and dietary sacrifice was equated with national safety, thereby giving the appearance that all women could become soldiers in their own, gender-specific battleground.

Women, War and Ethnicity in Narratives of Turkish Nationhood: Representations of ‘Islamised’ Non-Muslim Women in Turkish Literature

Sevinc Elaman, Independent Scholar

This paper explores some of the implications of WWI for the production of gendered Turkish nationhood through an analysis of the role of Armenian women in Turkish novels. WWI dealt a mortal blow to the Ottoman Empire which, after more than six centuries of rule across the Middle East and South-East Europe, was dismantled and partitioned by the victorious occupying forces, leading to a profound reshaping of the political contours of the region - including, ultimately, the foundation of the Turkish Republic following the Turkish Independence War (1919-1923). The attempts in this period, to establish a unified Turkey of one nation, religion and language, made life difficult for all minorities. Many minority groups- and in particular women within these groups - were compelled to either convert to Islam or keep their identity secret all their lives in order to survive during and after the war. One of the major impacts of WWI for women in this period was therefore the “Islamisation” of Armenian women as part of the massive “forced relocation” of the Armenian population in 1915, which resulted in death on what many have claimed to be a genocidal scale. As part of this process and faced with the threat of deportation, or worse, many Armenian women were effectively forced to marry Muslim Turkish or Kurdish men and to convert to Islam. One of the under-explored stories of this period of dramatic change in Turkish society is the role of non-Muslim women and the various advances, sacrifices and transformations that they experienced during and after the war.

Turkish literary history written during the Republican era produced a literature on how Turkish-Muslim women contributed to the National Independence War, ignoring to a great extent the experiences of non-Muslim women and the role they played in the construction of a new national Turkish identity. In the late 1990s however, with the beginning of European Union accession talks, Turkey witnessed a proliferation of literature on the subject of the Islamisation of Armenian women, such as Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother (2004) and Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2007). This paper aims to investigate the role of Armenian women in these novels and in particular the way they respond to the Turkish nationalist discourse during and after WWI. Analysing the depiction of Armenian women in these novels allows us to reflect on the effects of WWI on non-Muslim women’s experiences as gendered national subjects, and to explore some of the ongoing implications of this

8 period within narratives of gendered Turkish nationhood as these themes surface in contemporary Turkish literature and broader public discussion.

Back to the Front: French and British Female Veteran Groups in the 1920s

Alison Fell, University of Leeds

This paper will consider two groups of French and British women who considered themselves, in different ways, to be ‘veterans’ of the First World War in the 1920s. In France, it will focus on French war nurses, who formed associations to lobby for improved pension rights, and as a means of supporting each other in their reintegration into their personal and professional peacetime lives. In Britain, it will focus on the Old Comrades’ Association of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (renamed the Queen Mary Army Auxiliary Corps), analysing their magazine and members’ correspondence to consider the ways in which former WAACs understood and evoked their war service in the years following the Armistice. I will explore the extent to which these groups performed similar functions to male veteran groups, as analysed by historians such as Antoine Prost and Niall Barr. I will examine in particular the discourses of nostalgia and comradeship evident in their writings, as well as the ways in which these women presented their relationships to the state in the postwar years. Finally, I will consider their relationships to and interactions with male veteran groups.

‘So teach us to number our days’: Women and the Cropthorne War Memorials (1920) Emma Ferry, Nottingham Trent University

Throughout the Great War, the women of Cropthorne, a small village in rural Worcestershire, engaged in a wide range of activities brought about by the conflict. They raised money for the Belgian Refugees and Serbian Relief Fund. They organized a ‘Vegetable Produce Committee’ which sent food to serving troops and contributed eggs to the ‘National Egg Collection for the Wounded’. They made hundreds of garments for the Red Cross, St. John’s Ambulance, Queen Alexandra’s Field Relief Force and the Military Hospital at Cheltenham. As part of the National Food Economy Campaign of 1917 they provided a mid-day meal for all the children at the village school; they even made a consignment of Plum Puddings for the men of the Worcester Regiment at Christmas. And, of course, as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, they also endured the anxieties and sorrows of all women whose men were serving King and Country. It is no surprise then, that at the end of the War, several women were appointed to significant positions on the War Memorial Committee, which undertook to provide a fitting memorial to those who had lost their lives in the war. Drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials, surviving war-time Parish Magazines and contemporary newspaper reports, this paper examines the role of the women of Cropthorne in commemorating the twelve men of the Parish who fell in the war.

The War Work of Mississippi’s Black Women

Martin Foote, University of Portsmouth

As the USA entered the Great War women’s organisations swiftly pledged their support, and the Woman’s Committee under the Council of National Defence began creating a network of state level bodies to oversee the deployment of women workers. In the South this meant finding a way to mobilise communities of Black women in spite of continuing racist oppression. In Mississippi on September 14th 1917 a Woman’s Service Day was held, with both Black and white women signing up to offer their services to the Red Cross, the Clean- Up Campaign, the Liberty Loan and other initiatives. The state’s Woman’s Committee branch was faced with reconciling the necessity of harnessing the energy of Black women with contending with deep-rooted white supremacist attitudes. Alice Dunbar-Nelson was appointed as a field representative by the Woman’s Committee and dispatched to the southern states to assist with the organisation of Black women. In Mississippi she found the Black women anxious to work regardless of feelings of exclusion resulting from a white society weary of upsetting the status quo of race relations. White Mississippi Women’s Committee chairperson Mrs Edward McGehee recognised the need to make effective use of Black female labour as a resource and recruited Black teacher and property agent Sally Green to serve as Black state chairperson, and even personally paid her salary. Although Mrs McGehee hoped that Black and white women would work “along the same lines” this did not necessarily mean side by side. Although Black women activists saw an opportunity not only to help their nation during war time but to also bring about social progress through their work, they would first have to face the considerable challenges posed by a white dominated society that sought to keep barriers between the races in place.

‘[A]ngelic choirs sang, and angelic musicians played to us’: Mary Maud MacCarthy and Founding the Festival of Remembrance’ Emma Hanna, University of Kent

Even the most comprehensive of histories of British remembrance rituals state that the Festival of Remembrance started when the Daily Express sponsored the event in 1927. However, the first ‘Festival of Commemoration’ was staged at the Royal Albert Hall on Armistice Night 1923. It was organised by the composer John Foulds and the musician Mary Maud McCarthy. Foulds was a Manchester-born cellist and composer, and MacCarthy was an Irish-born professional violinist with links to prominent Socialists and members of the Suffragette movement . Working as musicians for the YMCA in the early wartime years, both were Theosophists until 1917 when they left their respective spouses and announced their intention to marry. The phrase ‘Festival of Commemoration’ was first used by MacCarthy, who appears to have been the driving force behind the Albert Hall Armistice Night concerts in the mid-1920s which were sponsored by the British Legion. The centrepiece of these concerts was Foulds’ World Requiem (Opus 60) billed as ‘A Cenotaph in Sound’. Some sections of the piece were said to have been heard ‘clairaudiently’ by Foulds and MacCarthy having ‘cultivated in him […] the ability to hear, and take down as if from dictation, music

10 apparently emanating directly from the world of nature or of the spirit.’ By 1927 the Legion’s relationship with Founds and MacCarthy had broken down. The couple moved to India and in 1939 Foulds dies of Cholera aged 58. but MacCarthy continued to campaign on behalf of Foulds and his work until her death in the 1960s. This paper will reposition Mary Maud MacCarthy as a principal architect of the Festival of Remembrance and key figure in the true history of musical commemoration on Armistice Night in the early interwar period.

‘Perfect Unanimity of Motherhood’: Maternal Identity in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom during the Great War

Sarah Hellawell, Northumbria University

Six days’ after the Second Battle of Ypres had begun, a group of internationally-minded feminists gathered at The Hague to discuss the issues of war and peace and formed the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP). Established in 1915 during the Great War it adopted the name Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) four years’ later. April 2015 marked a century of activism by WILPF, yet this organisation is often omitted from the broader historiography of the women’s movement. This paper will look at how the League campaigned for both feminism and pacifism throughout the First World War. Traditional visions of motherhood were popular in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century nation-building. In addition, women were called upon to assist the national war effort during the Great War through their roles as mothers and caregivers. Nevertheless, Eileen Yeo (1999) has shown that activist women subverted the language of ‘motherhood’ to legitimise feminist claims to the public sphere. During the Great War, WILPF argued that, as mothers, women had a unique understanding of the human cost of war. In particular, the organisation used the rhetoric of ‘motherhood’ to create a transnational identity and pursue rights for women. This paper will examine ‘motherhood’ as a central concept that influenced both WILPF’s peace campaigns and their feminism. It will be important to assess whether the organisation simply reaffirmed essentialist assumptions about women’s roles in society, or whether the rhetoric represented a female-centred vision of international relations. This paper will focus on the formative years of the WILPF (1915 – 1919) to examine the extent to which these women used the concept of ‘motherhood’ to work for the ideals of both feminism and pacifism.

Wartime Wharton: Edith Wharton’s Fighting France and Women’s First World War Reportage

Alice Kelly, Visiting Scholar, Yale University

… as he spoke the peaceful room vanished, and the twilight shadows of my suburban garden, and I saw myself, an eager grotesque figure, bestriding a mule in the long tight skirts of 1915, and suddenly appearing, a prosaic Walkyrie laden with cigarettes, in the heart of the mountain fastness held by the famous Chasseurs Alpins, already among the legendary troops of the French army.. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

Edith Wharton’s autobiographical recollections of her travels into the war zones in 1915 gives an indication of the unusual position occupied by a woman reporter during the war. The American novelist was living in France when the war broke out, and quickly became an active participant. Although her extensive war relief work in France is increasingly celebrated, her work as war reporter remains less understood. Gaining access to the war zones through a combination of her personal contacts and her literary celebrity, Wharton exploited her unique opportunity to the full through a series of letters and articles. This paper examines Fighting France (1915), Wharton’s collection of articles written as a result of her five trips to the war zones from February to August 1915 and published in Scribner’s Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post to advocate for American intervention. Drawing on archival material and unpublished photographs from Yale and Princeton for a new critical edition to be published in late 2015, this talk considers the publication history and reception of this important work, arguing for the complex and unusual nature of Wharton’s propaganda while she was still negotiating her literary response to the war. More broadly it considers her position as a woman war reporter and positions the text within the field of women’s First World War writing.

‘Giddy girls’ and a ‘burst bubble’: The war baby panic of 1914-15 Catherine Lee, The Open University

Between August 1914 and April 1915 the columns of the British press were filled with reports of what was heralded as a ‘new social problem’. It was claimed that across Britain, as many as 2,000 women and girls were pregnant with the babies of soldiers recently departed for the western front. The rumour was sufficiently potent to provoke speeches in Parliament, extensive social investigation and a notice issued from Scotland Yard. By the time that the unfound rumour was finally put to rest, having been denounced as ‘fiction’, ‘romance’, ‘delusion’ and ‘myth’ in the same medium that had helped bolster it in the first place, a range of prominent figures had become drawn into the episode. In examining this extraordinary chapter through the lens of what David Garland calls ‘social reaction phenomena’ and, more specifically, the moral panic concept, this paper focuses on the impact of the exceptional circumstances of wartime on the shifting and conflicting sets of moral values and social attitudes of the period. It pays particular attention to the ways in which these were rehearsed in the press, taking advantage of the mass digitisation of newspaper titles which makes it possible to trace the ‘war baby’ story in a way barely possible previously. Of particular interest are the ways in which social and official attitudes were reflected in discourse, given that the ‘war baby’ rumour was positioned at the intersection of political, moral and legal discourses: of sin and corruption, charity and Christian forgiveness, patriotism, public health, the sexual double-standard, and emergent feminism.

Public or Private? A Consideration of Women's War Diaries as Historical Artefacts

Anne Logan, University of Kent

War diaries have long provided staple archive material for historians as well as contributing to wider, public perceptions of the past. For example, in Great Britain, many readers had their first historical introduction to women’s war experiences through Testament of Youth (1933), the celebrated memoir of writer Vera Brittain, which was based upon her own contemporaneous diaries and was subsequently made into a television series, and more recently, a film. Yet the centenary of the First World War brings the importance and role of women’s war diaries as historical evidence into even sharper focus. The past two years have witnessed a publishing boom in war-related works, including the publication and re- publication of lesser-known, previously undiscovered or forgotten diaries. From a range of authors, literary figures and ‘amateur’ writers, from well-known celebrities, political figures, and unknown women, these works bring a wide range of voices and perspectives to bear on the experience of living through a so-called ‘total war’. This paper intends to pose a series of questions about women’s war diaries and problematize their use in the context of a centennial memorialization of war. Among other examples, the paper focuses on a recently-discovered diary of an upper-class housewife from a Southern England town and examines the journey it has undertaken from a treasured, if neglected private, family possession to an artefact in a public, national collection.

To ‘succour the brave men now fighting for our rights and liberties’: Lady Augusta Dillon and the Women’s War Effort in Galway

Emma Lyons, University College Dublin

On 21 August 1914 the Church of Ireland Gazette reported that Irishwomen responded to the outbreak of World War I by mobilising quickly to ‘succour the brave men now fighting for our rights and liberties’. Voluntary action was widespread, and Ireland witnessed a civil mobilisation that crossed religious and societal boundaries. A large variety of societies and associations were established to aid those displaced by war, to liaise between families and soldiers, and to raise funds to send provisions to soldiers on the Front Line and Prisoners of War in camps across Europe. Women played a central role in these societies, often establishing local associations to assist those impacted by the war in the area. One such woman was Lady Augusta Dillon of Clonbrock House in County Galway. She played an active role in providing assistance to soldiers and prisoners of war from the Galway area, most of whom were members of the Connaught Rangers. As a result of her efforts and activities during the war Lady Dillon was awarded an OBE in 1920. An examination of Lady Dillon’s extensive personal papers, which contains a large collection of correspondence from the Irish Women’s Association, soldiers, Prisoners of War and soldiers’ family members, it will be possible to gain an insight into the role played by women in their respective localities during World War I.

Gender and the impaired body in popular fiction of the First World War Kate Macdonald, University of Reading

In my research on British popular culture of the First World War I have recovered considerable amounts of evidence on the prescription of gendered roles. Two publications from this project will focus on the war-impaired soldier. For this paper I would like to explore how the impaired woman’s body was depicted during wartime in prescriptive fiction. I describe how female characters were given impairments to function in a range of narrative iterations. Examples of these deliberate re-formations of the woman’s body include blindness, facial disfigurement, clubfoot, mutism and the fake impairment. The association of women with impairment during wartime can be seen in Alan Graham’s Araminta stories, which offer wartime instruction in how to respond to war impairment, and the remarkably popular trope of the reward of the woman’s body given to the disabled serviceman. Using statistical analysis of a research corpus derived from around 4000 stories published in five fiction magazines from July 1914 to December 1918, I will describe the range of readings possible from the stories and their paratexts, illustrated with images from popular print culture from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Race, Indigeneity and Gender: the Baden-Powell Girl Guides in the British World 1914-1919

Mary Clare Martin, University of Greenwich

This paper examines the war work of the Girl Guides, officially founded in 1910, but originating in 1908, within the British World from 1914 to 1919. The First World War provided a great impetus to Guiding by increasing the need for young people’s social service, as well as for more explicitly war-related activities. As the movement began during a high period of imperial dominance, issues of race and inclusion were contested in a variety of geographical settings, including Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya and the West Indies. Wartime activities were not necessarily gendered, and often made girls prominent and visible in the public domain for the first time. This paper will investigate the extent to which indigenous children and young people were incorporated into the movement in these British world locations and their differing levels of citizenship. It therefore addresses issues of young people’s agency in relation to factors of ethnicity and gender in a period of global war.

The Eviction of Edith Cavell: A study of the changing nature of exhibiting First World War collections relating to women at the Imperial War Museum over the past century

Alyson Mercer, King’s College, London

A century ago on October 12, 1915 British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing squad. At the time, her status was elevated almost overnight to make her name synonymous with terms such as ‘heroine’ and ‘martyr’. Celebrated in the contemporary press, her story has since become a constant factor in the presentation of information in all exhibitions relating to women’s wartime work hosted by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and other institutions around the world. While the IWM and its exhibition spaces have undergone numerous transformations since it was hailed as the National War Museum in 1917, there has been a constant female presence in the nation’s war story as represented through material culture. This paper charts the changing nature of the spatial allocation of artifacts within the larger context of competing home front/ war front narratives within the new First World War galleries of the IWM. In particular, this paper will focus on exhibiting the experiences of women during the First World War, and how shrinking space allocated to women’s war work had at times in the past coincided with the need to represent subsequent conflicts over the past century. Returning to the supposed ‘eviction’ of Edith Cavell from the nation’s most recent reincarnation of the ‘official’ storyline of remembering the First World War, this paper will finally examine the re-evaluation of Cavell’s role as a modern day heroine, and will hypothesize whether the reduction of space allocated to telling her story is perhaps due to a shifting focus away from celebrating the narrative of the individual, in favour of a larger overarching record of the Great War.

‘Necessary’ and ‘Minor’ Items: Nurses, VADs and Nursing Orderlies in British Home Hospitals

Jessica Meyer, University of Leeds

The writings of British nurses during the First World War have provided rich insight into the lives of an important group of women in wartime. Along with many other topics, including female voluntarism, professional status and trauma, the memoirs and letters of both professional nurses and volunteers have illuminated the relationships between both these groups of women and between them and the men they encountered as part of their military medical service. The relationship between Sister and VAD, nurse and doctor and nurse and patient have all be explored by both historians and literary critics. One group whose encounter with nurses and VADs has remained unexplored, however, is that of the rankers of the Royal Army Medical Corps who served as nursing orderlies in hospitals along the line of evacuation. From Casualty Clearing Station to home hospital, these men worked alongside both professional nurses and VADs forming, in the process, a unique set of relationships shaped by ideas of appropriate gender roles in wartime, military and medical hierarchies, and the questions of status and authority that arose from all of these. This paper will look at the relationships between nurses and medical orderlies as represented in the pages of two home hospital journals, The Gazette of the 3rd London General and The

‘Southern’ Cross, journal of the 1st Southern General Hospital in Birmingham. Using both articles and images from the journals, the paper will explore how orderlies viewed nursing sisters and VADs and vice versa to argue that struggles over professional and voluntary authority between the two groups profoundly shaped the gender identity and relationships of both.

‘My husband is interested in war generally’: Gender, Generation and Commemorating the Great War Lucy Noakes, University of Brighton

At the war’s end, and in the following decade, most British towns, cities and villages, together with numerous schools and workplaces, erected memorials to the war’s dead. These memorials came to sit at the heart of British practices of remembrance. They were both the ‘memory sites’ that communities gathered at to conduct formal remembrance ceremonies on the anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11th, each year, and they served, as Jay Winter has noted, as reminders to these communities of who had been bereaved, and who might subsequently need both emotional and economic support. According to the historian Adrian Gregory, the needs and desires of surviving veterans were gradually marginalised in commemorative practice which, by the mid-1920s, was focused around the figure of the grieving widow or mother. At its outset then, memorial and commemorative practice can be under stood as gendered. Starting in 1937, the social survey organisation Mass Observation collected ‘day surveys’ of behaviour at war memorials and the meanings of both memorials and the Armistice Day ceremonies. In 2014, this rich and suggestive source of often ‘private’ attitudes, emotions and beliefs around war commemoration was joined by comments on reflections on the Great War’s centenary, and Remembrance Day in November that year, written by members of the current Mass Observation panel. This paper will being by outlining some of the ways that commemorative practice of the Great War can be understood as gendered from its outset before discussing the Mass Observation material collected in the 1930s and in 2014, considering the extent to which men and women of both generations related to these practices in gendered ways.

Suffragettes and the Scottish press during the First World War Sarah Pedersen, Robert Gordon University

This paper analyses the changing image of the suffrage movement and individual suffragettes in local Scottish newspapers in response to the First World War. Before the outbreak of war, the suffragettes were comparatively uniformly portrayed in the press. Regardless of whether a paper supported or disagreed with suffragette tactics, stories of hunger strikers, attacks on property, the exploits of the leaders and the condemnation or support of politicians and newspaper readers filled the pages of Scottish newspapers. However, during the war the image of the suffragette splintered into many very different narratives. While Mrs Pankhurst attempted to present the suffragette as a patriotic worker for the war effort and many militant and non-militant organisations received coverage for

16 turning their skills and contacts to such work, there were also stories in the newspapers associating suffragettes with the peace effort – or even with conspiracies against the state. Doctors and nurses at the Scottish Women’s Hospitals were often approvingly described as ‘suffragettes’ but the appellation retained its negative connotations when used about the peace campaigner Mrs Despard. Mrs Pankhurst was even forced to publically disassociate herself from former suffragettes in the Wheeldon case in 1917. Brave ‘suffragette battalions’ were reported to be arriving in France, but at the same time a politician could paint the Germans as ‘the suffragettes of Europe’. Whilst newspapers wrote enthusiastically of women’s contribution to the war effort, jokes, songs and skits about suffragettes were frequent elements in the many fundraising concerts reported in local news columns. There has been much work on the suffrage issue in recent years, but less consideration has been given to the campaign for Women’s suffrage during the Great War. This paper thus contributes to the study of the suffrage campaign in this crucial period and also offers a specifically Scottish focus.

What the Women Did: Remembering or reducing women from the First World War on the contemporary British stage

Amanda Phipps, University of Exeter

This paper explores the plethora of First World War theatre productions staged in recent tears. A variety of play will be examine such as The Christmas Truce (RSC) which portrays women’s role as nurses, Out of the Cage (Fine Line) which shows women’s war effort in factories and Shellshock the Musical (Shellshock Productions) where women embody the domestic sphere. Whilst taken together these plays seem to display a variety of roles and attitudes adopted by women during wartime, this paper will argue that they have become stereotypes on the British stage. It will be suggested that the selective narrative of the war which has gained significant dominance in cultural memory makes it incredibly difficult for productions to deviate from such portrayals of women. It is argued that the passing of time had led to certain easily-recognisable representations of women, which fit with popular understanding of women’s history and contemporary views of ‘old-fashioned’ gender roles, dominating theatre productions. This paper will explore a triple bill of plays from the 1920s remounted at the Southwark Playhouse entitled What the Women Did (Two’s Company). These plays delve below stock female characters, for example one examines the uncertain position of a woman whose husband has only been declared ‘missing’. Consequently, What the Women Did suggests that during and in the direct aftermath of the war, women’s experiences were not always seen as easily categorised. Direct memory perhaps meant that these plays looked beyond the surface of nurses, factory workers and domesticity to the multifaceted ways in which women had to cope during wartime. This paper will therefore address the limited representation of women on the contemporary stage, questioning whey women’s diverse experiences and reactions to the First World War are often reduced in remembrance

What happened to the women’s movement during the First World War? The English suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union June Purvis, University of Portsmouth

‘What happened to the women’s movement during the First World War’ is a commonly asked question, especially about the suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), who dominated the headlines during the pre-war period. This paper will focus on the WSPU and explore the reaction of its leaders, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, to the war and its activities during the conflict.

The Carer, the Combatant and the Clandestine: Images of Women in the First World War in War Illustrated Magazine

Jonathan Rayner, University of Sheffield

The weekly magazine War Illustrated was published throughout the First World War, and provided its readers with a highly visual record of the global conflict. Its reporting, commentary and editorial sections were accompanied by extensive illustration through photographs, maps and the work of war artists. In addition to depicting the evolving conflict from the frontlines, War Illustrated also reported the effects of the war upon non- combatants such as women and children, both on the home front in the UK and in Europe. Within the magazine’s pages, images of women occupy several demarcated roles and reinforce specific ideological and propagandist discourses. Images of women in France and Belgium are central to the exaggerated narratives of German atrocities committed against civilians. The depiction of women engaging in employment and especially in war work during the conflict are also key to the propagation of concepts of national unity and sacrifice. However, while female endeavours are celebrated in certain gender-specific environments and employments, such as nursing and charity work, other occupations, such as spying, entering uniformed service and even engaging in combat, are represented in paradoxical terms as both responsible and heroic, and dangerous and transgressive activities. Such representations and exploitations of female images and experiences are subsumed within wider war narratives, which both sensationalise and normalise the socially transformative effects of the conflict.

“In a curious way, we were worth it”: Gender, motivation and value of war work on the Balkan front

Rachel Richardson, Independent Scholar

War work and the perception of its value is closely linked to gender, with the m ale soldier’s story reflecting the ultimate sacrifice, and female roles (such as nursing and motherhood) either seen in relation to the sacrifice of men, or recast as a variation of male sacrifice by borrowing the narrative (as seen in Janet Watson’s Fighting Different Wars). My

18 paper will explore how on the Balkan front these roles were reversed, with soldiers being frustrated with the inaction on their front and the lack of public appreciation for their sacrifice, while volunteers (mainly female relief and aid workers) received both accolades on the home front and opportunities that would not have been afforded them there. The volunteers, mostly women, were largely enthusiastic about their war work, whereas British soldiers, all men, were reluctant and rather resentful of their posts. While one might assume gender accounts for this disparity, it could be something usually aligned with gender—the roles prescribed to each gender by society. Women reveled in the opportunity to find their work so valued, or the opportunity to do something that fulfilled them for the first time. Men, used to having their work appreciated, were discouraged and resentful to find themselves relegated to a much-criticized "side-show." The Balkan front, and the way that men and women wrote about their war experiences there, give an opportunity to explore how motivation and perceptions of worth shifted when traditional social roles were not reflected in war work.

Women’s Military Organisation in First World War Britain: Refining the Double Helix Model

Krisztina Robert, University of Roehampton

One of the core features of the ‘double helix’ model is the imperative to analyse women’s wartime roles and their impact on gender relations not in isolation, but as part of a broader gender system which also defines masculine war participation. Based on this paradigm, historians have assessed the effects of women’s military employment in First World War Britain by comparing female auxiliary workers to soldiers in terms of organisation, status and conditions. Scholars concluded that women’s military work had failed to transform traditional gender categories, pointing to the inferior, civilian status of the female workers, indicated by their separate organisation, different insignia and lower pay that that of the soldiers they replaced. This papers re-examines these arguments by exploring the organisation and status of the Women’s Services in wartime Britain. It argues that women’s entry into the armed forces was enabled by the amateur military tradition which relied on temporary, civilian soldiers at times of danger to supplement the regular forces. Consequently, it was this tradition which defined women’s incorporation into the armed forces, resulting in auxiliary, rather than regular, military organisation, status and conditions. Therefore, if we want to assess the impact of women’s martial employment on gender categories, we must compare female auxiliary workers with male auxiliary forces, rather than regular soldiers. Such a comparison reveals not only that female auxiliaries ranked higher than most male auxiliary units, but also that auxiliary status was a justified position for these women and served them well, providing several benefits of regular soldiers without the ultimate responsibilities of combatants. The paper concludes that the ‘double helix’ model needs refining by specifying that women’s war participation should be analysed alongside the wartime roles of comparable and equivalent male participants in a system which emphasizes the diversity of wartime femininities and masculinities.

Food Narratives in Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother

Cafer Sarıkaya, History Department, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

In recent years, Turkish political and social life has been marked by public debates about how far one can guarantee the freedom of expression and cultural rights for ethnic and religious minorities and whether past atrocities committed in the name of the nation can be acknowledged. Some of the most contradictory discussions have been on the Kurdish issue and the massacre of Armenians in 1915. This paper investigates Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother with a special emphasis on food narratives in her memoir. My Grandmother is a real life story of Fethiye Çetin’s Armenian grandmother. There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories in Turkey. On a more personal level, I have a similar ethnic background. My paternal grandmother was from a Circassian family that came to Çarşamba from Russia as a result of the migration wave from the 19th century Caucasus and my maternal grandmother came from a Georgian immigrant family of Batumi. My great grandmother was an Armenian lady called Mari who took the name Zeliha after getting married to my Turkish great grandfather in Ünye in 1915 during First World War. My great grandmother made it possible for herself and her family to stay in the region by marrying my great grandfather and becoming a Muslim. She was an exception in that she was a lucky woman who was never pressured by her Muslim husband for her original religious conviction despite the conversion. Unfortunately, we don’t know very much in detail about the nature of such conservations if we don’t have our family secrets. I hope women like my grandmother could and did in actuality practice their pre-conversion faith. In her memoir, Fethiye Çetin breaks the silence and helps accelerate the profusion of confession literature and testimonials about hidden Armenians in Turkey. In this paper I will focus on the following questions: How does the author negotiate between her Turkish and Armenian identities? How does her grandmother in disguise of a Turkish housewife prepare certain foods that are related to her Armenian heritage? How does the author reconcile the conflicts in the household growing as a Turk and admit her hidden minority status to her grandchild before she dies that challenges dominant Turkish narrative on Armenian minorities in Turkey?

Expressions of War though Gendered Sound Laura Seddon, University of Portsmouth

At the outbreak of the First World War, there was a burgeoning feminist musical subculture in London creating unprecedented opportunities for the performance of women’s music. This underground movement had gained momentum through the formation of the Society of Women Musicians in 1911 (many members were also active in the suffrage movement), and women’s participation in the Cobbett competitions for chamber music – a musical form that the Society considered was to be the path towards a ‘woman’s sound’. This paper will examine three examples of women composers during the War and their different musical responses to their personal and political environments. The two movements of Morfydd Owen’s (1891-1918) Piano Trio Liege and Rheims (1915) are a direct response to early news

20 reports that these cities’ cathedrals were destroyed in the early months of war. During this period, Owen was a composition student at the Royal Academy of Music in London and this piece is analysed as a gendered resonance across architectural and cultural spaces. The Phantasie String Trio (1915) by Susan Spain Dunk (1880-1962), who also remained in London during the War, represents an avoidance of war issues and a conforming to sonata form (a form which had been developed primarily through male German composers). This is juxtaposed with Adela Maddison’s (1866-1929) first-hand experience of war, as she had to escape Germany at the outbreak of the War to return to England, where her Piano Quintet was composed in 1916. The form of this work reflects the chaotic situation in which she found herself, and also represents a return to smaller scale work, having previously written operas and orchestral music. Through these three cases, it will, therefore, be argued that women’s musical responses to the War were not only representative of personal experiences but that these works contributed to a collective subversion of ‘masculine’ forms within classical music.

Love as moral imperative and anti-war strategy in the International Women's Movement 1914-1919 Ingrid Sharp, University of Leeds

While the majority of organized women turned away from internationalism in 1914 to engage in patriotic war work, a small minority within the suffrage movement remained convinced that the international cooperation and political influence of women were urgently needed to bring the present war to an end and create conditions where future wars could be prevented. The call for participation in a Women’s International Congress to be held at The Hague in April 1915, which was widely distributed and reproduced in the press, set out the pacifist women’s principles clearly, condemning the war as the insane product of male politics and demanding women’s suffrage as the only way of preventing future conflict. For some women activists, the outbreak of the war had confirmed their view that far from being the rational sex, men were dangerously volatile, motivated by self- interest, venality and a tendency to violence. As the German version put it: ‘We women declare the war, the last word in men’s statesmanship, to be madness. War is only possible in the life of nations in the grip of a mass psychosis, for it seeks to destroy everything that the creative forces of humanity have built up over centuries.’ Despite their condemnation of male irrationality, the women who met at The Hague in 1915 and again in Zurich in 1919 deployed strikingly emotional language. Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer made the following impassioned speech at The Hague: ‘Brains – they say – have ruled the world till today. If brains have brought us to what we are in now, I think it is time to allow also our hearts to speak.’ Within the international women's organization for peace, a rhetoric of love reaching across national boundaries was set against the messages of hatred and enmity that dominated international exchanges and the national press during and in the aftermath of the war. The association of pacifism with womanly weakness and emotionality led to women's organized resistance to the First World War being dismissed by many as sentimental and naive. This paper will examine the writings of key peace activists during the First World War as well as the accounts and resolutions of the International Women's Congresses held at The Hague in 1915 and Zurich in 1919 in order to show that the women’s pacifist position was both radical and coherent, and reveal how they deployed articulations

21 of love as both a moral imperative and a powerful, gendered strategy of resistance to war.

“Soft hands at work in the stables” Nicola Smith, University of Brighton in Hastings

Cecil Aldin, a World War I remount purchasing officer and Master of Hounds recalls in his autobiography that the demands of war meant that he was as short of men as he was of horses. “…there was only one thing to be done and that was to see if I could get any women and girls to help.” Aldin looked no further than women who were hunt members to staff the remount depots.This paper explores the experience of women who joined the remount service and how they challenged the accepted norms of behaviour for middle class female riders. I will discuss the varied experiences of two women: Lucy Elinor Horrocks who worked as Cecil Aldin’s head women in Berkshire, and was later imprisoned for fraud; and in contrast Margaret Tryon Woodforde who more traditionally married Michael Rimmington, the officer in charge of the remount depot in Shropshire where she worked. The remount women started a process of change in attitudes to riding which in the interwar period moved a largely masculine, military dominated activity to what became largely a female leisure pursuit.

Grace Charlotte Vulliamy, C.B.E. Forgotten War Heroine Katherine Storr

The name Grace Charlotte Vulliamy is not one which many people recognise today, yet her contemporaries compared her to Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell, undertaking similar wartime work to each. She was a nurse in the new field of psychology, and like Cavell, helped prisoners to escape, smuggling men onto ships about to cross the Channel. She began her war-work with the Women’s Emergency Corps and then went to Flushing to help the Local Government Board with refugees. While there, she simultaneously worked in refugee camps with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee in Holland, leaving this work in 1917. She was concerned about the conditions in which British Prisoners of War were held in Germany and pushed the authorities to agree prisoner exchanges, campaigning for the inclusion of Privates and accompanying prisoners on their journeys from Germany. Post-war, the British Committee for Relief in Poland, which she founded in 1919, was probably the first fund to be helped by Save the Children and she was a Life Vice-President of that Fund. Vulliamy was a delegate for the Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants. She was a woman who pushed at boundaries, did not suffer fools gladly, and had some prejudices typical of the age. However, she was much loved. Vulliamy’s ability with languages and mental nursing experience were vital in her war-work. She received several honours, including the CBE in 1919. This paper, which arises from material made available by the Vulliamy family, will focus on her work in Holland during the First World War. I hope it will help to restore her to the canon of women’s history.

The Role of Women in the Italian Veterans Association (1915-1923): notes and research perspectives

Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre, Independent Scholar

The role of Italian women during the First World War was certainly studied and deepened. This work aims to investigate the following three aspects that have still not developed and that it is possible to bring to the relationship between women and associations of veterans:

1) The role of women in assisting wounded and mutilated soldiers 2) The role of the wives and widows of veterans in the Associations 3) The nature of the relationship between veterans - especially mutilated - and women.

This paper aims to deepen the relationship between veterans and women (both widows that family members of soldiers rendered permanently disabled), in particular the theme of participation of the women in the life of the various associations established during and after the war. In particular, this research aims to turn its attention to the unpublished sources of the Italian National Association of Disabled Ex-Servicemen (ANMIG), but also to the work of the Committees of Assistance to the mutilated soldiers. The women participated to the organization of committees for assistance; they asked to have an active part in the life of associations; they were opposed by disabled veterans who accused them of taking away their jobs. The relationship with the mutilated (especially regarding the problem of work) then appears particularly interesting, especially after the enactment of the law on compulsory employment (Labriola Law, 1921). Deepening these aspects will therefore clarify how women organized their action and their public presence during and after the war; how they tried to self-determination (even compared to men); which self- image they proposed to the Italian society.

Women, work and the countryside in the Great War: a case study of the Women’s War Agricultural Committees

Nicola Verdon, Sheffield Hallam University

This paper will examine how rural women’s work on the Home Front was determined and shaped by the intersection of class, gender and region. It will do so through a case study of the Women’s War Agricultural Committees (WWACs), which were first set up in 1916 to oversee the registration of village women for work on the land. This paper draws upon one of the few extant collections from the Great War: the Bedfordshire WWAC. Their committee records offer us insight firstly into the scale and distribution of women’s agricultural labour during the war at the local level, and secondly the administrative enterprise and endeavour of the women who volunteered to direct that work. It is the second group who are the focus of this paper. Who were the women that volunteered to run the committees, what

23 experience did they have, and what opportunities did working for the WWAC offer them? It will be argued that these committees reinforced local power networks and upheld rural class divisions but they also gave middle-class women an opportunity to contribute to the war in a way that was gender and class-appropriate. For some women it was short-lived, with the Bedfordshire WWAC office closed by early 1920. Others however honed skills and expertise that formed the basis of long-term volunteer service that extended into the Second World War.

Wartime Reality as Fashion Fantasy: Austerity, mourning and practicality as fashion trends during the Great War

Lucie Whitmore, University of Glasgow

Women’s fashion from the Great War functions as a device through which women’s social, economic and emotional lives can be explored in the present day. British fashion trends – worn mostly by the higher classes but aspired to by many – reflected the interests, hopes and concerns of the nation and can be used to chart the progress of the war itself. These trends survive in museum stores and women’s magazines such as The Gentlewoman and The Queen, who marketed the new fashions week-by-week without fail between 1914-1918. This paper will look at three ways in which the war had a direct impact on women’s fashion and the fashion industry, and how these – seemingly negative – developments, were interpreted and marketed as fashionable choices by women’s magazines and other media. The first of these wartime ‘trends’ is austerity fashion; from re-dyed furs and wedding gowns to the ‘remnant fashions’ celebrated by many journalists, who simultaneously renounced any austerity propaganda. Secondly, the issue of practicality in women’s attire will be addressed. The First World War was not solely responsible for an increased functionality in women’s fashion in the early twentieth century, but the popularity for easy wear ‘washing frocks,’ blouses and jumpers can certainly be attributed to an increased functionality in women’s own lives. Lastly, this paper will address the issue of fashionable mourning dress; considering the changing etiquette of mourning in the era of modern warfare. As hundreds-of-thousands of young men were massacred on the continent and the numbers of young widows swelled, it is no surprise that the subject of suitable mourning dress became a highly contested topic in wartime media. The material significance of these trends represents the changing role of women in society, but also offers insight into women’s mental outlook during the war – a subject which wartime journalists were not afraid to discuss. The study of these garments in fashion – as opposed to necessity – indicates the true impact of war on everyday female lives; not just those women who were more directly involved in the conflict.