Conference Papers 

The Place of the Great War in the History of British Feminism

Abstract

Although the Great War is an acknowledged watershed in the history of the British feminist movement (if only because the vote was partially won in 1918) it is virtually absent from histories of British feminist political thought, which seem to view it neither as a key turning point nor as having witnessed the development of any noteworthy feminist analyses.

In this paper I propose to address both the reasons for which the Great War exercises such a pull on what one might call “the feminist imaginary” and to discuss whether or not the discrepancy one can observe between histories of the movement and histories of ideas can be explained and justified.

I conclude that it can be explained in theory (histories of movements and histories of ideas need not necessarily share the same chronological markers) but not, given the evidence I discuss, justified in the particular case of the Great War and feminist political thought. This leads me, finally, to suggest that a study of feminist thinking during the Great War has the potential to recast our understanding of how feminism evolved in Britain as a result and in the aftermath of the first total war.

Presentation

Place and Time

Conference: Thinking Gender: The NEXT Generation, organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Leeds University
Date: June 2006

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Gendering the war and peace debate in Britain: a capitulation to separate-sphere ideology?

Abstract

When the Great War broke out, British men were called upon to take part as “Patriots”. Some declined, on the grounds that they were “Quakers” or “Socialists”. Later, they would be called upon to resist conscription as “Conscientious Objectors”. None justified their position for or against the Great War on the grounds that they were “a man”.
By contrast, a substantial number of leading suffrage campaigners, from the pro-war Emmeline Pankhurst to the anti-war Helena Swanwick, publicly justified their position in the war and peace debate on the grounds that this was the only position that women, as women, could/should adopt.

My purpose, in this paper, is twofold. Firstly, I aim to describe and compare the “as women” arguments made by these leading feminists. What collective identity did they ascribe to women and are there marked differences between their accounts? What was it about women, according to these campaigners, that made them necessarily against or in favour of the war? Secondly, I intend to discuss the relationship of these texts to the broader linguistic context within which they operated. Does the war and peace debate considered in its entirety also discuss the position that women, as women, ought to adopt? If so, is this discussion related, and in what way, to the feminists’? What languages (patriotic, populist, pacifist, liberal, etc…) does one find in this broader debate? Which of these languages is taken up in the suffrage campaigners’ texts and how are they made to interact with their “as women” arguments?

In conducting this dual exploration, I hope to be able to contribute to the debate generated by Susan Kingsley Kent’s claim that “feminists’ understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war (…) until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists” (Kent, 1988: 232). Do their contributions to the war and peace debate, steeped as they are in an account of women’s collective identity, confirm this thesis of a capitulation to separate-sphere ideology?

Kent, S. K. (1988), The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism, Journal of British Studies, 27, 232-253.

Place and Time

Conference: "The Gentler Sex? Responses of the women's movement to the First World War 1914-1919", at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in London
Date: September 2005

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