Abstract
Because of the physical suffering and mental anguish it entailed, the enormous loss of life it caused, the disabling memories it created and its ultimate uselessness, the Great War has proved the dominant cultural perspective for the twentieth century on matters of physical and spiritual endurance, pacifism and patriotism, class barriers and habits of subservience, the understanding of mental breakdown. Paul Fussell has brilliantly disclosed its formative place in modern memory and myth.1
On this one point, and on this point almost alone, the knowledge of women, simply as women, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not… We have in all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has been, howsoever covered with slain, which has not cost the women of the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, than it has cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life.
Olive Schreiner, Woman and War
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Notes
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1947) p. 7.
Ivor Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, in Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War, ed. I. M. Parsons (London: Heinemann, 1965) p. 60.
David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).
Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 1965).
Like Arthur Marwick’s Women at War, 1914–1918 (London: Fontana, 1977), the discussion of women’s experience of the War solely in relation to the cause of suffrage reveals a certain myopia; a valid connection exists, but one which in isolation tacitly perpetuates the belief that war is men’s concern.
See the Introduction to Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (London: Macmillan, 1990), to which I am indebted.
Philip Hager and Desmond Taylor, The Novels of World War 1 (New York and London: Garland, 1981).
George Parfitt, Fiction of the First World War: A Study (London and Boston, Mass.: Faber & Faber, 1988) p. 136.
Catherine Reilly (ed.), Scars upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981).
Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War: The British Experience (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
Lynn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man’s Land (London: Michael Joseph, 1980).
Jo Vellacott Newberry, ‘Anti-war Suffragists’, History, vol. 62, no. 206 (October 1977).
Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
Judith Stiehm, Women and Men’s Wars (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1983).
Ann Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Pandora, 1985).
Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Selfhood, War and Masculinity’, in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1987).
Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (London: Gollancz, 1978).
Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–39 (London: Virago, 1983).
Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 8 (1983) pp. 422–59.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987).
Nasheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1988).
Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: Sexchanges (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Feminism in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France (New York: Henry Holt, 1918).
Mary Borden, Preface to The Forbidden Zone (London: William Heinemann, 1929).
Helena Swanwick, I Have Been Young (London: Gollancz, 1935) p. 247, quoted by Lyn Bicker.
Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1917) pp. 39, 232–3.
See Sandra Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War’, Signs, vol. 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983).
See the title of Nicola Beauman’s essay: ‘It is not the place of women to talk of mud’, quoting from Cyril Falls, War Books (1930; London: Greenhill Books, 1989) p. 282.
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© 1993 Editorial Board, Lumière (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Goldman, D. (1993). Introduction. In: Goldman, D. (eds) Women and World War 1. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22555-2_1
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