Posters and Images of Women in the Great War

Abstract

By the early twentieth century, posters were an established means of communication: in entertainment, in the marketing of consumer goods and also in a political context, in the suffrage campaign. However, they were to assume a new importance when the war, which began in the summer of 1914, did not, as was hoped, end by Christmas. The First World War required a far greater mobilization of national resources than earlier conflicts, so that posters became just one element, but a very considerable element, of a growing home propaganda front; print runs of 40 000 were not unusual, and re-prints frequent.²

The scope of this chapter is limited to Britain. While there is an extensive literature on the posters of the combatant nations of the First World War, references to women (and particularly to posters addressed to women) are at best only brief. It became apparent that I would have to examine every nation’s national archives to do justice to an international perspective, and so I had to be content with a search of British collections. Fortunately, an extensive record of British poster campaigns of the Great War are held in the Imperial War and Victoria and Albert Museums, to which I owe my thanks. I have also drawn from two articles which offer a femininist analysis of the roles and images constructed for women in wartime: Shover (19 ); Marcus (1989).