Dressed to Kill: Clothes, Cultural Meaning and First World War Women Munitions Workers

Abstract

Clothing has much to offer as a subject for cultural analysis. Clearly used by humanity as a language of symbolism and communication beyond its practical and economic purposes, clothing allows us to read what people want to tell others about themselves as well as what culture, social systems and eroticism elaborate. The very words ‘to clothe’ and ‘clothes’ have become a pervasive metaphor for both value systems and collusion to mask them, the latter often through the particular metaphor of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’. For the historian, clothing presents a tantalizing dilemma: scholars who have written about fashion insist that changes in fashion cannot be simply and directly read as representing historical events such as war,¹ but, as a form of cultural, artistic and social expression, clothing is too good a subject matter not to mine for cultural history. Elizabeth Wilson (1987) has asserted that: ‘Fashion is obsessed with gender, defines and redefines the gender boundary.’² My interest here is mostly not in fashion but because, like fashion, clothing itself is a cultural marker of the gender boundary, I want to investigate the coexistence of multiple cultural and historical meanings of the clothing of one cohort of women, and thus to discover what we can learn from them.

I thank Carroll Pursell for generous help with the research for this essay, for being convinced I should write it and for coming up with the title; and Antoinette Burton for her typically insightful comments.