2This issue of LISA e-journal examines, via the example of the United Kingdom and the First and Second World Wars, the ways in which a nation calls on its female members in wartime. In what ways are women “used” by the nation and, in turn, in what ways can women be seen as “making use” of war? How are gender stereotypes affected by war and how do women themselves react to their altered experience? During these wars, how were representations of women – written, pictorial, cinematographic, auditory – developed in accordance with new demands? What relationship was there between the representations and surrounding “reality”? What were the longer-term effects of these wars on women? These are some of the questions which the articles in this issue address.

3The articles in the first part of the journal analyse some of the very often innovatory roles and positions adopted by women during the First World War in both military and civilian domains. The articles tackle assessments of the perturbing phenomenon of the woman in military uniform and society’s reaction to her, offer analysis of photographic records of women in industry, of Glaswegian women’s militant defence of their access to housing, of the more upper-class contributions via philanthropic enterprises. The first part concludes with an examination of the relationship between war work and women’s suffrage. The axis around which the articles in the second part of the journal turn is that of the representation of women’s participation in and reactions to the Second World War, moving from the concept of women’s life-writing or oral accounting of their experiences to cinematographic or fictional constructions of women in wartime with, in addition, opinions and views emanating from the central political source of Parliament. In both parts light has been thrown on many different facets of women’s lives and experiences through the study of a range of source material: personal accounts, fictional accounts, official documents, cinema, photography, etc..

4Thus, the ten articles in this issue of LISA e-journal examine the supposed or genuine disturbance in gender roles occasioned by periods of warfare in the twentieth-century United Kingdom. The authors have responded to the call for papers by offering the fruits of their research into women and warfare in a wide variety of areas, drawing upon an equally extensive choice of source material. As a result the journal offers an enriching and revealing picture of women and war, highlighting, on occasion, the similarities, for British women, between the two major world conflicts and, on the other hand, on occasion, pointing to the differences between the two conflicts as far as women were concerned.

6This issue opens with an article by Lucy Noakes examining the entry of British women into the armed forces during the 1914-1918 conflict and the reactions to this initiative. Lucy Noakes underlines the extent to which this event deeply disturbed predominant views on women’s roles, soliciting hostile verbal comments and very negative opinions in relation to women in uniform. These reactions were centred to a large extent on women’s sexuality, indicating the degree to which their donning of a military uniform was felt to be a threat to masculinity. The wearing of uniforms by female soldiers was read, paradoxically, either as a sign of their “perverted” female sexuality, they must be lesbians, or a sign of their excessive desire for the male, they must have volunteered in order to draw closer to the male soldiers. Accusations of immorality, labelling as prostitutes and rumours of pregnancy outside marriage abounded. Lucy Noakes suggests that the vision of women in uniform disturbed profoundly precisely because they were a “visible reminder of the ways in which war was disturbing gender roles”. She points out that this sexualised reading of women soldiers recurred during the Second World War, members of the ATS being nicknamed “officers’ groundsheets” or “Auxiliary tarts”. Even in the context of the war in Iraq, in the 1990s, British MPs discussing women’s roles in the army expressed the fear that, if they were captured, women soldiers would be victims of sexual assault and rape and, furthermore, that servicemen’s wives would worry about the presence of women amongst male ranks. In the domain of the military, which is so strongly marked as male territory, the presence of women has always been and still is seen as a source of potential disruption and disorder.

7Claire Bowen’s article turns its attention to the civilian domain of women’s participation in industrial labour, between 1914-1918, focusing on the fascinating representation of women and work provided by the photographic archives created thanks to the initiative of the Women’s Work Sub-Committee’s “Substitution” Photographic Project. Claire Bowen points out that although the photographs do not enable the present-day viewer to apprehend the often deplorable work conditions of women in factories during the First World War they do represent the women as highly competent and skilled workers, reversing by their visual evidence the stereotype according to which women would be physically incapable of carrying out many of the tasks required in industry.

8Olivier Esteves and Philippe Vervaecke offer accounts of women’s reactions either to or during the conflict, interestingly at opposite ends of the social scale and, as a consequence, establish ironical echoes around the concept of patriotism. Olivier Esteves brings to the fore the role played by women in the rent strike movement in Glasgow in 1915. The arrival of thousands of supplementary munitions workers in Glasgow, all needing housing, became a pretext for exorbitant rent rises: women whose husbands were fighting on the front, who themselves were often working to provide munitions, found themselves at the mercy of the landlords’ cupidity: patriotism did not extend to showing any generosity towards tenants who were also often women munitions workers. Non payment of rent led to eviction. A movement developed to refuse to pay the rents and women were much in the foreground of the action. Tension was such that the future Provost of Glasgow, Patrick Dollan, wrote to encourage the women with the words, “Defend your homes against the Huns”, equating thus the landlords with the foreign enemy. In the face of increasing protest, the government proposed an Act, which was finally passed, to freeze rents for the duration of the war. Olivier Esteves emphasizes the importance of the question of the women’s class origins in this conflict and points out that their emancipation in class terms was as important as their emancipation in terms of gender.

9At the other end of the social scale, where class membership is an equally determining factor, Philippe Vervaecke provides a study of the philanthropic patriotism prevalent among women members of the Primrose League, a conservative movement created in 1883 which had, by 1913, 800,000 members, male and female. With its mainly upper and middle-class membership, often well established in rural areas and small towns, it offers a focus on a quite different sector of the population, women who were somewhat older, as well as being from the more rural areas of Britain. P. Vervaecke notes that the roles carried out by these women continue to be those traditionally associated with women: fund collecting, sewing, nursing the wounded, providing entertainment for them, participating in propaganda, particularly in the area of food consumption and waste prevention, and helping to recruit women into the labour force. In this domain an interesting contradiction is brought to light as patriotism argued in favour of encouraging women into work, in order to free men for combat, whilst respect for the social conventions linked to gender roles pulled in the opposite direction, mobilising distrust in the face of women’s increasing independence in relation to employment. Many women apparently found satisfaction in the roles the Primrose League enabled them to play during the war but their male counterparts continued to hold the important posts in the movement. Following the war a large number of women left the movement to join movements specifically based on female membership, such as the “Women’s Unionist Organization”, and one notes a decline, as far as women are concerned, of the Primrose League in favour of these all women organizations. It would seem that if philanthropic patriotism could, during the war, offer sufficient motivation to remain within the League, political emancipation after the war needed to find expression in movements where women could occupy more space and act more independently.

10Each of the above studies researches into the different ways in which women participated in the war effort: they illustrate the ways in which women were variously “rewarded”, or the ways in which their efforts were “received”. It must be remembered that whilst women were called upon to support the national effort they were not, in terms of suffrage, fully fledged citizens, not having access to the vote. Véronique Molinari examines the question of women’s suffrage and its links with the 1914-1918 conflict, concluding that it would be incorrect to see women’s suffrage as a “récompense” for their participation in the war effort. She underlines that women workers could hardly be said to have been rewarded since they were subject to mass dismissal at the close of the war. Furthermore, women’s suffrage initially concerned only women over the age of thirty, while many of the working women were in fact young women, so it was precisely working women who were more generally excluded. As V. Molinari points out, the central concern of the Representation of the People Act was the solving of the problem of the absent male voters and the measures concerning women’s suffrage were the only ones which did not receive unanimous approbation, thus the obtaining of the vote was, no doubt, in her opinion, related to the upheaval of the war but not specifically to women’s huge contribution in industrial and other employments.

11Beyond the individual theme each pursues, the articles in the second part of this number of LISA e-journal, focusing on women in the Second World War, share a concern with highlighting the question of the recording or representing of women’s wartime experiences. Karen Meschia provides an extremely useful theoretical and methodological reflection on the use of women’s own personal accounts of the war. Elizabeth de Cacqueray’s article examines the characteristics of cinematographic representations. Whilst Céline Magot and Rose-May Pham Dinh analyse the contributions fictional works bring to our understanding of the particular position of women in wartime Britain. By working on official documents concerning women, their participation in the war effort and the related legislation, Martine Renard-Stirling introduces another possible angle of approach for the historian who wishes to reconstruct a picture of the situation of women and gender roles during the period: the use of the records of Parliamentary debates, particularly those relating to the call on the female workforce.

12The historian faces the task of attempting to build up accounts of past events which correspond as faithfully as possible to the reality of those events. “What was it really like?” is the recurrent tantalizing question. The basics of historiography teach us that a historical account can only be an attempt at representation but it is expected of the latter that all possible precautions should have been taken to sift fact from fiction. Accounts of the Second World War, as experienced by the British people, and in particular by women, provide excellent case studies of the difficulties involved: indeed, the period is associated with the concept of a great, concerted national effort to defeat fascism. Applying the codes of class distinction, looking down on fellow countrymen of a different social origin, seemed to be no longer acceptable. Gender boundaries were crossed as women moved in to replace men in the labour force and the concept of all pulling together, even the expression of exhilaration at the idea of resisting together, seemed to become the general attitude of the population. As time has passed historians have, on occasion, questioned the true extent of popular adhesion to the war effort: was this idea of social and national unity genuinely felt or was it closer to a myth, the result of a wide-spread, subtle form of propaganda. The experiences and attitudes of women have been of particular interest to women and feminist historians eager, since the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, to give women a voice and to insist on their role in History. Interviewing women has been one way of trying to sound out what it was “really like” for them during the war, what they really thought about their experiences. Karen Meschia’s article offers a synthetic analysis of the development of oral history in the United Kingdom and of the epistemological and methodological debates around the use of oral accounts and also of other forms of “life-writing”, many sources of which exist thanks, in particular, to the Mass-Observation project during the war and to the much more recent BBC “People’s War Archive.”

13Martine Renard-Stirling’s article drawing on the Hansard records enables one to apprehend the wide differences of opinion which existed at the time, among Parliamentary members, both male and female, in relation to the use of female labour, in particular that of married women and mothers, with support or opposition to female labour often cutting across party lines. She underlines that often, women employed whether in industry or in the armed forces, were called on to occupy subaltern functions, even if they were qualified for higher positions. She points to other forms of inequality in the treatment of men and women, such as lower wages, but also lower invalidity pensions in the case of women suffering from physical injury at their workplace, whether in industry or linked to the armed forces. This latter injustice, to which all the female MPs objected, was finally brought to an end, after a number of aborted attempts, in April 1943. M. Renard-Stirling concludes that if the government often did little to encourage equality of the sexes, the role played by women during the war was the source of a rising collective awareness of their social and economic importance and that a certain number of reforms towards the end and after the war did considerably improve conditions of life and open up broader horizons: the abolition of the “marriage bar” in the teaching profession, the opening of teaching hospitals to women, the “Legal Aid and Advice Act”, for example.

14In her article on cinematographic representations Elizabeth de Cacqueray examines a number of filmic texts, appertaining to different filmic genres, showing how they seem to have reacted to the possible gender disturbance caused by the nation’s need for female labour and participation in the war effort. A considerable number of films open up the perspectives for female characters, casting them in innovative roles and functions, offering at once an encouragement and a tribute to female labour. Films such as They Also Serve and Down Our Street foreground the importance even of women who do not work outside the home but who provide essential support to their neighbours or family members working outside the home: a position which was adopted only very much more recently by feminist historians. However, some films continue to put forward die-hard stereotypes, particularly in the domain of the need for secrecy (women remaining closely associated with the idea of dangerous gossip, associated particularly with their sexual attractiveness) and a number of films, after offering roles requiring of women courage and initiative, show them being taken back under a reassuring masculine wing at their close. E. de Cacqueray concludes that there is a specific sort of Second World War cinematographic heroine, capable of great strength but who, ultimately, does not threaten over much male supremacy and whose survival into the post-war period is uncertain.

15Obviously, the novel writer is not in the same position as the historian, the former being free to re-invent the universe as she/he pleases, not having, in any way, to answer to charges of the misrepresenting of events. It is, however, of great interest, to any reader and to the historian, to observe a novelist’s eye turned towards the condition of women during this period of war. As Céline Magot points out, Elizabeth Bowen, in her novel The Heat of the Day subverts the codes of the classic, very masculine genre, of the spy thriller to provide a feminine re-writing: gender disturbance spells out textual disturbance in Bowen’s universe. The novelist’s voice is ultimately another female voice sounding out the experiences of women during the period. Written after the war and, in any case, using the more discreet and intimate form of the novel, Bowen has the possibility of presenting a more problematic view of women’s situations. One of the main features of her enterprise is the invention of a wide panel of female characters, not only the upper class Stella but also the lower class Louie and Connie and the enigmatic Aunt Nettie who escapes the weight of the traditional female role via the simulation of madness. Thanks to the character Louie, Bowen approaches and develops the sensitive subject of the wife who is “unfaithful” to her serviceman husband and who has a child by another man. With a certain degree of irony but, one feels also, affection for her character, Bowen shows how Louie, in her husband’s absence, constructs her identity from the multifarious descriptions of the ideal war heroines she reads about in the newspapers. With her husband gone Louie comes to terms, on her own, with the written word, developing a passion for the newspapers, a voluptuous almost erotic delight in them and their stories, constructing an identity for herself via their versions of wartime womanhood. Yet, as Céline Magot reads her, Bowen’s vision is not really optimistic, for her conclusion is that the female characters continue to be manipulated by the male characters according to the stereotypes of the eternal feminine which are rather re-activated by the war and amplified by the organs of propaganda. Bowen seems to say that, in spite of the radical upheavals caused by war, power structures remain identical accompanied by immutable archetypal discourses.

17This collection of articles illustrates the numerous ways in which the two World Wars created upheaval not only, obviously, in the realm of everyday life and survival but also in the realm of the gendered distribution of social roles. One observes the ironical paradox according to which the nation had, on each occasion, a vital need for its women folk’s energy and competence whilst, at the same time, many members of society feared the consequences of women’s introduction into previously male dominated domains. Thus, in the second conflict, the cinema put forward brave and enterprising heroines but did, on occasion, counter their feminine enterprise with a reminder of the eternal Eve or, once their contributions were made, offer male assistance to wind up the narrative or a male wing for shelter. The sum of this research indicates that, of course, the two wars altered the condition of women in profound ways, as it did that of men, that some changes survived the end of each war but that many of the transformations permitted, perhaps simply because the circumstances of war imposed them, did not survive the end of the war and had to be won back at a later date. Possibly, the fact that the circumstances of war had proved the capacity of women to intervene and contribute in all areas added to their subsequent determination to gain entry into all field of public life. Whatever the results of the contributions of these women, the interest of the researchers represented here seems to show that their efforts should be examined and recognised. It took a very long time for a monument to be built in homage to women in the Second World War and, as far as I know, for example, the women whose health was destroyed by work in the armaments factories in the First World War have no official “monumental” recognition of their sacrifice. It is, in such circumstances, cheering to observe the determination of the world of academia to bring to light and record the many facets of women’s energetic participation in the defence of their society.