Female War Icons: Visual Representations of Women’s Contribution to the First World War in France and Britain in 1914–1918 and 2014–2018

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the representation of women’s roles in the First World War in France and Britain during two key moments in which the war’s cultural memory has been constructed: at the end of the war and during its centenary years. In order to do so, it first considers two visual sources dating from 1918: the film “La Femme française pendant la guerre” (The Frenchwoman in Wartime) made by the Section cine´magraphique de l’arme´e (Army cinema unit), and photographs of British women’s war work commissioned by the Photographic Section of the Ministry of Information. It then analyses the representation of women and the First World War in two museum exhibitions that were both launched in anticipation of the public interest that would be generated by the centenary of the conflict: the First World War galleries in the Imperial War Museum in London, which opened in 2014, and the permanent exhibition in the Muse´e de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War) in Meaux, which first opened its doors in 2011.