Kitchen Window Feminism: Sarah Macnaughtan, Wartime Care and the Authority of Experience in the South African and First World Wars

Abstract

ABSTRACTSarah Macnaughtan, a wealthy novelist, used volunteer care work to claim the legitimacy of her wartime experience in the South African and First World Wars and to assert women's rights in the early twentieth‐century British empire. Macnaughtan framed her caregiving experiences in both inherently domestic terms – ‘from a kitchen window’ – and as a justification for women's suffrage and participation in public life. Her example loosens a persistent binary between trained nurses and untrained wartime volunteers and highlights the importance of precedents set in the British empire to the feminist politics and caring practices of the First World War.