“Maleness run riot”—The great war and women’s resistance to militarism

Abstract

The psychological welfare of propaganda and censorship was first developed by the British government during the First World War. Straight after the declaration of war in 1914 it introduced the Defence of the Realm Act to intimidate groups opposed to the war and suppress their views, while promoting its own imperialist policies. However, pacifist, both women and men, worked together to reveal the methods used, in order to avoid further coerced hostility. They demonstrated that, while force degrades all individuals, women in particular always suffer in militarist societies. A recent article on women and the Great War, by Sandra Gilbert, ignores the research by women which has recovered and discussed this writing. She in fact relies on the British state’s war-time propaganda, to try to argue that the First World War was an “apocalyptic turning-point in the battle of the sexes.” Not only does her argument disregard the history of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain; it also has to ignore what women themselves wrote to show little “exuberance” or “sexual glee” they actually felt. By fudging the cultural distinctions of class and age, she obscures the fact that women are as dehumanised by the modern technological state as men are. It is a point that women made clearly at that period. Furthermore, not having any voice in government, women were almost powerless politically to prevent the war, but they did what they could. In their political stand against bullying and the mechanisms of deceit, women wrote with compassion and irony to show that young men were as psychologically vulnerable to a militarist system as women. It was not something they crowed over.