Women, War and Citizenship

Abstract

involved in the last century had such different meanings for the Britons involved that it is hardly surprising to find it attracting serious attention from feminist scholars. In Nicoletta Gullace's The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women and the Rene gotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War and Sonya Rose's Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945, we have two new studies of how the idea and practice of being a British citizen was changed by war-time conditions. Citizenship has always and only been highly valued in war-time; at other times citizen-makers have to borrow the urgent exhortations of war conditions, and are derided for their false talk. For Gullace, the First World War delivered citizenship for women, and the roles which women and leading feminist organizations played during the war shaped the cultural and legal defi nitions of British citizenship. For Rose, the Second World War exacerbated social and cultural differences in British society at a time when the government was working flat-out to create an image of a united nation and empire an enterprise which still engages establishment historians. 'The British were a united people, with a quite extraordinary, illogical patriotism', Sir John Keegan said recently of World War Two. These eloquent books have escaped the left's traditional reluctance to situate its history in the field of violence; they also add to the as-yet underdeveloped historical analysis of civic identity.1 Nicoletta Gullace focuses on the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) which from the start of World War One positioned itself as a distinctively female belligerent in the war effort. The WSPU's 'unabashed enthusiasm' for recruiting men to fight 'was unique'. She explores the ways in which WSPU activists used feminist speeches and campaigns to press women's case for citizenship, heaping contumely on male 'traitors', strikers and pacifists, even rejecting Prime Minister Asquith's 1916 offer of the vote for women because soldiers away from home could not vote (an example of what she describes sharply as Mrs Pankhurst's 'theatrics of patriotism'). When, by 1916, the role of the army had changed from heroic fighters to stoical sufferers, the feminist case for women's equality was immeasurably strengthened now, in total war, all were equal in sacrifice. The steadfast pacifism