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Manhood and Womanhood in First World War

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover begins with an apt description of the social upheaval which followed the advent of the First World War in 1914:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn. (Lawrence 1959, 1)

The First World War altered the traditional Victorian notions of gender roles, but only temporarily. Many British and American women in the World Wars enjoyed new freedoms and opportunities in times of war; in one woman's words, it was 'like being let out of a cage'. Women, freed from the domestic sphere and allowed, even encouraged to pursue previously considered masculine behaviour, found notions of femininity and womanhood opened. Indeed, Janet Harrison says that 'life is doomed to make for itself moulds, break them, remake them . the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, caught and recaught ever in new birth' (Harrison 570-1). Writers of the early twentieth century argued that modern society exhibited an unprecedented state of freedom, and yet at the same time experienced a greater standardization. Wyndham Lewis argues in Blast that the aesthete and the everyman have grown indistinguishable, and laments a modern world in which 'there is no revolt, it is the normal state' (Lewis 42). Feminists sought a constant construction and reconstruction of those categories which govern the social sphere. The theorist Jacque Ranciere calls this a 'process of subjectivization' where the individual achieves a provisional identity. It is 'the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relationship of a self to an other'. Writers, men as well as women, defined the social as a creative medium, one that is both conditioned by and conditions multiple identities and relations.

The concept of femininity and womanhood underwent the most visibly significant change as a result of the World War. Women were increasingly visible in both the social and political arenas, contributing to the war effort both at home and abroad, and arguing fiercely on the merits or disadvantages of their men being sent into combat. On 12 March 1915, Isabella Ford, in disagreement with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Society's policy of support for the government during the War, argued in the Leeds Weekly Citizen that women's groups should use their efforts to obtain peace. The reasoning was that woman's very existence was dependent upon their male relations, whose death would leave the women at home without purpose or being.

Women have more to lose in the horrible business than some men have; for they often lose more than life itself when their men are killed; since they lose all that makes life worth living for, all that makes for happiness . the destruction of the human race too is felt more bitterly and more deeply by those who through suffering and anguish have brought the human race into the world.

Ford was clearly blind to the social changes precipitated by the war, and many contemporary periodicals and activists argued the changing womanhood. The June 1916 issue of Punch Magazine articulated the complex reactions to the "new" womanhood:

It is quite impossible to keep pace with all the new incarnations of women in war-time - 'bus-conductress, ticket-collector, lift-girl, club waitress, post-woman, bank clerk, motor-driver, farm-labourer, guide, munition maker. There is nothing new in the function of ministering angel: the myriad nurses in hospital here or abroad are only carrying out, though in greater numbers than ever before, what has always been woman's mission. But whenever he sees one of these new citizens, or hears fresh stories of their address and ability, Mr. Punch is proud and delighted. Perhaps in the past, even in the present, he may have been, or even still is, a little given to chaff Englishwomen for some of their foibles, and even their aspirations. But he never doubted how splendid they were at heart; he never for a moment supposed they would be anything but ready and keen when the hour of need struck. Women were involved in a range of activities, including government positions, clerical workers, conductors on buses and trams, and even hard labor. The number of employed women increased from 3,224,600 in July 1914 to nearly 5 million by January of 1918. Industries which had previously been male dominated not only employed women but welcomed them. Rising along with women's roles in the war effort was the suffragette movement. Although the raison d'être of the suffragette movement was the campaign for the vote, a driving goal was legitimising new representations of women, or, more precisely, modifying, challenging and restructuring representations of women. Scholars such as Barbara Green have examined the way in which feminist experiences would influence and inform other subjectivities. Green argues that suffragist literature 'takes up the performative nature of identity, revealing how feminist identities are produced through constant reiteration or performance' (Green 16). Taking up Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, Green suggests that gender roles are socially determined and as such as transitory.

However, changing notions not only of what was appropriate behaviour for men and for women, but what it meant to be a man and a woman, were short-lived. 'Attitudes towards [woman's] roles at home and at work remained remarkably consistant over nearly fifty years. Both wars put conventional views about gender roles under strain', but despite the social upheaval women still experienced hostility in traditionally "masculine" jobs, found female labour devalued, and were once again expected to be responsible for the domestic front (Tylee 1990, p 7). The ambiguity of changing gender roles during the war, and the further attempt to return to the pre-war roles after the troops had returned home, is expressed in contemporary literature.

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