Women, War and Citizenship

Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002; 284 pp., hbk $45, pbk $24.95. ISBN 0-312-29446-8.

Sonya Rose, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 2003; 328 pp., hbk £30, pbk £16.99. ISBN 0-19-925572-5.

Total war changes the life of every person in the warring nations, destroying and mutilating very many of them. Total war is the opposite of civilization. Total war, however, also has a unique potential to generate public good will, and to liberate women from traditional restrictions. The two world wars in which Britain was 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 Renegotiation 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 definitions 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 of some feminists ceased to be the distinct representative voice of women. Instead, the belligerent female patriots, surreptitiously funded by Lloyd George as valuable strike-breakers, won the national argument, thus redefining what it was to be a citizen in Britain. Not a man, but a British-blooded loyalist. 'Blood' was the transmitter of nationality. Despite the emotive impact of her title, Gullace does not properly explore how 'blood' was understood in Edwardian Britain, whether it had the same meaning as in its nineteenth-century French and German usage as an indestructible and inimitable mark of national belonging. Its significance for her appears to lie its genderlessness, that 'blood' was the same in women as in men, and so could be used as a symbol of patriotic belonging to be wielded by feminists for women and against foreigners, whatever their legal entitlement to citizenship. Her case for this feminist victory is well-argued and convincing, but...