'The Blood of Our Sons'. Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (review)

This is an important new contribution to the domestic history of Britain during the First World War and to the history of women's suffrage. It is also part of a growing literature on gender and warfare, on the construction of political identities and on the ways in which cultural values can permeate political discourse. The book is original without proclaiming this fact too loudly and its aims are laid out with admirable clarity in an effective introduction. Gullace shows successfully that in the circumstances of wartime Britain, notions of citizenship were redefined. This redefinition made it more difficult to exclude women who were participating in civil society from the right to participate in politics. New ideas on citizenship were constructed by a range of organizations. Sifting ideas from a wide and eclectic range of source materials, the book tells a convincing story of the way that images and ideas about the role and rights of the citizen were expressed. The book is 'as much about perceptions as it is about reality, as much about culture as it is about politics, and as much about men as it is about women'. After 1914, service and patriotism became the mark of the good citizen. These were not attributes that were unique to men. Propagandist attacks on the male 'shirkers' who declined to enlist were paralleled by propaganda depicting women's wartime work for the nation. This included 'giving' their men to the war, working in munitions factories and the vital task of mothering the next generation. The book looks at the positive construction of the soldier/citizen in propaganda, at the less positive images of men constructed during the unsuccessful recruitment campaigns which led to the introduction of conscription, and at the cultural implications of the 'white feather' attacks on conscientious objectors by women. The 'new' discourse constructed during the war challenged the case put forward by opponents of women's enfranchisement before 1914. At the same time, more favourable images of women were developed. The campaign for women's rights was not abandoned during the war (contrary to some historical accounts) but 'rearticulated' by the W.S.P.U., which was 'highly influential in reshaping public attitudes towards women's suffrage during the Great War' (p. 5). The negative image of 'suffrage women' constructed before 1914 could no longer be sustained. If the attention given to women's public patriotism is a feature of Gullace's book, so too is the propaganda value of women serving at the front as nurses. Gullace also notes the way in which some groups of women argued for the right to fight and die for their country in armed conflict. All this helped to undermine pre-war notions on the link between gender and citizenship. The material is well-described, with a good eye for the resonance of an image. Excellent use is made of unusual written sources. More well-known, but none the less powerful, visual images are also utilized and a series of these are reproduced in the book. All this it is inventive, imaginative and convincing.

The final section of the book seeks to explain an essentially political event - the enfranchisement of (some) women in 1918 - seeing this political 'reality' as the product of the altered perceptions delineated in earlier chapters. This is less effective. It is one thing to demonstrate that a new narrative of citizenship existed; it is more complicated to step into the world of the empirical historian and show that this particular reconceptualization altered the attitudes of political actors and brought about legislative change. More 'conventional' political historians have shown that the 1918 Reform Act did not enfranchise many of the women depicted in the propaganda campaigns studied so expertly by Gullace. It was not young munitions workers, nurses and wives who got the vote in 1918, but married women and...