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"Munitions of the Mind": Travel Writing, Imperial Discourse and Great War Propaganda by Mrs. Humphry Ward
- English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920
- ELT Press
- Volume 39, Number 2, 1996
- pp. 171-192
- Article
- Additional Information
"Munitions of the Mind": Travel Writing, Imperial Discourse and Great War Propaganda by Mrs. Humphry Ward Claire M. Tylee Brunei University College JOHN MACKENZIE has argued that by the end of the First World War, "much of the landscape of a defensive, nationalist, popular imperialism had become so familiar [in Britain] as to be barely noticed."1 He also pointed out that the role of girls and women in such imperial ideologies had been too little studied.2 That was in 1986. Since then, of course, there have been a number of studies of women's role in imperiaVcolonial relations.3 However, the main focus of interest has been on countries outside Europe. In this article I want to examine the role of women in the production of Allied propaganda during the First World War as one of the means by which a popular imperialist ideology had become taken-for-granted in Britain by 1918. There is such a large quantity of women's First World War writing between 1914 and 19194 that all I shall attempt is to lay out some of the issues and discuss them mainly in relation to one of the more significant texts authored by women in that period: Mrs. Humphry Ward's England's Effort (1916).5 Generally, the study of First World War literature is kept distinct from literary study of Empire in such a way as to imply that they have no bearing on each other; but it is my contention that First World War propaganda was essentially imperialist and the imperialist ideology which fuelled it was precisely what made it so persuasive both to its home audience in Britain and, more importantly, to the American readership which Britain was so anxious to implicate. The dominance of war propaganda in the period 1914-1918, surreptitiously sponsored 171 ELT 39:2 1996 and financed by the British government's so-called Ministry of Information (i.e. the Department of Propaganda, initially at Wellington House), particularly in Britain and the U.S., and the censorship via the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) of writing which questioned militarism, not only intensified imperialist values but criminalised opposition.6 Women's role in the production of this propaganda is significant on two counts: firstly because it became a central aim of British propaganda to involve women in the war-effort, especially in munitions work, yet women's active involvement in the very production of pro-war propaganda aimed at other women has remained largely unacknowledged and unexamined;7 secondly, because women's involvement in the war-effort is generally seen as an important stepping-stone to their economic and political equality, yet women drew on imperial ideology for both pro- and anti-war propaganda, even though imperialism, like militarism, was a masculinist discourse which subordinated women and reinforced conservative conceptions of femininity. (This was clearly recognised by feminist theorists at the time, such as C. K. Ogden and M. Sargant Florence.8) Ward is particularly interesting in both these respects. Before the war she had been notorious for leading the opposition to women's suffrage and had helped found the Anti-Suffrage Review, the chief organ of propaganda against women's political emancipation, on the ground of women's inferiority. Yet, recognising the crucial importance of women to Britain's mobilisation, even she expected the war to bring about equalising changes in women's position as a result of their contribution to the national effort: "that the war will leave some deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our public life which began in the teeming middle years of the last century, is, I think, certain."9 Nevertheless, within her war propaganda can be discovered contradictions over the wartime role of women and its repercussions on traditional ideas of femininity. One of the reasons why the imperialist presuppositions of First World War propaganda became so familiar as to be unnoticed, as Mackenzie has claimed, was because such contradictions were kept subliminal and unresolved. Propaganda was made effective precisely by disguising and silencing rather than confronting what contradicted it. An examination of Ward's aesthetics, as manifested particularly in England's Effort...