PATRIOTS AND PACIFISTS

In October 1914, just after the outbreak of war, a young upper middle-class English woman, Vera Brittain, wrote to her fiance Roland Leighton who was about to be sent to France with his battalion.

I don't know whether your feelings about war are those of a militarist or not. I always call myself a non-militarist, yet the raging of these elemental forces fascinates me, horribly, but powerfully, as it does you. You find beauty in it too; certainly war seems to bring out all that is noble in human nature, but against that you can say it brings out all the barbarous too. But whether it is noble or barbarous I am quite sure that had I been a boy I should have gone off to take part in it long ago... Women get all the dreariness of war and none of its exhilaration.⁵³

For Brittain and many others like her, the outbreak of war engendered feelings of patriotism and a desire to be involved. Few women were either wholeheartedly patriotic or ideologically pacifist, although by 1918 there were many more in the latter camp, Brittain included. Like many of her social contemporaries, Vera Brittain found an outlet for her patriotism in nursing. But her first-hand experience of war in Malta and then in France, coupled with the loss of so many of her young male friends including her fiance, caused her to reflect in later years on her initial enthusiasm for war. Women are just as liable as men to be carried away by war-time emotion', she wrote in 1936, ‘and deceived by the shining martial figure of patriotism'.⁵⁴

In the first year or so of the war there were few means by which women could actively demonstrate their support for the war other than by releasing their menfolk to fight. In Britain there was an infamous white-feather cam­paign, whereby women attempted to shame men dressed in civilian clothing by sticking a white feather in their lapel.

Nursing was one of the few front-line roles open to women during the war that was deemed acceptable despite nurses' proximity to combat and the horrors of war. Nursing, in contrast with factory work and military service, was characterised as a feminine vocation which incorporated the values associated with nineteenth-century womanliness: service and self-sacrifice in the guise of the ‘angel of mercy' and the devoted mother. Nursing, particu­larly as it was promoted by the Red Cross in the years before 1914, was portrayed as requiring ‘spirituality, self-abnegation and perfect submission to authority', ideally suited to women. Even the courage and heroism required of the military nurse were regarded as natural attributes of the mother. ‘In truth', remarked Cesar Legrand of the French Red Cross, ‘what a tiny dis­tance a woman must go to change herself into a nurse!'⁵⁶ However, prior to the First World War, female nurses had not been allowed to work in front­line medical units; during this war, though, they were mobilised alongside soldiers, they travelled to the front line with soldiers and they participated in the experiences of the battlefield.

The military nurse was the acceptable face of the patriotic woman who wanted to serve her country. Unlike the munitions workers and uniformed women in the auxiliary services, the nurse never compromised her feminin­ity, or at least not in popular representations of her role. Indeed, nursing was the ultimate form of female national service, unthreatening to the masculin­ity of war and reaffirming women's duty to men. But those who volunteered regarded their work somewhat differently. Nursing was women's chance to contribute to their nation in its time of need, a means of expressing patriotism equal to that on offer to men. ‘Defence was a man's job, and I, unfortunately, was a woman', wrote a British member of the Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD), the military nursing service which provided nursing assistants for the professional medical services. ‘And yet', she continued, ‘the New Army of men would need a New Army of nurses. Why not go and learn to be a nurse while the Kitchener men were learning to be soldiers?'⁵⁷ ‘This is a wild adventure I am on', wrote Ellie Rendel to her mother in 1916 from HMS Huntspill, having volunteered to serve with the Scottish Women's Hospital in Russia.⁵⁸ Similarly, German nurses expressed their patriotic desire to do their bit tinged with overtones of adventure and escape from a constrained and mundane existence, their accounts combining a sense of duty to serve with the excitement of the challenge ahead. ‘My heart was thumping... it was a day of honour for us all', recalled one. ‘Our faces were positively transfigured, all petty concerns forgotten.'⁵⁹

However, the opportunity to serve alongside the military was com­promised by the presumption that women's war service was an extension of domestic work and social duty. Such work was acceptable because it con­tinued a tradition of middle-class women's philanthropic endeavour, albeit in quite different circumstances. Just as in the pre-war decades women had exported an ideology of domesticity to working-class homes, in wartime volunteer nurses, along with those who remained at home knitting socks and bandages and writing to pen-pal soldiers, were creating a kind of domesticity at the front.

For many of these nurses the experience of war was to mark them for the rest of their days. If we return to Vera Brittain we can witness a journey from youthful patriotism to more mature pacifism which was shared by many of her contemporaries and especially those who experienced the military hos­pitals. Brittain had volunteered to become a nurse so that she too could con­tribute to the war in an active way, just as her brothers and fiance were doing. But her experience, especially in France, where as a VAD nurse she tended to wounded German prisoners, as well as her personal loss led her towards a pacifist position which she elucidated so well in her postwar autobiograph­ical work Testament of Youth (1933). Brittain was not alone in having travelled this path. Surely expressing the sentiments of so many nurses, Helen Zenna Smith's fictional dramatisation of one woman's experience of war powerfully expressed how disillusionment could lead to an anti-war position:

I have schooled myself to stop fainting at the sight of blood.

There was another, if less acceptable way, for a woman to demonstrate her patriotism, and that was by joining a paramilitary organisation or auxili­ary service or, exceptionally, to engage in armed combat. By 1917, British women were recruited to auxiliary corps of the armed forces. Needless to say, members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Royal Naval Service and Air Force were not allowed anywhere near armed combat although British servicewomen were sent to the Western Front as drivers, signallers and clerical workers. The desire to ‘do one's bit' was un­doubtedly fuelled by patriotism in many cases, but women had other reasons for enlisting in the women's services, not least the perception that the wages would be better than factory work and an anticipation of adventure over- seas.⁶² The wearing of uniform by women in the British auxiliary services brought forth criticisms that they had not earned the right to wear it. Cer­tainly for servicewomen, part of the attraction of uniform was its symbolic value, allowing women to appropriate male forms of war service. A second explanation for the unease with which females in uniform were greeted was the sense that dressing as a soldier symbolised a woman denying her feminin­ity and questioning gender roles. Women's femininity entitled them to pro­tection and it was the feminine woman who became the emblem of all that soldiers were fighting to defend. In Britain, khaki became the ‘emblem of National Service', signifying sacrifice; women in uniform, at least until the end of the war, were regarded as dissimulators, assuming the badge of service whilst being unable to fulfil its demands (since they were forbidden to engage in combat) and thereby demeaning the soldier's role.⁶³ Whereas nurses were idealised as angels in white, cloaked in feminine garb and their heads mod­estly covered, the khaki-clad members of the British Women's Volunteer Reserve were dubbed Amazons by those who were uncomfortable about any association of women with the military. Ironically, though, these women were watched for unnecessary feminisation of their uniforms with jewellery, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes.⁶⁴ More seriously they were accused of being unpatriotic by wearing a uniform they did not deserve and thus pour­ing scorn on those who did wear it in the true defence of their country.

In Serbia and Russia, women did serve at the front, if in an unofficial capacity. It has been estimated that around 5000 Russian women, some in disguise, fought alongside men, continuing a tradition of female involvement in violence and unrest, and exploiting the Russian government's laxity in policing membership of the armed forces. Both upper-class and peasant women contributed to the Russian war effort in this way, but historians tend to argue that most did so for personal reasons; there was no agenda of equal­ity underlying their actions. Indeed, the motivation of the most famous of female soldiers, Maria Bochkareva, suggests that she was just as stirred by patriotism and a sense of duty as well as adventure as those who volun­teered to be nurses. ‘My soul was deeply stirred... “Go to war to help save the country!” a voice within me called... my heart yearned to be there in the seething cauldron of war, to be baptised in its fire and scorched in its lava.'⁶⁵

Servicewomen and nurses embodied the contradictions of wartime. The uniformed paramilitaries, and even the ‘Walkuries in knickerbockers’, as some nurses wearing boots and khaki were described, personified the break­down of rigid gender divisions that assigned men to combat and women to the home front. These women were patriots, yet their work as nurses and as service auxiliaries drew them into fields of conflict not envisaged as the appropriate place for patriotic femininity. Their active engagement with the war forced many to re-evaluate their own identities, and in this sense the First World War must be seen as a crucible of change.

For other women the appropriate response to the war was opposition to war itself. Feminist pacifists, although standing at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum to patriotic servicewomen, came to be seen as a greater danger despite their use of the language of gender difference. Indeed, it was the pacifists’ association of femininity with peace (and masculinity with war) that led them into conflict with the state because wartime governments were actively trying to reshape femininity as patriotic, expressed in service to the nation. The fact that feminist pacifism was internationalist, uniting women from the aggressor states, did little to enhance its reputation during the war. Perhaps even more threatening, though, was the feminist pacifist critique of male politics and the assertion that war was man-made. The logical conclu­sion to be drawn from this analysis was that the enfranchisement of women would change the way political disputes were handled. Pacifists, like patriots, were staking a claim to citizenship.

Pacifist women opposed war from a number of standpoints. Socialist feminists like Clara Zetkin opposed this war, like all wars, as a capitalist war that oppressed all working people, men and women. The majority of femin­ist pacifists, though, used moral arguments based on the belief in gender difference, emphasising women’s role as mothers, as the moral sex, and as the victims of war. Drawing on Olive Schreiner’s analysis of women’s rela­tionship to war in her Woman and Labour (1911), the British feminist Helene Swanwick (1864—1939) set out what has come to be seen as the feminist pacifist position:

[Women] are the life-givers and the home-makers. War kills or maims the children born of woman and tended by her; war destroys ‘woman’s place’ — the home... Militarist states always tend to degrade women to the position of breeders and slaves... Women, whose physical force is specialised for the giving and nurture of life will never be able to oppose men with destructive force. If destructive force is to continue to dominate the world, then man must continue to dominate woman, to his and her lasting injury.⁶⁶

Governments which listened to women's needs and which gave women a political voice would think twice before going to war. For Swanwick and others like the German feminists Anita Augsburg (1857—1943) and Lida Gustava Heymann (1867—1943), war exemplified male physical force both symbolically and actually. Heymann, echoing the atrocity stories that were rife in the early months of the war, drew attention to the physical violence of war in a vivid and brave acknowledgement of wartime rape. We do not want statements saying that we women are protected by war. No, we are being raped by war!'⁶⁷

Feminist pacifism has been described as ‘the creed of a minority, of a tiny band of courageous and principled women on the far-left fringes of bourgeois-liberal feminism.'⁶⁸ It is certainly true that many, indeed probably most, feminists supported their governments and suspended their cam­paigning during wartime. Pacifism split the feminist movement everywhere, not least in Britain where Swanwick and other leading suffrage activists like Maude Royden, Kate Courtney and Catherine Marshall, left the NUWSS in order to join hands with their pacifist sisters outside Britain. The significance of feminist pacifism goes further than a focus on the small band of activists would suggest. Anti-militarism had a broad base of support, especially amongst feminist and socialist women but also amongst women who merely recognised that war would achieve little. In the mill towns of north-west England, for example, there existed considerable grassroots support for the call for an end to the war and a mechanism to prevent war in the future. Furthermore, feminist pacifism was international; it crossed national borders and united women from aggressor states. We feel strongly that at a time when there is so much hatred among nations, we women must show that we can retain our solidarity and that we are able to maintain a mutual friend­ship', stated the Dutch feminist Dr Aletta Jacobs to an audience of women at an international women's peace congress in The Hague in 1915.⁶⁹ Their internationalism was a source and symbol of strength, of unity of purpose as women and as feminists, but it made them dangerous to national govern­ments at a time of conflict. The British government tried to prevent women travelling to the Netherlands; in Germany, Clara Zetkin was jailed for her anti-war activity; and in France, all anti-war activity by women was closely monitored on the grounds that the apparent benign nature of women's pacifism was in fact all the more dangerous on account of the importance to the nation of women's morale. Louise Saumoneau was arrested and jailed for publicising her pacifist stance in the pages of her journal La Femme Socialiste.

The arrest and trial of the French socialist schoolteacher Helene Brion (1882—1962) for so-called defeatism in 1918, was a defining moment for the history of women during this war, not only because of her spirited defence of her position — ‘I am first and foremost a feminist... And it is because of my feminism that I am an enemy of war'⁷⁰ — but because of the way Brion was characterised as the antithesis of the good patriotic woman during wartime. But it was not only as an anti-militarist or ‘defeatist’ that Brion was on trial, but as a woman, a feminist, and as an alleged Malthusian, a supporter of birth control. Her defenders, sister feminists like Nelly Roussel, were moved to speak out on her behalf. ‘I am proud of her as a Frenchwoman because the glory of a people is made not only by the warlike valour of soldiers but... also by the greatness of soul and generosity of heart’. She continued, ‘Helene Brion brings honour to France; she is a pure and true Franξaisef^λ For the French state, though, Brion was a traitor to France and to French women. She spent four months in prison and, although found guilty of treason, received a suspended sentence.

Women’s pacifism, like their patriotism, was the ideological expression of an engagement with the war and with politics at a time when women had no political rights. The all-encompassing impact of this war in particular, com­ing after a period of sustained feminist campaigning for the vote, gave some women a new vigour leading them to question the government’s definition of the female contribution to the war effort and forcing them to come to their own understanding of their position. Furthermore, feminist pacifism demanded a role for women in politics for they believed that only female enfranchisement would force a shift in the way politics was done. Indeed, both pacifists and patriots used the war to protest their exclusion from the privileges of citizenship and to demonstrate, in different ways, why they should be incorporated into national political life. For Helene Brion, her arrest and trial provided the opportunity to make public the absurdity of the exclusion of women from politics when they were being asked to contribute so much to the nation.⁷²

Many countries, including Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Britain (limited to women over the age of 30), did enfranchise women at the end of the war, rewarding them for their sacrifices and their contribution to the war effort. Poland and Hungary did so in 1921 and 1925, respectively. By 1920 only France, Italy and Portugal amongst the belligerent nations had not taken this step. Only a small number of educated Portuguese women were enfranchised by the authoritarian Salazar regime in 1933. Although in France and Italy suffrage bills had been approved by parliament after the war, women had to wait until the end of another war for a chance to cast their votes.