This is the story of how women in France and Britain between 1915 and 1933 appropriated the cultural identity of female war veteran in order to have greater access to public life and a voice in a ...political climate in which women were rarely heard on the public stage. The 'veterans' covered by this history include former nurses, charity workers, secret service agents and members of resistance networks in occupied territory, as well as members of the British auxiliary corps. What unites these women is how they attempted to present themselves as 'female veterans' in order to gain social advantages and give themselves the right to speak about the war and its legacies. Alison S. Fell also considers the limits of the identity of war veteran for women, considering as an example the wartime and post-war experiences of the female industrial workers who led episodes of industrial action.
French feminism was central to the theory and culture of Second Wave feminism as an international movement, and 1975 was a key year for the women’s movement in France. Through a critical review of ...the politics, activism and cultural creativity of that moment, from the perspective of both preceding and subsequent ‘waves’ of feminism, this book evaluates the legacies of 1975, and their strengths and limitations as new questions and new conjunctures have come into play. Edited and written by an international group of feminist scholars, it offers both a critical re-evaluation of a vital moment in women’s cultural history, and a new analysis of the relationship between second wave agendas and contemporary feminist politics and culture.
After her 1915 execution in occupied Brussels for her role in organizing an escape network for French and British soldiers, British nurse Edith Cavell became a household name, and her fame as a ...'martyr-heroine' persisted in the decades following the Armistice. This article compares and contrasts a range of sculptures, monuments and films featuring Edith Cavell that were produced during the interwar years in Britain (and what were then the Dominions), France and Belgium. Whereas existing studies of Edith Cavell have tended to focus on those produced in the Anglophone world, and to argue that she is universally made to embody female martyrdom against a 'barbarous' enemy, this article reveals that the different and evolving national and political contexts in which these cultural representations were produced resulted in important variations in the ways in Cavell was depicted.
This article examines French and francophone cultural representations of the roles played by tirailleurs sénégalais during the First and Second World Wars. It analyses how such representations ...(produced by authors from both within and outside this group) can be considered as examples of what Max Silverman has defined as 'palimpsestic memory', containing traces of the present and the past. Key myths and stereotypes of French African troops have reappeared with relative frequency in images, texts, and films. This article explores the ideological and political purposes to which these representations have been put at different historical moments up to the present.
The current centenary of the First World War provides an unrivalled opportunity to uncover some of the social legacies of the war. The four articles which make up this special issue each examine a ...different facet of the war's impact on British society to explore an as yet untold story. The subjects investigated include logistics, the history of science, the social history of medicine and resistance to war. This article introduces the four which follow, locating them in the wider historiographic debates around the interface between warfare and societies engaged in war.
The concept of motherhood emerges strongly in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc and Annie Ernaux, whose work is examined here in the light of current debates about women's ...reproductive function and the longstanding glorification of the mère au foyer in France, driven by fear of a falling population.
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