Dennant, Lynda (1998) Women at the Front during the First World War : the politics of class, gender and empire. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Our memory and understanding of women's experiences at the Front during
the First World War are overwhelmingly influenced by the autobiographical account
of Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth was published in 1933 as part of a wave of
antiwar literature produced by men and women. Brittain's chronicle of the war
achieved renewed popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s when it was dramatised by
the BBC and acclaimed by feminist academics who recognised its value in contesting
the predominantly male literary war canon. Brittain wrote about the effects of losing
the young men in her life, her fiance and her brother, and the inability she felt as a
young woman, to achieve anything constructive during the war. When her fiance
enlisted in the army she decided to enrol as an auxiliary nurse with the Red Cross
Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), believing this would give her at least some idea of
what it was like to experience war. The loss of the men she loved shaped her war
experiences, as did the labour and anguish of volunteer nursing and the eclipse of her
youth in a war that she considered neither just nor worthwhile. Her experience of being a young woman from a provincial middle-class background, without medical
training, going off to war to nurse as a way of comprehending the experiences of the
men closest to her came to personify the experience of women who went to the Front.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D501 World War I
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	World War, 1914-1918 -- Participation, Female
Official Date:	1998
Dates:	Date Event 1998 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for the Study of Women and Gender
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Luddy, Maria
Extent:	v, 291 leaves
Language:	eng

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