Poppies at the Tower – Remembering World War I
Photography: Robin R. Joyce
Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War and Conflict
Women’s History Network Annual Conference, 2014
Introduction
The 2014 Women’s History Network Conference took place in September at the University of Worcester. The title and theme – ‘Home Fronts: Gender, War and Conflict’ – promoted stimulating exchanges, discussion and debate on a broad range of topics, most looking at women during the First World War from a British perspective. Some papers ranged further afield.
Abstracts of papes presented by Jody Crutchley and Karen Hunt at the Conference illustrate this well. These are the third group of abstracts related to Britain and the First World War to be published on the blog. As well as raising questions and a stimulus to Conference sessions, their publication here provides an opportunty for readers to engage. Comments and discussion on the issues are invited from readers.
Robin R. Joyce (c) November 2014
“Responsibility, Duty, Sympathy and Self-Sacrifice”:
Empire and Elementary School Curricula on the Home-Front, 1914-1918
From 1870 elementary school attendance had begun to be compulsory for all British children between the ages of five and ten. This mushrooming working-class school population necessitated a new, focused approach from government, educationalists and pressure groups towards mass elementary curricula. A need arose to prepare pupils for their role as future working-class citizens of the Empire, to which the Board of Education responded with prescriptive curricula differentiated by both age and gender. By the outbreak of the Great War, however, the content and pedagogy of these curricula were often contested by both professional and political groups; especially as the perceived needs of Britain and the Empire changed in the face of new imperial and colonial challenges. Patriotic organisations increasingly regarded the schools as a ‘front’ in the years leading up to and during the Great War through which to promote their own interests and utilised the elementary curricula as a site for their wartime propaganda.
Jody Crutchley, University of Worcester © September 2014
Jody Crutchley is a PhD student at the University of Worcester, Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts. She studying Britain’s Experience of Empire, 1870-1939, her doctoral research addressing the role of the British Empire in development of the British school system and British curricula. Her thesis will contribute to current scholarship and debate that has tended to challenge and extend traditional views of Britons’ experience of empire. Locating educational development within an imperial trajectory will necessitate application of an inter-disciplinary approach. She therefore draws heavily on concepts and techniques utilised within the field of the History of Education: this means utilising a wide range of more unusual historical sources, such as school textbooks, as well as unpublished archival material within her research. Her twitter account is @jodycrutchley.
Poppies at the Tower – Remembering World War I
Photography: Robin R. Joyce
Gendering the Local Home Front (1914 – 1919)
Histories of life in wartime tend to focus on the extraordinary and the unusual; the remembered; and what was new or different. This applies to all modern war but especially to what many see as the first truly ‘modern’ war, the Great War. However, if we change our focus to the everyday, the banal and often forgotten details of daily life, we may find that continuities are as important as changes. This is particularly the case when considering the home front. Everyday life had to go on, despite the challenges, privations and sorrows of this new kind of ‘total’ war. Yet it is clear that whichever combatant nation one looks at, there was a diversity of experience on the home front dependent on place – hence local home fronts – but also on class, on age, and particularly on gender. And that these experiences varied over time.
To understand how place (the city, the suburb, the town, the village) shaped everyday experience on the home front, it is important to draw on examples from across and beyond Britain. Further, how did everyday life on local home fronts challenge or reinforce existing gender relations? Did this have any lasting effect beyond the peculiar circumstances of wartime?
Karen Hunt, University of Keele © September 2014
Karen Hunt is Professor of Modern British History at Keele University and is currently Head of Humanities Research at Keele, as well as Chair of the Social History Society (2014-17). Her publications cover many aspects of the gendering of politics (locally, nationally and transnationally) particularly from the 1880s to 1939, including Equivocal Feminists (1996) and Socialist Women (2002)(with June Hannam). Her current research juggles a number of intersecting interests: the life and politics of Dora Montefiore; interwar women’s politics, focusing on the local and the everyday; and women and the politics of food in the First World War. She is an advisor to the AHRC/BBC World War One at Home project in the West Midlands.
Poppies at the Tower – Remembering World War I
Photography: Robin R. Joyce