Women in Ww1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/women_combatants_01.shtml#three

It was rare for an Englishwoman to fire a weapon in combat during World War One. Numerous people at the time commented on the inappropriateness of women in combat. The ideal woman was nurturing and pacifistic. This ideal was summed up in an immensely popular pamphlet allegedly written by A Little Mother (1916) which sold 75,000 copies in less than a week. According to this pamphlet, women were 'created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it'. Women's gentleness was even portrayed as being extended to the German enemy. Thus, in a book on English soldiers, called Golden Lads (1916), Arthur Gleeson contrasted the boastful accounts by male soldiers about the number of enemies they had 'potted' with the delicacy with which Englishwomen cared for wounded Germans. While sharing hardship alongside their menfolk, these women 'had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreck their will on human life', he observed. Danger did not 'excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot the other fellow'. Or, as the feminist and pacifist, Helen Mana Lucy Swanwick, noted in 1915 - when women did seem to be supporting the war effort, this was only due to their sense of familial loyalty. To do otherwise might be seen as an insult to their menfolk.

Culturally, there are many reasons why both conservatives (like 'A Little Mother') might join with feminists to argue that women were not warriors. For both groups, women's social influence and political advancement was at stake. The power of middle-class women as domestic and moral arbiters depended upon their separation from the sordid world of money-making and life-taking. This was a particularly important argument at this time because so many women were fighting for the right to vote. How should they respond to the argument that only those who fought for their nation (men) had a right to that ultimate gift of citizenship,...