The Women’s Library (London School of Economics) documents all aspects of women’s lives, with particular emphasis on the great political, economic and social changes of the past 150 years. The reality proved more complex than any imagined, but the status of women had fundamentally changed. Suffragettes seized on this to argue that women active in the war effort were more worthy of citizenship than male pacifists or conscientious objectors. They work at the front, and go to factories making munitions active roles, compromising traditionally expected behaviour of future caring mothers. In propaganda they are portrayed as gentle, vulnerable home-makers, both objects of men’s affections and victims of barbarous enemy acts – and yet also as resilient, active participants in the war effort. However, women’s standard roles were being blurred by wartime demands.

Those who refused to do so would be spurned by sweethearts, and face accusation and recrimination. The home meant security, to be protected from German aggression at all costs. This example, an appeal to Britain’s women to ensure their men enlist, complements the male action required by Kitchener’s ‘Your country needs you!’ poster. Nations were personified by women, such as Britannia: epitomes of morality, virtue, innocence and justice.

The Bodleian holds several monographs shedding light on the significantly changed female experience of employment during the war, including Our Girls, their work for the war (Caine, 1917), Lloyd George's Munition Girls (Cosens, 1916), Munition Lasses (Foxwell, 1917) and The Woman's Part: a recrod of munitions work (Yates, 1918).ĭuring WWI, posters were one of the most important means of spreading propaganda. The papers are now housed in the Vera Brittain Room in the College archives, where they may be consulted by appointment. In 1999, a collection of Brittain's letters and a large amount of research material used in writing her biography were given to Somerville Library by her biographers. She wrote 29 books in all and was a prolific lecturer and journalist, who devoted much of her energy to the causes of peace, socialism and feminism. In 1933 she published Testament of Youth, a record of a lost generation - one of the first accounts of the Great War from a woman's point of view, and likely the most influential. She returned to Somerville in 1919, changing course to Modern History in an attempt to understand the origins of the conflict that had claimed the lives of her fiancé, her brother and two close friends. However, at the end of her first year she decided that her duty lay in serving her country, and she spent the remainder of the war nursing in London, Malta and France. Just as WWI was breaking out, Brittain won an exhibition to Somerville to read English. Somerville College is home to the Vera Brittain Archive.

Ww1 participants