Introduction
Women writers in the 20th century found it much more difficult than men to have their work published; this extended to all of the arts and, consequently, their work is often less well known than the work of men of the same period . It is also the case that most students in schools in the UK will be much more familiar with the writing of men than women.
This does not mean that women’s art was less significant, on the contrary; women played a large artistic and historical role throughout the 20th century. The reasons for this are not based on merit, but on the social and political climate of the time.
This booklet, therefore, aims to celebrate women writers from different countries and social backgrounds.
The first area to be studied is the contribution that women writers made to World War I and, coming as it did at the very beginning of the century, it is a suitable place to start.
Women’s position during the war reflected a changing attitude to the role of women generally; this change began just before the outbreak of war, with the cry for women to have the vote, a movement, which sought change in the position of women in society, which until then had disenfranchised them.
Not only was there a cry for the vote, but, surprisingly to some, women also wished to take an active part in war and not be excluded on the grounds of their gender:
‘Until the twentieth century, women were excluded from war in Western cultures because they were thought to lack strength and aggression and because social attitudes required them to take on a caring and nurturing role. Those women who did want to fight had to disguise themselves as men and some managed to avoid detection for long periods.’
Women at the Front
Daily Chronicle, 2 February 1915
‘The finest part of it will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark when Special Correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on their field at Melle, or on that road between Dixmunde and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.’
Why should we devote some of this study to women writers of World War 1?
Vernon Scannell, a British poet, in his poem ‘The Great War’ states:
‘Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind’
Perhaps because of the scale of the destruction; the futility of it; the horror of trench warfare; the timing of it at the very beginning of the 20th century, and the virtual loss of a whole generation of men; we cannot forget it. The legacy of World War One remains in our minds; it is still expressed in art, culture and social relationships and, therefore,it is hardly surprising that a generation of poets, both male and female, sought to express their own thoughts and feelings of loss, stimulated by such a significant historical event.
Vera Brittain was an author, feminist, pacifist and socialist whose life was dominated by her experience during the First World War. Born on 1893, she was frustrated by the intellectual restrictions of her provincial life until an unexpected opportunity led her to Oxford University in 1914.
Brittain expressed her feelings in an eloquent and moving autobiographical work ‘Testament of Youth’ which caught the mood of a generation and made her famous.
She wrote of ‘the lost generation’ and the irrevocable changes in her life caused by World War 1.
Pat Barker, in her novel ‘Regeneration’ reflects on the War’s terrible reversal of expectations:
‘The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilised into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure( the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys)consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed.’
There is also a strong but neglected tradition of women’s poetry written in response to the events of World War 1. Many of these poems are the products of direct experience of the processes of war – making weapons, nursing the wounded, the loss of brothers, sons, or lovers in the trenches – by women on active service in the battle areas as well as by women involved in the war effort at home. The range of poetry is wide. It is often experimental and in advance of the male poetic response.
Most poetry of the First World War, which is studied in schools is written by men. This study is not to deny the validity or greatness of these poets, but to redress the balance a little and to give students an introduction to some of the writing of women who were part of the same experience and who wrote at the time. Pat Barker whose writing is included here has written in prose, from a later historical perspective, but about the same period.
It is worth comparing the poems of some of the women writers at the time with the poems of the well –known male poets like Wilfred Owen. Three of his poems ‘Dulce and Decorum Est’ and ‘The Send -Off’ and ‘The End’, invite comparison with poems written by four contemporary women poets.
WE SHALL COME NO MORE
So then we came to the Island
Lissom and young, with the radiant sun in our faces;
Anchored in long quiet lines the ships were waiting,
Giants asleep in the peace of the dark-blue harbour,
Ashore we leapt, to seek the magic adventure
Up the valley at noontide,
Where shimmering lay the fields of asphodel.
O Captain of our Voyage
What of the Dead?
Dead days, dead hopes, dead loves, dead dreams, dead sorrows-
O Captain of our Voyage,
Do the Dead walk again?
To-day we look for the Island,
Older, a little tired, our confidence waning;
On the oceans bed the shattered ships lie crumbling
Where lost men’s bones gleam white in the shrouded silence.
The Island waits, but we shall never find it,
Nor see the dark-blue harbour
Where twilight falls on the fields of asphodel.
Encircled by the traffic’s roar
Midst music and the blaze of light,
The battle-jaded khaki knights
Throng, sleek and civilised once more.
Oh, one there was who ,long ago
(Three centuries or is it years?)
Adored in splendour and the tears
Of London Ebb- of London Flow.
Oh, one whose very presence gave
The common air an added grace,
Now in our hearts an empty place
And far in France an unmarked grave.
Eleanour Norton
I feel the Spring far off,far off,
The faint far scent of bud and leaf-
Oh how can Spring take heart to come
To a world in grief,
Deep grief?
The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright-
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?
The grass is waking in the ground,
Soon it will rise and blow in waves-
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?
Under the boughs where lovers walked
The apple –blooms 3will shed their breath-
But what of all the lovers now
Parted by death,
Grey Death?
Crippled for life at seventeen,
His great eyes seem to question why:
With both legs smashed it might have been
Better in that grim trench to die
Than drag maimed years out helplessly.
A child- so wasted and so white,
He told a lie to get his way,
To march, a man with men, and fight
While other boys are still at play.
A gallant lie your heart will say.
So broke with pain, he shrinks in dread
To see the ‘dresser’ drawing near;
And winds the clothes about his head
That none may see his heart- sick fear.
His shaking, strangled sobs you hear.
But when the dreaded moment’s there
He’ll face us all, a soldier yet,
Watch his bared wounds with unmoved air,
(Though tell- tale lashes still are wet),
And smoke his woodbine cigarette.
Eva Dobell
(In Memoriam E.T.)
In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, ‘ I will praise Easter Monday now-
It was such a lovely morning’. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, ‘This is the eve.
Goodbye. And may I have a letter soon.’
That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple –bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.
April 9th 1917
It is interesting to compare these poems with three poems by Wilfred Owen, one of the most famous British poets of World War 1. Owen fought in the war himself and died, tragically, a few days before Armistice in 1918.
The first one ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is one which most UK school students are familiar with.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock –kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,
Obscene a cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Send –Off
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the sliding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.
Nor if they mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.
After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?-
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, Age?
When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
‘My head hangs weighed with snow.’
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
‘My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.’
Wilfred Owen
Individual teachers may wish to use the texts to suit the purposes of their own curriculum and class work.
However, it would be useful for students to study the poems by the female poets, comparatively, with the three poems by Wilfred Owen.
Thinking about the poems
Reading poetry can affect and change our thoughts and experience; the following exercises will help you to identify how you felt as you read the poems and to organise your thinking, in preparation for closer reading of the texts.
A. Brainstorming- In groups or pairs, read these poems together and make a note of your responses. Your notes could be a kind of brain storming, where you might write down the words which come into your head as you read each poem. It could have stimulated a memory, which you would make a note of or made you think of a piece of music. Record whatever is appropriate for your group, or for you and your partner.
B. An emotional response - When we read any piece of literature, fact or fiction, it has an effect upon our experience. Sometimes our experience is changed; sometimes it is challenged; sometimes it stays the same. We experience the world through our senses, primarily, and reading poetry can have a strong effect upon our senses. For example, if you read a poem about a rose, you may well remember the smell of a rose, or imagine a picture of a rose in your mind or even remember a song about a rose.
Before moving on to comment upon or analyse in more detail, what we think or feel about the poems, write a few sentences about each poem, which describes how your group felt after they had read the poem.
Individual Response
How did you feel when you read the poems? What did you see in your mind? What did you hear? Again, record your own experience as you read the poem. Write your notes in the space below.
Poem: Title_______________________
Author___________________________
My response to the poem___________________________________________________
Repeat this exercise for each poem
A Response to war
How did you feel about war when you read each poem?
Do you feel the same, after reading each poem; or are your feelings different for each poem? How would you describe your feelings? What does each poem make you think about in terms of your attitude to war?
Record your own response to what the poems have to say about war below
Now answer the following questions in response to the poems
Owen’s poetry Women’s poetry
1. Choose one poem of Owen’s and one other poem and explain, using examples from both poems, how the poets convey an anti-war feeling. How good do you think this language is in communicating anti-war feelings? Give examples of words from the poems which put the anti –war message across.
2.Do any of the poems say anything positive about war?
3.Without knowing the poets’ names, do you think the poems offer clues as to whether they were written by a man or a woman.
4.Give examples of lines, or images, which you feel suggest the poem was written by a man or a woman.
Choose a poem by one of the female poets and examine how the poet communicated the experience of loss during war.
By using examples from the text, such as word choice, content and imagery show how the poet has given you a clear impression of a woman’s experience of World War 1.
This passage is taken from a contemporary novel, ‘ Regeneration’, by a British female writer, Pat Barker; it won the 1995 Booker Prize. Read the passage carefully, before trying to answer the questions.
The passage records the thoughts and feelings of the character, Rivers, who is the psychologist treating patients who return from the front with shell-shock. He works at Craiglockart Hospital near Edinburgh where Wilfred Owen himself was treated.
The dream had not merely posed a problem, it had suggested a solution. ‘Why don’t you try it?’ Henry had said. Rivers felt he’d got there first, that the dream lagged behind his waking practice: he was already experimenting on himself. In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed , that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They’d been trained to identify emotional repression, as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men. And yet he himself was a product of the same system, even perhaps a rather extreme product. Certainly the rigorous repression of emotion and desire had been the constant theme of his adult life. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at repression and to let themselves feel the pity and terror their war experience inevitably evoked, he was excavating the ground he stood on.
The change he demanded of them – and by implication of himself- was not trivial. Fear, tenderness- these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man. Not that River’s treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy. His patients might be encouraged to acknowledge their fears, their horror of the war – but they were still expected to do their duty and return to France. It was River’s conviction that those who had learned to know themselves, and to accept their emotions, were less likely to break down again.
Paragraph One
1.“ the dream lagged behind his waking practice”. Using your own words, describe what Rivers is trying to suggest about the time difference between his dream and what he was doing in reality. 2.
2.Rivers explains that as a psychologist, ‘he was setting himself against the whole tenor’ of his patients upbringing. Quote three feelings, from the text, which Rivers was trying to get his patients to express. 3.
3.Quote an expression from the first paragraph, which explains what men have to do to be ‘masculine’. Using your own words explain what this phrase means. 2.
4.Quote two phrases, which show us that Rivers knows that he too has been subject to the same process of repressing feelings. 3.
5.Give reasons for the word ‘feel’ being in italics. 2.
6.Which words, in paragraph one, emphasise the idea that expressing feeling is seen as a weakness in a man? 2.
Paragraph Two
7 .In paragraph two how does the author make it clear that the change Rivers expects from his male patients is very demanding? 2.
8.What information does he give us that shows that the treatment, although different, could not be seen as weakness ? 2.
9.Which word in the second paragraph tells us that he is sure that his treatment will work? 1.
10.Which phrase suggests that this passage is set during World War One? 1.
11.Using examples from the text, show how this passage explains the conflict between a man’s ‘duty’ as a soldier and his humanity. How successful do you think the author has been in describing this conflict? 5.
Total: 25 marks
Women also expressed the same idea: of the life that men sacrificed for the war effort:
You know, they won’t let wives come to the Front. Women can come into the War Zone, on various pretexts, but wives cannot. Wives, it appears, are bad for the morale of the Army. They come with their troubles, to talk of how business is failing, of how things are going to the bad at home, because of the war; of how great the struggle, how bitter the trials and the poverty and hardship. They establish the connecting link between the soldier and his life at home, his life that he is compelled to resign.
Additional Texts for comment and discussion
‘In 1914 not only the masses but most of the intellectual and leading forces of the Unionists were against the war. Only Enver Pasha and a certain convinced military group, along with the profiteers, were in favour of war. Somehow the war seemed an impossibility, although a great many people feared it and felt uneasy, knowing the strength of military dictatorship in Turkey.’
Drifting into War Halid¾ Edib Adivar (1884- 1964) Turkish
1914
Black berries in a rose wreath,
each a dead man’s skull,
each a drop of blood,
May God have mercy!
Pray, pray, O Slovene,
perhaps God remembers you!
He who does not pray, shall curse:
May Satan have mercy!
From dreams a mother rises into night:
memory knocking at the door,
knocking at thousands of cottages.
On the battlefields lies my son!
Where does the red trail lead in the snow?
Where does the wind bear the last sigh?
Lands, waters, nine mountains high-
my son, how can I get across?
1875 - 1932 Slovenian
Anonymous, Olivia Tambala singer, Malawi
When interviewed in her village, Olivia Tambala may have been in her seventies. In 1914 the village chief reported to his people that war had broken out; the British then came to the houses, carrying the young men away to where they were slain at the war.”
At Karonga
People perished there, at Karonga.
Why did they perish?
At Karonga
People perished there, at Karonga.
Why did people perish
At Karonga?
Young men died there.
Why did people die?
Many people have written about the trenches – the mud, the odors, the inhumanity
of compelling men to live under such foul conditions. Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the best conditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible.
That night, when from a semishielded position I could look across to the German line, the contrast between the condition of the men in the trenches and the beauty of the scene was appalling. In each direction, as far as one could see, lay a gleaming lagoon of water. The moon made a silver path across it, and here and there on its borders were broken and twisted winter trees.
“ It is beautiful,” said Captain Fastrez beside me, in a low voice. “ But it is full of the dead. They are taken out whenever possible: but it is not often possible.”
Mary Roberts Reinhart, American
Reading the poetry, and prose extracts, is a beginning, for acquiring a feel for how thoughts and feelings about WW1 were expressed by women at the time, and afterwards.
The First World War was a turning point for many women. Women lost their husbands, partners, sons and brothers during the war; their lives were forever touched by deep loss; they too were moved by the horror of trench warfare; many continued to campaign for the vote during the war and entered the industrial workplace for the first time. Women from all backgrounds and nationalities recorded their thoughts, feelings and opinions on World War One; the expression was international; their struggle and inspiration is our inheritance.
Extended Reading and Discussion
Other poems could be selected for reading and class discussion from the following texts:
‘Scars Upon My Heart’ Women’s Poetry WW1 Catherine W. Reilly
‘The Virago Book of Women and the Great War’ Joyce Marlow
‘Home Fires Burning’ Belinda J. Davis
‘Testament of Youth’ Vera Brittain
‘Lines of Fire’ Women Writers of World War 1 Margaret Higonnet, an international anthology of women writers.
L.Atkins, Shawlands Academy May 2004
CELEBRATING WOMEN WRITERS
WHY?
(The woman writer) will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values- to make serious what appears insignificant to man, and make trivial what is to him important.
Women writers have, in the main, been given a lower profile in schools than male writers. This has been a feature of gender inequality that remains unsatisfactory, as women have a different experience to offer in literature, which is enriching and wide ranging and, alongside the writing of men, offers a more complete picture from which to make informed comments.
For our project work in ‘Roads to Equality’, we felt it was valid to try and redress the balance a little and give some of the writing by women of the 20th century a higher profile in the curriculum. The case to redress the balance in Norway was unnecessary, as, by law, in Norwegian schools, there has to be a gender balance in texts studied in school.
We also felt that as part of our commitment to multicultural education, which offers another enriching dimension to the school curriculum, it was important to ensure this book was representative of the writing by women from different nationalities, in particular offering a selection from three of our partner countries: British, Austrian and Spanish women writers.
The texts can be studied alone, in any of the three subject areas: English, Spanish or German or as part of other curricular work, which may be ongoing in school.
So far the presentation of women writers has engendered discussions in all of the partner schools and the students undertaking the work have gained much from the study and discussion of the poetry.
We hope that this can be a valuable addition to the study of literature in our partner schools.
Lesley Atkins, Shawlands Academy; Mari Ausejo, I.E.S. Hermanos D’Elhuyar and Irmgard Edelbauer, HBLA Kirchdorf an der Krems
December 2004
Source: http://www.roadstoequality.org/documents/WW1%20Women%20Writers.doc
Web site to visit: http://www.roadstoequality.org
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