ACTIVE SERVICE: GENDER, CLASS, AND BRITISH REPRESENTATION OF THE GREAT WAR

This study is a socio-cultural analysis of different ways that men and women described their war experiences during the First World War. It also examines the relation of these variations to perceptions of British society. It argues for significant variance from popular retrospective impressions, such as those epitomized in the imagery of trench warfare, and in the focus on the works of disillusioned writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Relying on extensive unpublished as well as published sources, it focuses on underlying causes of these representational differences, including gender and socioeconomic position. The study seeks to provide an integrated analysis of a society at war by examining the writings of both men and women and relating them to each other, as well as through analysis of texts produced by authors across the socioeconomic spectrum. The dissertation concentrates on representations from the years of conflict, and differentiates them from later, retrospective views.;Both men and women described their own war involvement and that of others in very different terms in later years than those they used during the war, and both gender and class play critical roles in these reevaluations. These representational changes are marked and important to understanding the war as we now see it, and have been largely overlooked by scholars who have conflated texts from differing periods. I demonstrate that attitudes to war work can be divided into ideas about work and service. Some members of the population, male and female, saw their efforts for the war as work. These ideas ranged from an opportunity for professional advancement or merely better wages, to the job which had to be done at the time. Others identified more strongly with differing conceptions of service, to the country, the Empire, or in response to abstractions of honor and glory, or even expectations about the socially-appropriate behavior for members of their class.