Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914–1929
Go into any main stream bookshop, or library for that matter, and look at the amount of shelf space given to detailed accounts of the doings of men during World War I. Then look to see if you can find a book about the other half of the population. You would be hard pressed to find any. Bless them, women were clearly either not involved or not effected by the war, just staying at home knitting socks for their war hero menfolk, or bravely stepping up to take on men's work whilst they were away.
It comes as a shock to discover that the number of women, children, the elderly, and other civilians who died as a result of the war was greater than the number of men. It runs counter to the dominant narrative.
Each year at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of the eleventh month, we stop to share a minutes silence to remember the dead from that terrible conflict, and wreaths are laid – most symbolically on the tomb of the unknown soldier – but also at thousands of war memorials up and down the length and breadth of the county, where the names of the 'fallen' men are inscribed.
Where is the memorial for the women who died? Or for the children? Or for the other civilians: they were more numerous than the battle field heroes. Hardly a whisper is said about them.
There is a problem with history: it can all to easily become his-story. In microscopic detail, the doings of men on the battle fields are recorded, in book after book. But of what women may have done, there is next to nothing. Yet women did make a incredible and lasting contribution, not by adding to the death and destruction, but by ameliorating war's ills.
Classically, stress is explained as the 'fear, flight, fight' reaction. True, but not the whole truth. They are the typical responses in men. Responses that the armed forces galvanise to their advantage. Some researchers claim, with good evidence, that the female reaction to stress is better described as 'fear, tend and befriend'.
The lasting reaction of women to the horrors, stresses and destructions of the 'Great War' fits well with the 'tend and befriend' model; but their work with refugees, with relief work and with reconciliation is Excluded from the Record – hence Katherine Storr's title for her book.
The whirlpool of war sucked in so many able bodied men – serving in the armed force or retained in a reserved occupation – but women were free from such demands. Some chose voluntarily to serve, many in medical or in arms manufacturing roles. There was a general feeling that by stepping up to the plate and showing their worth they would be rewarded by winning the right to vote: service was seen by as a way of advancing female suffrage. But there were others who used the female freedom not to participate in wars in a more compassionate way. Katherine Storr's book focuses on them and what they achieved.
With the men's hands tied by conscription, reserve occupation, or, for the brave few, conscientious objection – with its risks of being sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour – it was the Quaker women, in particular, who led the way in providing relief work, services for refugees, and, where possible, reconciliation work.
More has been written about the humanitarian service rendered by the men of the Friends Ambulance Unit (an allowed military style service for conscientious objectors) than about the work carried on by those women, yet the work they did touched the lives of millions.
The counter cultural nature of Quakerism to some extent insulated its members from the pressures to conform to the prevailing zeitgeist: an overwhelming sense of patriotism and anxiety to 'do your duty' and serve as part of the war machine. It was the age of the white feather. A fact discovered by Carl Heath, the then Secretary of the National Peace Council, when in 1914 support for the council vanished almost over night when war was declared, leaving few but the Quakers among its members.
Looking back on his life, Carl Heath saw that a main event was the discovery he had made early on in the First World War that the international peace movement, was built on sand. When the flood of an actual big war at home swept over Europe, it fell. Carl was increasingly drawn to the Society of Fiends, feeling a kinship with its fundamental teachings, to which he had very largely come through his own independent thinking. But this was a group, a fellowship of like minded people, seeking together to follow the Light, not a collection of individuals. (Fredrick J Tritton: Carl Heath Apostle of Peace: Friends Home Service Committee, London, 1951)
Katherine Storr's Excluded from the Record was an important source book for me, helping address the imbalance in history publishing. It is one of the few modern book on the subject of women's peace work during and in the aftermath of the First World War. As Storr says in her introduction:
Military history feeds nostalgia by claiming that war is exclusively a male matter, that war time deaths and suffering are gender-specific and quantifiable according to the wearing of uniform, and that courage is an exclusively male attribute called on in combat. Most importantly, the history of civilians appears to detract from the bravery of soldiers.
There has been very little chronicling of the extraordinary efforts spearheaded by Quaker women to ameliorate to the suffering of the civilian populations caused by the war; a willingness to reach out over national boundaries to all who suffered. Quaker pacifism expressed itself internationally, extensively and actively: they lived out the peace testimony.
In order to set the scene for the arrival of the Pickards in Geneva in 1926 as peace-workers at the Quaker Centre, a brain child of Carl Heath – it was one of his proposed Quaker 'embassies' – I wrote a chapter on the Quaker Reactions to the 'Great War' and its Aftermath which touched on some of the extraordinary relief work spearheaded by such Quaker women as Ruth Fry, Hilda Clark and others. The opening paragraph says:
From the moment war was declared in 1914 the predominate response amongst Quakers was humanitarian. They knew this to be above all else a crisis of need on the part of so many innocent victims. It was to tending those needs that they geared themselves up, both individually and collectively.
It would seem there really is an bias against publishing works on the doings of women – her-story, if you will, as opposed to his-story.
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