Authenticity and Gender: Public Responses to Great War Memoirs by Nurses and Frontline Soldiers in Britain, France and Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT Great War memoirs by both soldiers and nurses emphasise the role of eye-witness in establishing the authority of the account. This authority is acknowledged in the public response to these texts, which crosses both national and gender boundaries. However, the response is asymmetric between genders: soldiers were often blamed for insisting on the primacy of personal experience in their accounts, on the grounds that this made the war seem senseless, undermining the sacrifices made. Nurses, to the contrary, were not the subject of such attacks, with one noteworthy exception which is explained by the untypical nature of the memoir in question. The asymmetry derives from the attribution of gender-specific forms of authenticity in the memoirs: the authenticity of soldiers’ accounts derived from their own experiences, the authenticity of nurses’ accounts derived from what they did for the soldiers.