" Women! Your Country Needs You! " Fleeing Feminism or Gendering Citizenship in Great War Britain?

Abstract

When war broke out in August 1914, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies suspended its political work on behalf of women's suffrage and plunged into relief work for women and children. Because it appeared to conform to the reigning ideology of separate spheres, this response has been presented as conclusive evidence of British feminism's ideological collapse in the face of war. This article argues a contrario that the National Union's response is further evidence of feminism's ideological resilience in this period. Relief work, it shows, was one aspect of a broader project aimed at " gendering " the concept and language of citizenship in order to appropriate them for women. The result was an insistence on women's identity as " citizens, " an identity that in turn had important consequences for the kind of feminism that could be articulated in its name.