Writing the Women’s Part

This chapter documents Clark’s dedicated pursuit of the words, and meanings, by which women’s participation in World War One was to be expressed. As Clark observed, women, as war workers, arguably claimed a new linguistic visibility in war-time, evident in a diverse array of gender-marked neologisms alongside other gender-specific and transferred forms of use. This was another part of the language of war effort and doing one’s bit, in which Clark’s interest in minuteness (and ephemerality) proved rewarding — as did his attention to the complex undercurrents of meaning that such forms could reveal. This was, as he explored, nevertheless perhaps best seen as another form of language ‘for the duration’ – profoundly resonant of time and change, it was also strikingly time-bound, and characterised by its own forms of ephemerality and incipient obsolescence.