Vera Brittain
Overview
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The Edwardian Family
Experience of War
The Interwar period
Conclusion
Introduction
• Vera Brittain (1893-1970) gives an insight into
women and war; feminism and pacifism
• She wrote in many genres, always addressing the
most devastating experience of her life: WWI
• Contrast between later autobiographies and the
more ambivalent writings of the war period
• Wanted to show the attraction that war held for
youth and relation between women and war
• When war touched her personally she began
rebellion against patriarchal values that
dominated her pre-war life
Edwardian middle-class family life
• Carol Dyhouse argues there was a consistent
set of rules about the right ordering of
domestic life
• Patterns of middle class life had become
highly ritualised
• Distance between social aspirations and
income created tensions for middle class
family
• Affected women more than men
Vera Brittain’s family life
In her diary of 1913 when she was 20 she wrote:
On the way to golf I induced mother to disclose
a few points on sexual matters which I thought I
ought to know, though the information is
always intensely distasteful to me and most
depressing – in fact it quite put me off my
game! I suppose it is the spiritual - &
intellectual – development part of me that feels
repugnance at being brought too closely into
contact with physical ‘open secrets’. Alas!
Sometimes it feels sad to be a woman! Men
seem to have so much choice as to what they
were intended for.
Daughters
• Daughters treated differently from sons and adolescent
girls spent long periods of their life at home
• A daughter at home was initiated into the social
routines of middle class women often centred around
‘calling’ – a highly complex and ritualised activity which
functioned to establish and confirm social position and
to cement the relationships between middle class
families in the neighbourhood.
• Her autobiography mirrors that of other early feminists
full of impatience at what she considers to have been a
futile waste of time
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tP7k4wqVJo
War
• When war broke out in 1914 she was just within
reach of a feminist dream: to go to Oxford
• She was the daughter of a Staffordshire paper
manufacturer and received the education
considered appropriate for a young lady – lessons
at home from a governess, followed by five years
at boarding school in Surrey.
• Encouraged by her reading of Olive
Schreiner’s Woman and Labour she persuaded
her reluctant father to send her to Oxford
• Her plans were shattered by the war
Diary: 3rd August 1914
Love, Work and Death
War Experiences
• She turned increasingly to patriotic and religious discourse.
• She became a full-time nurse enabling her to emulate Roland
particularly by sharing his physical discomforts
• Her poem The German Ward written in 1917 captured the folly of
patching up the Germans after the Allies had blown them apart
• At the end of the war she realised that nursing had saved her from
personal despair over her losses (her lover and brother)
• When the war ended she was in a state of ‘numb disillusion’. On
Armistice Day she wrote:
‘all those with whom I had really been intimate were gone; not one
remained to share with me the heights and the depths of my
memories’.
Perhaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJjSTh4Nkfc
Violets – April 1915
Violets from Plug Street Wood
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange that they should be blue,
Blue when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head:
It is strange they should be blue.)
Roland Leighton
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collec
tions/brittain/
Oxford
• Spent two years at Oxford
• Developed friendship with
Winifred Holtby which
continued until Holtby’s
premature death in 1935
• Supported campaign for
women to receive degrees at
Oxford
• When she left Oxford in 1921
she determined to follow a
career as a writer.
Feminism
• Associated with active feminists working in London
• In 1920 Lady Margaret Rhondda assisted by a
number of other women including Rebecca West
and Cicely Hamilton founded the feminist
journal Time and Tide.
• 1921 she inaugurated the feminist organisation the
Six Point Group which took its name from its six
goals: pensions for widows, equal rights of
guardianship for parents, improvement of the laws
dealing with child assault and unmarried mothers,
equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities in
the Civil Service
• VB and Winifred Holtby began to work for the six
point group shortly after their arrival in London
• WH became a director of Time and Tide in 1926 and
VB was a regular contributor.
Marriage
• VB claimed a new concept of marriage was
essential if women were to achieve equality.
• Marriage should be an equal partnership and
women should no longer be forced into the
roles of ‘either slaves, exotic greenhouse
plants, or carefully reared animals’.
• She rejected the convention that married
women should abandon their careers
• She and George Catlin (professor at Cornell
University) agreed to a ‘semi-detached
marriage’
• Arrangement continued after her two children
were born
Pacifism
• Became revolutionary pacifist through her
encounter in 1936 with Cannon Dick
Sheppard head of the Peace Pledge Union
• Maintained stance throughout WWII
• British government viewed her bi-weekly
‘Letters to Peace-Lovers’ which had almost
2,000 subscribers at its peak, as pro-Nazi
heresy
• England’s Hour written in 1941 about civilian
life in England during the war ended with a
plea to forgive the enemy
• Pamphlet against obliteration bombing Seed
of Chaos, first published in America in 1944,
emphasised consequences of bombing for
victims and those who inflicted the suffering
Conclusion
• Tracing Vera Brittain’s career between 1914 and 1950
demonstrates there is not a straight line to pacifism
and feminism but a series of backward and forward
movements
• Should relate her experience to an understanding of
women and war more generally
• Early pro-war sentiments and desire to be active in the
war seem part of her professed desire to be a man
• Her nursing experiences brought her in touch with her
suppressed female identity
• Before the war all her intimates were men, after the
war she found friendship with Winifred Holtby