Women Writers and the War Experience: 1918 as Transition
Women Writers and the War Experience: 1918 as Transition

Summary/Abstract: What does it mean to discuss women as a category within a temporal node such as 1918, which as a military and political moment would seem to belong to men? The complex political turning point of 1918, marked by war and the eventual end of war, had an impact on women that differed from place to place, just as the experience of the Great War differed among men. Yet war and a postwar politics of self-determination and extension of suffrage indeed possessed a lively, even life-determining importance for women. As a “total” war, World War I blurred the lines between men and women, between soldiers and civilians. It came at a moment when greater numbers of urban women (and of the working classes) had access to literacy. They could therefore participate in the widespread impulse to report on and shape the meanings of the war. We should remember, however, that oral cultures also shape the motives and meanings of war, as some of the materials discussed here will show. Not all women writers of the period adapted their focus or their forms to the rearrangements of the social order that accompanied the war, but a number did so in ways that often linked their literary experiments to those of their male compatriots, using neologisms, fragmented syntax, and generic innovations to evoke this historical rupture.[...]

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