Bonnerjee, S (2019) ‘The lure of war’: reconsidering the motivations of nurses to volunteer in the First World War. Women's History Review, 28 (7). pp. 1096-1114. ISSN 0961-2025
Abstract
This article argues that the motivations for British women to volunteer for the First World War were more nuanced and complicated than the formulaic binaries of patriotism versus pacifism. It reads the war-time memoirs of two women in military medical care, May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium and Olive Dent’s A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front to demonstrate how understandings of gender roles and nationalist affiliations rendered complexity to the reasons why certain women volunteered for war-work. These two women volunteered very early in the war and published their life-writing during the war (1915 and 1917 respectively). Consequently, they did not have the advantage of hindsight, and their writings were the product of the immediate pressures of the war environment. By reading the memoirs of these women and unpacking their overt motives to volunteer, this article reveals the nuances in the reasons women volunteered to engage in military medical work during the First World War.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author produced version of an article published in Women's History Review. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 20 Oct 2020 16:19 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2023 17:01 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/09612025.2019.1608683 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:166786 |