The book's longest chapter deals with poetry as evidence of women's work experience.
The number of women engaged in war work was over 3,000,000 in total. Lower class women had a plethora of options in terms of war work from munitions to the Land Army however, the choices for middle class women were limited due to bourgeois notions of respectability. Thus , many middle class women such as Vera Brittain, worked as VADs.
Vera Brittain's "The German Ward," "To My Brother," and other poems document the conflicted ambiguities and complexities that she negotiated as she mourned the deaths of her brother and her fiancé, while she developed her feminist, pacifist, and internationalist positions in relation to state and society.
Vera Briitain, British Great War poet and novelist, served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse (VAD) between 1914 and 1918. Her poetry collection, 'Because You Died' is renowned for its overwhelming theme of irremediable loss and grief as Brittain laments the loss of her beloved fiance, Roland Leighton; her brother, Edward Brittain; and her two best friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow.
The last three chapters unfold at considerably greater length, focusing on several elements that Banerjee sees as key to poetry by women authors. In a chapter on grief, he describes the poetic expression of female mourning as the catalyst for formal experimentation
Banerjee argues that that the female depiction of mourning is of great importance, denoting a break with the old tradition of pastoral poetry and instead, opting for a new, experimental approach to convey the author's sense of loss and grief.
As he sets out to "broaden the horizons" of much preceding criticism, Banerjee also aims to analyze a variety of mediums and styles—considering not only male and female authorship, then, but also highbrow and popular culture; song lyrics, parodies, and jingles; and visual and verbal art.
Banarjee's article, "Gender, Poetry, & the Great War" emphasizes the significance in terms of including not only different styles and mediums but also female poets and writers into the genre of Great War Literature.
diversity of voices from the First World War has improved our understanding of the war and the cultural and artistic changes occasioned
Female writers during the Great War were excluded from the genre of Great War Literature until the early 1980s. Indeed, American historian, Paul Fussell's study, 'The Great War Modern Memory' highlighted the large-scale omission of female authorship from this genre. Vera Brittain was the single female Great War writer and poet to be mentioned by Fussell which attracted much attention from other scholars regarding the exclusion of women who wrote during this period.
33 At first sight, then, it would appear that in the 1950's and 1960's Brittain was simply reestablishing her alignment with the feminists of the past. Such was not entirely the case, however. Her commitment to Christian pacifism and her personal experiences as a pacifist in time of war both strengthened and enriched her theorizing. Brittain never abandoned the ideas towards which she had struggled so painfully in World War II. In her determination to follow "the Way of the Cross" and in her equally strong determination to pursue the course of reason and of truth she made her most original contribution to feminist pacifist theor
Brittain's pacifist tendency began in the early 1920s as she often spoke on behalf of The League of Nations and later joined the Peace Pledge Movement in January 1937.
Only when the war came to an end was Brittain able once again to bring together her feminist and pacifict inter
Despite her avid denunciation of war, Brittain remained committed to her feminist interests, and combined both her pacifism and feminist beliefs after the Second World War concluded. She acted as a regular contributor for the pacifist magazine, 'Peace News' .
10 In Testament of Exper- ience Brittain recalls that in 1938, just before the Munich crisis, Catlin repeatedly put before her the "one agitating question. What are you going to do? If war comes, what are you going to do?""1
By the late 1930s, the prospect of another war was likely following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German chancellor in 1933. Brittain, as a militant pacifist, was strongly opposed to the threat of violence and instead advocated for peace and a cessation of hostilities abroad and at home. to not only wider society but to Brittain herself.
sm. This philosophy may be best illus- trated by a notebook entry written in 1936 when her friend Winifred Holtby was dying: "There is no God and no hereafter; no angels guide our steps nor protect our paths. The only benevolent force in the Universe is man himself, a tiny indefatigable unit persistently fighting against the hostility of Nature and the malevolence of
Winifred Holtby, a fellow graduate of Oxford University and close friend of Brittain when she returned to education. She later became a renowned English novelist and journalist, with her best known novel being 'South Riding', published posthumously in 1936.
e of peace. Brittain returned to Oxford, took a degree in history, and in 1922 settled in London to embark on a career as a writer. She soon won recogni- tion as a feminist journalist, and in innumerable articles, notably for Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian, as well as in two books, Women's Work in Modern England (1928) and Halcyon, or The Future of Monog- amy (1929), she set forth her views on wom
Brittain resumed her studies in Oxford University following the cessation of the War in Europe. However, she found it increasingly difficult to return to her quotidian existence as a student without the "Three Musketeers", as dubbed by Mrs Marie Leighton, Roland's mother.
Brittain's pacifism was grounded in personal exper
Brittain's own loss inspired her burgeoning attitude that war was futile, unnecessary and of course, senseless which is heavily portrayed in her 1933 memoir, 'Testament of Youth'. Brittain became an advocate for peace and pacifism as a result of her own personal turmoil. Her intimate friend and fiance, Leighton was shot through the abdomen by a German sniper whist in the French trenches; her childhood friend Richardsonwas shot through the head, suffered blindess and died weeks later in a hospital in London; Thurlow was shot through the lung by a sniper and died immediately; and her brother was shot in Italy in 1917.
y. Her problems, her ideas, her ideals, and even the details of her life in many ways anticipate those of women in the 1980's, and her life and work may be considered almost a paradigm of female experience in the twentieth centu
Vera Brittain served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse (VAD) between 1915 and 1918. Following the death of her fiance, Roland Leighton in early 1915, Brittain no longer felt it possible to nurse at home when the remainder of those she loved were enaged in combat abroad including her brother, Edward Brittain and two friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow and she then decided to volunteer abroad in Malta. .