¹ “Women's War: White Feathers for ‘Slackers,’” Daily Mail (August 31, 1914), p. 3Google Scholar.

² Ibid.

³ “‘White Feathers' a Novel Method of Making Young Men Enlist,” Chatham News (September 5, 1914), p. 8Google Scholar.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Although white feathers were given out in many parts of the country, the practice was most common in London and in port towns where the long history of impressment may have created a culture favorable to such coercive practices. For a sense of the geographical range of white feather incidents, see Imperial War Museum staff, “Great War Index to Letters of Interest,” n.d., Imperial War Museum, LondonGoogle Scholar (henceforth IWM). According to one contemporary, the “idea spread like a virulent disease.” It is unclear exactly how the practice caught on, but it is probable that rumor, newspaper reports, and the depiction of the practice in popular theater and fiction helped spread the idea. See Francis Almond to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), May 25, 1964, IWM, BBC Great War Series [hereafter BBC/GW], vol. ALL-ANT, fol. 339.

⁶ Yearsley, M., “Memoirs,” IWM, Documents, DS/Misc/ 17, p. 19Google Scholar.

⁷ See, e.g., Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa City, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foster, Catherine, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens, Ga., 1989)Google Scholar; Liddington, Jill, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-militarism since 1820 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1989)Google Scholar; Kamester, Margaret and Vellacott, Jo, eds., Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Vellacott, Jo, “Feminist Consciousness and the First World War,” History Workshop 23 (Spring 1987): 81–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byles, Joan Montgomery, “Women's Experience of World War One: Suffragists, Pacifists and Poets,” Women's Studies International Forum 8, no. 5 (1985): 473–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiltsher, Anne, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

⁸ Marwick, Arthur, Woman at War, 1914–1918 (London, 1977), pp. 35–36Google Scholar; Mitchell, David, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London, 1966)Google Scholar. This tradition has also been passed down by word of mouth, in the form of anecdotal evidence that is often repeated but has not inspired much detailed investigation.

⁹ See, e.g., Tylee, Claire M., “‘Maleness Run Riot’—the Great War and Women's Resistance to Militarism,” Women's Studies International Forum 11, no. 3 (1988): 199–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anne Wiltsher, p. 1.

¹⁰ Several excellent studies of women's involvement in various aspects of the war have recently appeared, showing the growing breadth of interest in the diversity of women's experience. See, e.g., Kent, Susan Kingsley, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, N.J., 1994)Google Scholar; Woollacott, Angela, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar; Levine, Philippa, “‘Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should’: Women Police in World War I,” Journal of Modern History 66, no. 1 (March 1994): 34–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Most feminist work that has dealt with this aspect of female militancy has been in the fields of literary criticism and political science and has focused on images of women in literary culture. See, e.g., Gilbert, Sandra M., “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Higonnet, Margaretet al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), p. 208Google Scholar; Cooper, Helen M.et al., eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), pp. xiii–24Google Scholar; Ouditt, Sharon, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London, 1994), pp. 89–129Google Scholar; Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (New York, 1987), pp. 163–79Google Scholar.

¹² Commenting on the psychological basis of bestowing white feathers and its seemingly disproportionate historical legacy in the memory of those men who witnessed, experienced, or heard about these acts, Virginia Woolf noted that “external observation would suggest that a man still feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with cowardice by a woman in much the same way that a woman feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with unchastity by a man.” Woolf rightly argues that the number of women who “stuck feathers in coats must have been infinitesimal compared with those who did nothing of the kind” but goes on to blame what she calls “the manhood emotion” for the exaggerated psychological effect of perhaps “fifty or sixty feathers.” See Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas (New York, 1966), p. 182Google Scholar. Although Woolf's psychological insights are profound, receiving a white feather was a much more common experience than she allows. In the BBC Great War Oral History Series at the Imperial War Museum scores of men and women wrote in telling of their experiences as receivers or witnesses of the white feather. In my sampling of this source I have found over 200 accounts of white feather giving. Considering that many of the recipients would have been killed or died of natural causes between the time of receiving a feather and 1964 when the survey was advertised, and that some recipients may not have seen the advertisement or chosen to write, Woolf's estimation of “fifty or sixty feathers” seems very short of the mark. I have also found numerous accounts of white feather giving in sources unrelated to the BBC Great War Series. For a fuller account of the BBC source, see n. 14 below.

¹³ It also includes the occasional question in Parliament and one or two official reports pointing to the practice as an embarrassing nuisance in need of suppression. For some contemporary references to white feather giving, see The Vote (June 18, 1915), p. 648Google Scholar; Clarion (September 4, 1914), p. 12Google Scholar; Daily Mail (August 31, 1914), p. 3Google Scholar; Chatham News (September 5, 1914), p. 8Google Scholar; John Bull (April 3, 1915), p. 11Google Scholar; Hole's Illustrated Review (June 12, 1915), cover; The Times (September 1, 1914), p. 1Google Scholar; Worall, Lechmere and Terry, J. E. Harold, The Man Who Stayed at Home (London, 1916)Google Scholar; Helen Hamilton, “Jingo Woman,” n.d., quoted in Reilly, Catherine, ed., Scars upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London, 1981), pp. 47–48Google Scholar; E. A. Mackintosh, “I'll Make a Man Out of You,” n.d., quoted in Parker, Peter, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (London, 1987), p. 181Google Scholar; T. W. H. Crosland, “The White Feather Legion,” n.d., quoted in Turner, E. S., Dear Old Blighty (London, 1989), p. 69Google Scholar; Meakin, A. M. B., Enlistment or Conscription (London, 1915), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Swan, Annie, The Woman's Part (London, [1916]), p. 170Google Scholar; Kernahan, Coulson, The Experiences of a Recruiting Officer (London, 1915), p. 69Google Scholar; House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, March 1, 1915, col. 548, September 15, 1915, col. 91, November 16, 1915, col. 1708; “The Northcliffe Press and Foreign Opinion,” Cabinet Document 1184, November 1, 1915, p. 3Google Scholar: Public Record Office (PRO), INF 4/1B.

¹⁴ In May 1964, Gordon Watkins, the producer of a BBC series celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War, issued an advertisement soliciting responses from white feather women and the men they had shamed. In the ad, Mr. Watkins tauntingly suggested that “I doubt if any of these women will be brazen enough to admit it now,” and given the wording he used, it is not wholly surprising that his prophecy came true. The BBC was inundated with responses from men who had received white feathers, but the reply from women to an advertisement that proclaimed its intention to “deal with the lunatic fringe which existed at home during part of the war” was so low that I have found only two letters in the collection from women who claim to have bestowed white feathers. Responses from men who received white feathers and from women who saw them given, however, should not be dismissed out of hand because of the reticence of the givers or the recipients' temporal distance from the war. As Mr. Watkins' tone suggests—and many of the letters corroborate—claiming to have given a white feather during the 1914–18 war was by the 1960s a highly embarrassing and shameful admission. Mrs. Thyra Mitchell, one of the two women who did write in, found herself in the Daily Mirror hailed as a self-proclaimed “chump,” and although the tone of the article was more one of astonishment over the admission than hostility for Mrs. Mitchell, such notoriety is not necessarily of the sort many women would have wished for. See “BBC Seeking White Feather Women,” Daily Telegraph (May 15, 1964)Google Scholar, in IWM, BBC/GW, vol. APL-AYR, fol. 242; Daily Mirror (May 29, 1964), p. 7Google Scholar. The BBC advertisement was published in a variety of other newspapers, though not all of them even solicited letters from women.

¹⁵ Undoubtedly these letters, like oral history interviews, reflect the intervention of time and a new historical context, yet they offer insight into a set of practices as interpreted by a class of respondent that is too important to be ignored. Letters from the 1960s match closely accounts written in the 1930s as well as contemporary anecdotes and advice to women proffered during the war, implying that the commemoration of this gesture was not as mutable we might expect. I wish to make sense of this practice by situating it within the cultural context of the war and then to examine white feather narratives themselves as a literary form with historiographical and political implications. For an excellent discussion of the use of oral history evidence, see Woollacott, , On Her Their Lives Depend, pp. 206–9Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For provocative discussion of gender, masculinity, and civic obligation, see Westbrook, Robert, “‘I Want to Marry a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 587–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gullace, Nicoletta F., “Women and the Ideology of War: Recruitment, Propaganda, and the Mobilization of Public Opinion in Britain, 1914–1918” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), pp. 62–109Google Scholar. An influential interpretation of the multivalent use of women in the promotion of war is found in Elshtain, pp. x–xiv, 106–20.

¹⁷ Oxenham, John, “The League of Honour War Memorial” (London: League of Honour, [1914])Google Scholar, in IWM, Women at Work Collection (hereafter WW), BO6/2/7.

¹⁸ One personal advertisement tauntingly announced: “Englishwoman undertakes to Form and Equip a Regiment of Women for the Firing Line if lawn tennis and cricketing young men will agree to act as Red Cross nurses in such a Regiment.” See The Times (August 31, 1914), p. 1Google Scholar. Another advertisement asked for “Petticoats for all able-bodied youth in this country who have not yet joined the army.” See The Times (August 27, 1914), p. 1Google Scholar. Dr. M. Yearsley describes this appeal in his memoirs and associates it with the feminine practice of giving white feathers. See M. Yearsley (n. 6 above), p. 19. The Germans apparently made much of a personal advertisement where a woman named “Ethel M.” informed her lover, “Jack F.G.” that “if you are not in khaki by the 20th I shall cut you dead.” The Germans, according to British sources, translated this as something closer to “hack you to death.” See Times (July 8, 1915), quoted in Turner, p. 70.

¹⁹ In The Experiences of a Recruiting Officer, for example, Coulson Kernahan launches into a philippic against “folk who inform me that this or that man ‘ought to go.’” This practice he attributes primarily to malicious and jealous women. Quoting a letter that is both anonymous and addressless, Kernahan assumes that it is from a lady and even paints an imaginary picture of her as someone who “was living in ease and comfort, if not in luxury, the preservence of which, and her own personal safety, she was more anxious to assure and to insure by sending other people's menfolk to fight for her.” See Kernahan, pp. 54–55.

²⁰ “Public Opinion and the Laggards, Unpatriotic or Afraid,” The Times (August 28, 1914), p. 6Google Scholar.

²¹ Jones, Henry Arthur to The Times (August 29, 1914), p. 9Google Scholar.

²² Duke of Bedford, “Recruiting Pamphlets and Leaflets, 1914–1915,” IWM, 325.1 NP K. 44699.

²³ “To the Young Women of London,” IWM 4903, reproduced in Rickards, Maurice, Posters of the First World War (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, no. 23. This appeal further conflates the virtues of citizenship with the virtues of a responsible lover.

²⁴ Kealey, E. V., “Women of Britain Say—‘GO!’” Parliamentary Recruiting CommitteeGoogle Scholar no. 75, IWM 0313, reproduced in Chenault, Libby, ed., Battlelines: World War I Posters from the Bowman Gray Collection, the Rare Book Collection Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), p. 122Google Scholar; anonymous, “To the Women of Britain,” in Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War, by Haste, Cate (London, 1978), p. 54Google Scholar.

²⁵ Angelsey's Ellis John Griffith, M.P., protested in August 1915 that “the walls of our country and the pages of our newspapers are defaced by official jibes and taunts at our manhood, some of these actually being addressed to women.” See Manchester Guardian (August 6, 1915). He was not alone in opposing tactics which called on women to do the dirty work of the state. The Vote denounced “an insolent advertisement that has been published in the daily papers putting ‘four questions to the women of England,’ and accusing men of having to be sent by them to ‘join our glorious army.’” The Vote (January 22, 1915), p. 472Google Scholar. And the Ministry of Information feared the influence such advertisements might have on foreign opinion, lamenting that “The Times writes that recruiting is deteriorating, that intimidation and flattery are employed alternately, resulting in scandals. The inciting to enlist through young girls, the presentation of white feathers (a symbol of cowardice in England) by excited women, are only surface signs of the national degeneration.” See “The Northcliffe Press and Foreign Opinion,” Cabinet Document 1184, November 1, 1915, p. 3Google Scholar: PRO, INF 4/1B.

²⁶ “A Fight to the Finish: Work of National Enlightenment,” The Times (August 31, 1914), p. 4Google Scholar.

²⁷ See Kent (n. 10 above), pp. 12–30; and Gullace (n. 16 above), pp. 62–92.

²⁸ Darwin, Major Leonard, “On the Meaning of Honour,” a lecture delivered to the Women's League of Honour, 1915, IWM, WW, BO6/3/2/8, p. 6Google Scholar.

²⁹ Kernahan (n. 13 above), p. 69.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 40.

³¹ MacDonagh, Michael, In London during the Great War (London, 1935), pp. 79–188Google Scholar.

³² J. P. Cope to BBC, May 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. COC-COY, fol. 141.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Francis Almond to the BBC, May 25, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. ALL-ANT, fol. 339.

³⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “feather.”

³⁶ His mission is significantly to “avenge the death of General Gordon” by accompanying Kitchener's forces on the reconquest of Khartoum.

³⁷ Mason, A. E. W., The Four Feathers (London, 1902), p. 35Google Scholar.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 41–42.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 147.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 210.

⁴¹ Alfred Allen, a young munitions worker, and his friend Christopher Crow were attacked by an indignant white feather woman in 1915. Although the incident left Allen “too shocked to move,” his workmate “roared like a wanton bull as she took hold of his lapel.” The woman was led away “shouting at the top of her voice ‘If the cap fits wear it!’” See Alfred Allen to BBC, May 31, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. ALL-ANT, fol. 263.

⁴² The Times (August 28, 1914), p. 11Google Scholar.

⁴³ The dynamics and implications of “khaki fever” are well addressed in Woollacott, Angela, “‘Khaki Fever’ and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (April 1994): 325–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ For an interesting discussion of the idea of sexual selection in Victorian culture, see Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1983), pp. 210–35Google Scholar; and Jones, Greta, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Sussex, 1980), pp. 99–120Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ “Women and Patriotism,” Girl's Own Paper, vol. 1914–1915, p. 36Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ The Mother's Union, To British Mothers: How They Can Help Enlistment, by One of Them (London, n.d.), p. 1Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ The Baroness Orczy, “To the Women of England, the Answer to ‘What Can I Do?’…,” Daily Mail (September 4, 1914)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ The Baroness Orczy to Miss Conway of the Imperial War Museum, [1918], in IWM, WW, BO/6/6/2i. The Baroness's League was reputed to have raised 600,000 men for the king's army.

⁵¹ For a pictorial version of this motif, see anonymous, “He, She, and It,” popular postcard reproduced in Parker (n. 13 above), pp. 192–93.

⁵² John Bull (March 6, 1915), p. 1Google Scholar.

⁵³ Ibid. According to Francis Almond, “Songs like: ‘We Don't Want of Lose You, but We Think You Ought to Go …’ and ‘On Monday I Walk out with a Soldier …’ were rendered by women vocalists throughout the land.” See Mr. Francis Almond to the BBC, May 1964, vol. ALL-ANT, fol. 339. See also Woollacott, , “Khaki Fever,” pp. 325–27Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Howarth, Tony, ed., Joe Soap's Army Song Book, IWM Great War Series (London, 1976), p. 2Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ For a discussion of the patriotic and conservative nature of the music hall, see Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 179–238Google Scholar; and Waters, Chris, “Manchester Morality and London Capital: The Battle over the Palace of Varieties,” in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Bailey, Peter (Milton Keynes, 1986), p. 158Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Major D. K. Patterson to the BBC, [May 1964], IWM, BBC/GW, vol. LIN-LYO, fol. 328.

⁵⁸ Kinnaird, Norah, “A Soldier's Wife,” Woman's World (September 19, 1914), p. 262Google Scholar. Jules's mother was even commended by female readers in “Heart to Heart Chats.” See “Auntie Jean” to the “Editoress,” “Britain's Brave Women,” Women's World (November 28, 1914), p. 559Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Bodkin, M. McD., K.C., “The White Feather,” Women at Home (August 1917), pp. 153–60Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ibid., pp. 153–54.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 154.

⁶² Ibid., p. 155.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 159.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 160.

⁶⁵ Bill Lawrence to BBC, [May 1964], IWM, BBC/GW, vol. LAB-LAZ, fol. 275.

⁶⁶ H. Symonds to BBC, 18 May 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. SNE-SYM, fols. 427–28.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Mrs. Thyra Mitchell to the BBC, April 16, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. MIL-MIT, fol. 479; and Nicholas Wall, “Notes on Telephone Interview with Mrs Thyra Mitchell,” May 26, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. MIL-MIT, fols. 477–78. For a fuller account of this episode, see Mrs. Mitchell's interview with the Daily Mirror (May 29, 1964), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Vivid accounts of the treatment of these men can be found in memoirs and oral history interviews with conscientious objectors. See, e.g., IWM, Department of Sound Records, Oral History Recordings, “The Anti-war Movement, 1914–1918.”

⁷⁰ The cultural history of memory has become increasingly important to the history of the Great War since the publication of Fussell's, Paul seminal work The Great War and Modem Memory (1975; 2d ed., Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar. For an excellent essay on the historiography of memory, see Gregory, Adrian, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–6Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Paul Fussell and Eric Leed have both commented on the alienation soldiers began to feel toward those at home who seemed unable to comprehend their suffering. See Fussell, pp. 79–113; and Leed, Eric, No Man's Land: Combat Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 44–48Google Scholar. For a brilliant discussion of the gender dimension of this problem, see Gilbert (n. 11 above), pp. 197–226.

⁷² According to Reuben W. Farrow, a conscientious objector imprisoned for “prejudicing recruitment,” during the war: “Railway employees had been given certificates of ‘indispensability’ temporarily. This resulted in a number of youngish men having their ‘call-up’ delayed. This resulted in certain women accosting them and scornfully demanding ‘why haven't you gone to the front?’ So [a scheme] was instituted whereby a man could ‘attest,’ that is, signify his willingness to enlist, and he was given an armband to wear, thus silencing the scornful ones!” See R. W. Farrow, “Recollections of a Conscientious Objector,” IWM, Documents, 75/111/1, fol. 289.

⁷³ Mr. B. Upton remembered an incident where his arm-band failed to deter the scornful admonitions of women. According to his grandson, “My grandfather … was standing with a friend, both on war work, in the Strand; when a young woman rushed up and gave them both ‘feathers.’ He still has his original ‘war work’ badge, which the young lady, in her excitement, failed to notice.” See Mr. B. Upton to BBC, May 15, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. UDA-VOS, fol. 38. Apparently women's enthusiasm for khaki was equally great when it came to choosing their own fashions. For a fascinating discussion of women's relationship to military fashion, see Grayzel, Susan Rachel, “Women's Identities at War: The Cultural Politics of Gender in Britain and France, 1914–1919” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), pp. 316–46Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ While the majority of those who received white feathers seem to have gotten them in 1915 (the gesture perhaps having caught on after its inception in 1914), the practice was still quite common in 1916 and 1917 and, though less frequent, was not unheard of in 1918. For this information I am grateful to the Imperial War Museum staff member who painstakingly recorded the dates of white feather incidents included in letters to the BBC. Although this evidence is fragmentary, excluding anyone who predeceased the BBC appeal, did not wish to write in, or failed to include the date of his feather story, it nevertheless refutes the idea that the practice was confined to 1914 and 1915 or that it ended with conscription. See Imperial War Museum staff, “Great War Index to Letters of Interest,” n.d., IWM.

⁷⁵ MacDonagh (n. 31 above), p. 80. MacDonagh's book is a published version of the diary he kept during the war. I have not compared the published version with the original and do not know if it still exists. Such a comparison would be useful in determining the distance between postwar memory and more immediate wartime perceptions.

⁷⁶ P.C.S. Vince to BBC, May 18, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. UDA-VOS, fol. 199. This is a very common trope. C. Ashworth was given a white feather while riding a train with shrapnel in his kidney, and both Reuben Farrow and Mrs. Ruth Brown tell of witnessing the bestowal of the white feather to amputees. See C. Ashworth to the BBC, May 18, 1964, BBC/GW, vol. ALP-AYR.

⁷⁷ Mr. J. Jones to the BBC, May 29, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, Ms. 285–86.

⁷⁸ Ibid., fol. 286.

⁷⁹ Farrow, R. W., “Recollections,” p. 290Google Scholar. Ironically, amputees and humpbacks were not to be issued armbands because it was imagined that their reason for being out of uniform was already graphically written on their bodies. See Lord Derby to Headley Le Bas, November 22, 1915, British Library, Add. MS 62170, fol. 182.

⁸⁰ Mrs. Ruth L. Brown vividly recalls the way such a moment of misrepresentation impressed her, though just a schoolgirl of ten years old: “A young man was sitting on a seat by the bus stop near Kent gardens, Ealing, … when a lady came up to him, said something, and passed him a small white feather. The young man took it, turning it about in his hand for some time, then, very quietly, moved his leg from under the seat and showed her his empty foot!” See Mrs. Ruth L. Brown to BBC, May 16, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. BRO-BRY, fol. 261.

⁸¹ MacDonagh, p. 79.

⁸² G. Backhaus to BBC, May 15, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. BAB-BAP, fol. 18.

⁸³ Ibid., fol. 19.

⁸⁴ Ernest Barnby to BBC, May 19, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. Bar, fol. 393.

⁸⁵ Granville Bradshaw to BBC, May 15, 1964, IWM, BBC/GW, vol. BRA-BRI, fol.

⁸⁶ House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, March 1, 1915, col. 548.

⁸⁷ Graham, John W., Conscription and Conscience: A History, 1916–1919 (London, 1922)Google Scholar, passim.

⁸⁸ Seager, J. Renwick, J.P., The Reform Act of 1918 (London, 1918), pp. 46–49Google Scholar; Marwick, Arthur, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1979), pp. 76–85Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ The debate over the “gender backlash” began with the feminist contention that women lost many of the economic gains they had made during the war in the postwar period. See, e.g., Braybon, Gail, Women Workers in the First World War (London, 1981)Google Scholar. Recently the debate has been expanded to encompass the psychological and psychoanalytic dimensions of the backlash and the impact of the war on the “demise” of feminism. See Kent (n. 10 above), pp. 97–139; and Perrot, Michelle, “The New Eve and the Old Adam: French Women's Condition at the Turn of the Century,” in Higonnet, et al., eds. (n. 11 above), pp. 51–60Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Sandra Gilbert has observed that the efforts of women recruiters “reinforced male sexual anger by implying that women were eager to implore men to make mortal sacrifices by which they themselves would ultimately profit.” See Gilbert (n. 11 above), p. 208. For a vivid account of the development and implications of these sentiments, see Kent, pp. 31–50, 90–91.

⁹¹ The wielding of these tales was not isolated to veterans, however, but could also be used by men and women close to a victim or by former pacifists who wished to vindicate their wartime stance. Perhaps the most strategic use of white feather stories was by the pacifist Sylvia Pankhurst who credited members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) with handing out white feathers during the war. The WSPU was of course run by her prowar nemeses and blood kin, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. According to Miss Pankhurst, “Mrs. Pankhurst toured the country making recruiting speeches. Her supporters handed out white feathers to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress, and bobbed up at Hyde Park meetings with placards [reading] ‘Intern Them All.’” See Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffrage Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, 1931), p. 594Google Scholar.

⁹² For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Higonnet, Margaret R., “Not So Quiet in No-Woman's Land,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Cooke, Miriam and Woollacott, Angela (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 205–26Google Scholar. In spite of the new “ironic” tone that Fussell notes coming out of the war, writers like Robert Graves nevertheless preserve a number of martial conventions even as they criticize the romanticization of the war. See, e.g., Robert Graves's treatment of his regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers: Graves, Robert, Good-Bye to All That (1929; new rev. ed., New York, 1957), pp. 82–105Google Scholar.

⁹³ Caroline Rennles, IWM, Department of Sound Records, 000566/07, p. 10, quoted in Woollacott, , On Her Their Lives Depend (n. 10 above), pp. 197–98Google Scholar.