Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain.

Susan Kingsley Kent's new study deals with the always-fascinating subjects of gender boundaries and sex war during and after World War I in Britain. The book, though focused on feminists and feminist thought, is a case study in a still larger issue, the reassertion of pre-war gender conventions throughout British politics and culture in the aftermath of the Great War, a retreat so massive that, as Kent sees it, it all but obliterated feminism in Britain. As Kent gloomily summarizes her view, by the end of the 1920s, "feminism as a distinct political and social movement had become insignificant" not because there were no longer organizations that spoke for women and viewed themselves as feminist in orientation but because their politics were "virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists." (p. 4) As Kent's argument goes, the largest branch of British interwar feminism pulled its punches politically partly because of the combined influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and of sexology, which, in different ways and for different reasons, stressed female "difference" in a way that was incompatible with feminism; and partly because its leaders feared that truly feminist political stances could hasten the reappearance of a sex war even more devastating to women than the post-war status quo.

The virulent misogyny of wartime culture, frightening attacks by veterans on women workers, widespread anxieties about the possibility of ever restoring normalcy after a war so cataclysmic in its destruction - all led these feminists toward the path of "prudence" as conservatives also, of course, moved toward restoring gender conventions. From the pre-war suffrage movement, the now dominant "new feminists" led by the tireless Eleanor Rathbone focused more on social programs aimed at meeting women's needs as mothers (a position that has come to be known as maternalism) than on fighting for full female political citizenship. On the other hand, many "old feminists" who disliked the new emphasis on maternity and female difference lost their feminist bite as well, submerging a woman's perspective in the "human."

Kent views interwar feminists in dialogue with other kinds of culture- and policy-makers who helped to structure their logic and to limit their vocabulary. Making Peace thus surveys an enormous amount of material, from feminists' correspondence and newspapers to wartime memoirs of all kinds, and discusses it compellingly. Kent draws on a large body of recent scholarship about interwar British feminism, and cites it often and respectfully. She must step carefully around the many recent studies on or close to this subject (Paul Fussell, Gail Braybon, Dierdre Beddoe, Eric Leed, Modris Ekstein, Sandra Gilbert, Brian Harrison, Johanna Alberti, Martin Pugh, Harold Smith and his contributors, Sandra Holton, Pat Thane, Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, etc.), but just manages to find her own path among them and to make a distinct contribution to a currently very lively discussion in literature and history on British culture in the teens, twenties and thirties.

In an interesting subordinate contention made in the context of a wonderful chapter (Chapter 3) on the writings of women who served in the war zones, Kent suggests that those feminists who actually served at the battle fronts as nurses, physicians, ambulance drivers, and so on - as did Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and Cecily Hamilton - were less likely to focus politically on sexual danger and female difference, more certain of the possibilities for comradeship, civic equality and sexual pleasure between women and men. For those women who remained at home, though, the war and its soldiers were mystified and fantastic, the returning soldiers potentially terrifying, sexually dangerous. While the chapter on women's war memoirs is based on wide and intelligent reading, its wider contention, that feminists' war experiences structured their postwar politics, is not developed consistently in the other chapters, and, when it is introduced again, it is (wisely) with the proviso that many of the egalitarian "old" feminists (like Ray Strachey, Elizabeth Robins and Rebecca West) had been nowhere near the front, though their political peers Cecily Hamilton, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby and Lady Rhondda (the latter torpedoed in the Lusitania and rescued in the Irish Sea) had been involved in some way. Needless to say, many of the women whose memoirs or autobiographical novels describe their experiences at the battle fronts were not politically active after the war - which adds another dimension of doubtfulness to Kent's tentatively offered hypothesis.

The chapter (Chapter 4) on the suffragists in wartime, their disputes over continued agitation for the vote and over participation in the international women's peace movement goes over much of the same ground as Sandra Holton's Feminism and Suffrage. Kent, however, in discussing the Representation of the People Act of 1918, makes a different point with this material. She argues that the seemingly ridiculous and contradictory measure of finally granting the vote to men over 21 (with a voting age of 19 for veterans) and women over 30 (who had to fulfill other requirements as well) was the result of a compromise based on mutual fear: many members of Parliament were afraid that their preferred suffrage bill which enfranchised all British males but not females would unleash unprecedented female militancy. Milicent Fawcett and much of the suffragist leadership, for their part, accepted the compromise in 1917 - which utterly sold out the younger Labour suffragists and which they surely themselves would have rejected before 1914 - from fear of attack by homes of angry males should they show themselves to be ungrateful or unpatriotic.

I found the author's attempt to approach interwar feminism in its cultural context an illuminating complement to existing studies of particular inter-war feminist-inspired organizations, campaigns, and issues. Clearly feminist movements are, as Kent maintains, built around the shifting meanings of "women," meanings which were shaken apart early in the twentieth century.

But Kent's study left me with many questions too. Her argument is advanced primarily through looking at feminist journalism and creative writing. She devotes rather less space to examining their extremely numerous organizations, and to their many parliamentary and extraparliamentary activities - an emphasis which surely would have modified her stance. The proliferation of feminist positions and organizations in the inter-war years and the growth of some prewar groups like the Women's Co-operative Guild; the activism of the Women's Sections of the Labour Party; the many legislative gains for women of the 1920s (maintenance for married women, liberalizing of laws on infanticide, equal child custody rights for wives in cases of divorce); and the concern of all political parties with housing suggests the success, if only partial, of some items on the agendas of such pre-war organizations as the Women's Cooperative Guild, the Fabian Women's Group, the Women's Labour League.

Kent's emphasis on the post-war bifurcation of feminism into egalitarian and maternalist strands is also problematic. To give just one example of the difficulty, four of the "six points" in the 1921 platform of the equal-rights Six Point Group dealt with sexual or family issues: the legal position of unmarried mothers, the needs of widows, legal inequalities between husbands and wives in guardianship of children, and age of consent legislation. Kent's intriguing charge that both "new" and "old" feminists were unable to sustain feminists definitions of "woman" (the first entirely collapsed women into mothers, the second into humanity) into the interwar period is one that she wavers on, sometimes making the "old" feminists into the true heirs of the prewar movement, and mostly ignoring the former suffragists whose energies in the 1920s were devoted to the peace or League of Nations support movements.

Few scholars, to continue with my list of questions about Kent's argument, would accept her view of pre-war British feminism as untainted by the notion that the capacity for motherhood was a distinctive element in women's lives that demanded special kinds of public policies and allowed at least some women in some arenas to speak with a distinct kind of authority. I would also challenge Kent's view of Eleanor Rathbone's and ultimately NUSEC's "endowment of motherhood" position as one that directly reflects the maternalism of post World War I discourse. Rathbone, born in 1872, formed her ideas on the anomaly of wifely dependence on husbands' wages, society's material obligations to mothers, and the rights of women as mothers in the 1890s, along with many women of her generation. These notions obviously took on a new valence in the post-World War intellectual climate, both for Rathbone and for her non-feminists allies, but it isn't accurate to see them as full products of this climate.

How significant was the war in generating changes in British feminism? A comparison with the United States casts doubt on Kent's position that the war itself had fractured the feminists' conception of "women." In the U.S., World War I had a far shorter duration and much smaller casualty list than in Britain. Yet it left American feminism with many of the same problems that afflicted their British peers: difficulty reaching a mass following after the achievement of suffrage; a wider culture emphasizing beauty and sex appeal for young women and domesticity for those who had married advanced by burgeoning commercial print and broadcast media; divisions within former suffragist ranks over the equality-versus-difference divide; the attractions of the international peace movement for many active feminists. Surely the war itself played only a minor part in generating the problems of American feminism in the 1920s.

Finally, I was uneasy with the author's tendency to quote characters in novels, describe plot lines, or refer to poetry as though they unproblematically represent the positions of their authors. Indeed, as historians move into turf formerly occupied by literary scholars (literary scholars on historical turf have different problems!), we need to employ their time-tested new-critical techniques, making distinctions between, for example, narrator, persona, character, and author; plot and story; and so on.

My catalogue of objections obviously demonstrates that this well written book is sure to succeed in its aim of stimulating new debate in an already animated historical subfield.

Ellen Ross Ramapo College of New Jersey