Daisy’s interview with Professor Lucy Noakes
24 Aug 2020 – audio transcription
Daisy
Hi, I’m Daisy from the East Sussex Youth Cabinet. Today, I’m interviewing historian Lucy Noakes as part of Make (Good) Trouble’s Project Poppy about Women in World War One.
So, Lucy, could you introduce yourself please and tell us about what you do?
Lucy
Sure, of course, Daisy. So, I’m Lucy Noakes. I am Professor of modern history at the University of Essex, where I research and teach mainly modern 20th Century British history, and the areas that I’m especially interested in are wars, both of the World Wars. Really, I’m a Second World War historian but I’ve kind of gone back to the First as well. And I’m really interested in issues around gender and around memory and around sort of emotions in war and particularly civilians in war – how civilians feel about wars. I’ve just written a big book about people dying in war, so that was cheery.
Daisy
How did the First World War affect women’s lives?
Lucy
Well, in Britain it was, I guess, in three main ways. So the first way, and the way that the people might sort of learn about a little bit at school, I suppose, is that I think that, at least to begin with, it derailed the suffrage campaign. So a lot of historians have argued that women were rewarded with the vote for their work in the First World War. But I think actually you can equally argue that women would have got, at least some women, would have got the vote far earlier if the war hadn’t come along. So, I mean, that’s one way.
I think, in terms of work and paid work it opened up all kinds of opportunities for women. So women worked in all sorts of industrial areas that they haven’t worked in before. Loads more women go into nursing, female doctors get opportunities that they hadn’t had before. Some women go into the women’s… Britain, I think it’s the only country that sets up women’s branches of the three armed services. But then I think the other way that it affects women that we tend to forget, because we look at it all as a sort of liberation, is that for most women it was really stressful and really difficult and people that they loved died. So those would be the three main ways, I guess.
Daisy
And how did that trauma affect the women in World War One?
Lucy
Yeah, I saw that you were going to ask me this and I thought I might have an answer by now and I don’t. I think it’s really difficult to say because I think a) it’s a really under-researched area, so there’s been lots and lots and lots of work on shellshock and men. There’s been far less on how the trauma of war-affected women.
I mean, the little bits of evidence that we have, I would say that that some women were really, really badly affected by this. So Vera Brittain, for example, you know, Testament of Youth, she loses three of the people she loves the most in the world and that shapes her whole life, both her politics, because she goes on to become a… pacifism shapes the rest of her life, so both her politics, but also her family relations, who she marries, how she relates to people. It’s all shaped by that huge experience of loss in the First World War.
But then there are other women as well who are less well known, some of whom write autobiographies or have had their diaries published afterwards. So particularly women that were nursing, quite, a lot of them, you know, they suffer with what we would now call, I suppose, PTSD. It would have been called shell shock at the time if they thought that shell shock was something women could get, but they didn’t. But you read all sorts of records of women who’ve been nursing or doctoring close to the front line, having to be taken out with what they call nervous exhaustion and sent off to a rest home for a while because they just can’t cope anymore.
Daisy
Leading on from that, what differences were there between how men and women were treated after the war?
Lucy
Really big differences. So I guess one of the main ones is that at the end of the war, the government promises homes fit for heroes and ‘we’ll create a society and all these opportunities for men who’ve been away to fight, we’ll reward them’. When they come home, there’s actually, a bit like now, there’s a recession, there’s not that many jobs. So in order to try to create jobs for men, all of whom can vote, a lot of women lose their jobs.
So a lot of women who have been employed during the war, they suddenly, they turn… if you look at the popular press, particularly the Daily Mail and The Daily Express at the time, they kind of go from being these heroines who’ve been helping the nation out by working really long hours in, I don’t know, in engineering or munitions to being self-serving, selfish women who just want to work because they want a fur coat. And they’re, you know, there’s women going out with lots of money, having lots and lots of fun, and these poor, disabled, unemployed soldiers sitting on the street watching them go past. So they get really, really turned [against] and there’s a real backlash against working women at the end of the war. So I guess that’s the main thing.
The other thing that’s really interesting is they got really worried about what they call surplus women. They thought there were going to be too many women because so many men had been killed. At the end of the war, the government sets up a scheme for returned soldiers to go off to what was then the colonies to live in the colonies and raise white families and govern and be a military presence. And then they tag single women onto that so single women can also go out to somewhere like Australia or Canada, because they want to get rid of them because they think there were too many of them. But a lot of them are women who’ve been in the armed services and they go because they want an adventure, but actually, all that the other countries want, really, are governesses and housekeepers and things like that. So their opportunities are really constrained compared to the war.
Daisy
That’s really interesting about how they thought there were going to be extra women from all of the casualties. Where do you find your research and your stories and things like that?
Lucy
So, it’s much easier for the Second World War. There are more archives and also there’s lots more oral history for the Second World War because more people are still alive. For the First World War there are a few places. So the Imperial War Museum has got some really good collections. They’ve got oral history collections and they’ve got diaries and unpublished memoirs and things like that.
When I was researching women in the First World War, I used the, it used to be out in East London, it’s now part of the London School of Economics Library, but the women’s library, which has got a brilliant collection of first-hand, what we call primary source material, and they’ve got quite a lot of stuff that women collected during the First World War and then it’s been saved there.
The Imperial War Museum’s also got, it’s great, it’s what they call the Women’s Work Collection. But basically, it was some women who were, you know, kind of well-to-do women during the First World War, who knew or mixed with some of the men who were setting up the Imperial War Museum, which opened in 1917. And they were determined to get some records of women’s war work in there. So they just kept big old scrapbooks and they just stuck lots of stuff in there, so newspaper cuttings. So I used that a lot as well because that was a really, really good source. So I think that’s really the three main sources.
Daisy
And what interests you particularly in the stories of women in both World Wars?
Lucy
I came to looking at women in war in a roundabout way, because when I was doing my PhD, which is like the first big research project you do, it’s post-graduate, I was really interested in gender, so masculinity and femininity and how that might shape people’s memories of the Second World War. So I started off looking at stuff that… I don’t know if you’ve been to it, there’s a great archive at The Keep, the Mass Observation Archive.
And they had hundreds of people writing during the Gulf War and during the Falklands War in the 1980s. And I was really interested in how men and women who’d lived through the second World War, how their memories shaped what they had to say about these current wars – so what sorts of memories they could draw on. So I sort of came to looking at women’s history through looking at men and women to begin with as well, and looking at gender roles rather than experience.
And then from doing that, I got really interested in women and the military and how people hadn’t really, or historians anyway, hadn’t really looked at that. So then I wrote a book about women in the British Army from the beginning, sort of in the first half of the 20th century. So I kind of came to it in a roundabout way.
Daisy
It’s amazing how that the more modern history has inspired you to delve further back in the archives – that’s amazing.
Lucy
That’s the thing, you realise it’s all linked, isn’t it? And if you want to understand one thing, you need to go back, you keep on going back.
Daisy
Why is it so important to hear the stories of women in the war?
Lucy
For way too long, the only history that we heard about was like top-down history, it was all about men, and not only was all about men, it was almost all about white men and almost all about ruling-class men. So in the 1960s, you get the emergence of social history, which is all about understanding people’s experiences of the past and women’s history came out of that. So it was this idea of recovering people’s voices that otherwise hadn’t been heard.
And it’s a bit like Black Lives Matter is showing us at the moment, at least in my field, that if you don’t have black faces or women’s faces then, why would anybody want to study the history of just the white ruling class men? So I think it’s really important, and especially with war, and especially war in the 20th century, because it affected civilians so much. And so, it affected women so much, so we really need to know more about that, I think.
Daisy
Which stories did you find the most interesting to find out about?
Lucy
I think I said at the start I just finished writing a big book on death in the Second World War. And I think what I found really, really interesting was all of it, but the bit I found really particularly interesting, and this happened in both wars actually, was how women were kind of instructed and instructed often through women’s magazines, as to how they ought to perform or rather not perform, not show their grief. So if they were bereaved, they were meant to do their absolute utmost not to show it in public if they were upset. So in the First World War you get all these suggestions in magazines and newspapers.
Because, you know in Victorian Britain, women wore black to show mourning – [in WW1, they said] you shouldn’t wear black – if your husband or your son or your boyfriend is killed in the trenches, then you should be wearing a white armband or a purple armband. And it should be like a symbol of your pride rather than your grief. Because if you’ve got these thousands of women walking around in black, it might be bad for morale.
And then in the Second World War, you don’t have that so much, there’s not the same tradition of people wearing mourning clothes for a long time. But you do have lots of stories in women’s magazines about how women lose somebody really close to them, but they carry on and they find that they feel much better if they carry on going to work or they cheer somebody else up or… there’s always a good positive outcome for them if they managed not to fall apart.
So I found that, the way that we’re instructed in, not necessarily in how to feel, but how to represent our feelings through different cultural sources, I think is really interesting. And, of course, that’s what happens now with Instagram or what have you. It’s always telling us what to do. We just don’t always realise that unless we step back and look at it.
Daisy
I hadn’t really thought about it like that but having all these women so upset that people that they love, and people that they know have died, that must have been awful. And I hadn’t necessarily thought how that would impact their surroundings and environment.
Lucy
Yes. No… it really did. I tell you one really quick thing I’ve just been writing about, so we’re coming up to the centenary of, I don’t know if you know, in Westminster Abbey, there’s the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So he was – nobody knows who he was – but he’s buried there, on November the 11th 1920, so two years after the end of the war. And originally the British government is going to give, overwhelmingly, all the seats in the Abbey to politicians, lords, royalty, military leaders. But they get overwhelmed with letters, mainly from mothers, who have all had dreams and are all 100 percent certain it’s their son. They know that it’s their son that’s being buried there and are absolutely desperate to have a seat in the Abbey at the burial service, which is heart-breaking. It’s so sad. So in the end, they end up giving basically by ballot, they choose a selection of these letters and they give about 90 percent of the seats in the Abbey to these bereaved mothers. Isn’t that interesting? It’s so sad.
Daisy
What are the consequences, do you think, of not hearing the stories of women?
Lucy
Well, I think particularly with war, I think if we don’t hear stories like that one that I’ve just told you, I think it becomes far too easy for people to, almost offhandedly, suggest that war, you know… Nigel Farage, or people like that, [say] war’s great, it’s what we do and it’s good for men! And that kind of [thing], but if we can keep on reminding ourselves, actually it has a terrible impact on people.
I think it’s much easier for politicians or whoever to romanticise the soldier dying on the battlefield for his country than it is to romanticise some poor woman falling apart in the street because her son or husband has died and she’s lost the person that she really loves or she’s got no money because of that. So I think it’s really, apart from what I said earlier about we need everybody’s voices, I think it’s really important that we hear more women’s voices in war.
Daisy
Yeah, of course. And how have the ideas from historians changed when it comes to the first the World War and women’s role in that?
Lucy
I think there’s been a really big debate about it. So in the 1960s, 1970s, there was a very well-known (not very nice) historian, called Arthur Marwick, not that I’ve met him, I was told he wasn’t very nice. And he argued that war was a watershed. He argued that war, and in some ways he’s right and we’ve seen this with COVID, that a big crisis will speed up changes that are already happening anyway. So you can see with COVID in the way that, you know, lots of shopping is now done online and we were all moving to doing more shopping online anyway, but COVID’s really sped that up. So, you know, town centres will change, more people are working at home, those sorts of changes are happening that get sped up. So, he was the main arguer for the First World War, that women were rewarded for their war work by the vote, in 1918 – for some women.
So he argues that the war sped up political change and enfranchised women. And then in the 1970s, feminist historians came along and said, well, hold on a minute, actually, no it didn’t – there was a terrible backlash against women at the end of the war. They didn’t come out of the war with all these big, shiny rewards. And like I said right at the start, they could have actually – they may have got the vote in 1914, not 1918. They might have got it on better terms if the government hadn’t been distracted by the war.
So I guess that’s the really big change. And then I think the stuff that’s happened recently is that historians have got much more interested in thinking about feeling and emotion, and thinking about how we can actually try to understand that as historians, how people felt or at least how people articulated how they felt in the past. So I think that’s probably the change that’s going on now.
Daisy
And of course, emotions really affect how, almost how you act, and then how other people around you act. And the other people around you’s feelings and it has much more of a ripple effect than you would expect with something like that.
Lucy
Yeah, absolutely. Exactly, yeah, completely. I hope you’re going to go and do history at University Daisy! That’s really good.
Daisy
And do you think the suffrage movement helped women towards better equality after the war?
Lucy
Good question. I mean, yes, because obviously women having the vote – so some in 1918, then everybody, all women on equal terms with men in, I think, 1928. I mean, obviously then, you start to have female MPs, you start to have more of a woman’s voice, and male MPs have to start paying more attention to what women want because they’re going to vote for them. But I would say, you know, in other ways, it went backwards after the War and we’re still nowhere near being equal. So it made a bit of a difference. It was a start. But you’d kind of hope that a hundred years on we might have made more progress than we actually have.
Daisy
Would you like to have lived at that time during one of the wars?
Lucy
God, no! [Laughs] No, absolutely… especially the First World War. I think that would have been really, really miserable because, you know, we’ve got a pandemic, we’ve got better medicine. They had a war and a pandemic. You know, for women, there was no legislation to stop women being paid less. There was no welfare state to help you if you didn’t have any money. I mean, I’d like to, if I had a time machine I’d be really interested to go back and see what it was like.
Daisy
Visit every now and then…
Lucy
Exactly, but I wouldn’t want to stay, not for either of them. I’d be really interested to go back; I’d really like to see what London was like in the Blitz. But, and also, for either of them, you must’ve got so tired. It must have been so miserable. You could only have a bath with that much water in and queuing for hours for food and not enough heating – nah it would have been horrible. I’m very glad not to live there.
Daisy
And what are you working on at the moment?
Lucy
A couple of things. So I’m leading a project with three other historians where we’re looking at the centenary of the First World War and we’re looking at how that was represented in different projects that took place, so stuff like this, so we’re writing about that. And then the other thing that I’ve had going on for ages and ages that I’m working on with a really good colleague who’s in the States, so we can’t see each other at the moment to work on it, it’s a book called ‘How to Survive a War’. And it’s looking at citizenship and war and gender and how people get told to be good citizens and good civilians in wartime. And we’re looking at that from the First World War right through to the threat of nuclear war, so right up to the 1980s in Britain. So, yeah, those are the two projects that I’m working on at the moment.
Daisy
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today, Lucy. I really enjoyed it.
Lucy
That’s my pleasure.
Daisy
Thank you very much.