Women in the British Army

War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–1948

Lucy Noakes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134167821
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this fascinating, timely and engaging study, Lucy Noakes examines women's role in the army and female military organizations during the First and Second World Wars, during peacetime, in the interwar era and in the post-war period.

Providing a unique examination of women's struggle for acceptance by the British army, Noakes argues that women in uniform during the first half of the twentieth century challenged traditional notions of gender and threatened to destabilise clear-cut notions of identity by unsettling the masculine territory of warfare. Noakes also examines the tensions that arose as the army attempted to reconcile its need for female labour with their desire to ensure that the military remained a male preserve.

Drawing on a range of archival sources, including previously unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, newspapers and magazines, Women in the British Army uncovers the gendered discourses of the army to reveal that it was a key site in the formation of male and female identities.

1 Introduction
Gendering war

In May 2002, Captain Phillipa Tattersall became the first woman to complete the notoriously gruelling nine-week long training course necessary to become a member of the prestigious Royal Marines Commandos. The course, which has a 55 per cent drop out rate amongst its predominantly male participants, is widely recognised as one of the most demanding military training courses in the world. In order to pass the course, Captain Tattersall had to complete a 30 mile ‘yomp’ across Dartmoor in under eight hours, carrying a 35 lb pack and assault rifle, scale a 30 foot wall and sprint 217 yards whilst carrying a fellow trainee in a fireman’s lift. Nevertheless, despite her achievement, she can only serve with the Commandos in a support role as the army still forbids women from serving in combat positions. The argument most often made to support the exclusion of women from front-line positions is that of physical strength, particularly the comparative upper body strength of men and women. As Captain Tattersall had proved herself to be as strong as, and stronger than, most men, her exclusion from combat had to be justified on different grounds. Major General Julian Thompson, a former commander of the Royal Marines Commandos, argued that ‘women would be a disruptive influence on the team’, thus encapsulating the belief that not only is combat a ‘naturally’ male occupation but that the presence of women threatens the masculine cohesion and efficiency of combat units.¹ As this introductory chapter will show, women in the military, particularly women in combat positions, or close to combat positions, have long been seen as problematic. From Boadicea to Joan of Arc, through wars of occupation and resistance, to civil wars and world wars, women have been active participants in warfare at many different points in history and in many different situations. However, the combatant woman appears again and again as, at best, an ambiguous figure and at worst as an object of hate.

Women in the military threaten to destabilise clear-cut ideas about gender by occupying the very male territory of warfare. These women have often been punished, both in myth and in reality. Boadicea, martial Queen of the Iceni who led her people against the Roman conquerors in the first-century AD, was, we are told, flogged and saw her daughters raped before poisoning herself rather than face further humiliation. Tales of the mythical Amazons tell again and again of their defeat and military and sexual subjugation by the forces of ancient Greece. Joan of Arc, having led the French forces to victory, was burnt at the stake for heresy. The term ‘camp follower’, used to describe the women who followed and provided services for the standing armies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, rapidly became an epithet for prostitute. Moving into the twentieth century, Klaus Thewelweit described in detail the fantasies of murdering ‘Red’ revolutionary women of the Freikorps, the proto-fascist armies which roamed Germany following the First World War.² A common nickname for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s section of the army during the Second World War, was ‘the groundsheets of the army’ reflecting widely held beliefs about the prevalence of promiscuity amongst the largely working-class service. The underlying antagonism towards women in military uniform continued after the war: Joe, the narrator and hero of Braine’s 1957 novel Room at the Top described a direct hit on a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) mess room as ‘simply a mess to be cleared up’.³ In the late twentieth century, 24 female American soldiers reported that they had been sexually assaulted by their male comrades during the Gulf war.⁴ Again and again, women who step outside the bounds of femininity to become active participants in warfare are punished by rape, defeat, humiliation and death. This introductory chapter explores some of the ways in which combat has been designated as a male activity, examining images of femininity and masculinity in warfare.

Wartime is a period in which the contours of gender roles can be seen extremely clearly. Men go away to fight; women remain at home. The image of the waiting woman is one which spans the centuries from the Lady of Shalot of Arthurian legend to the First World War posters telling men that ‘Women of Britain Say Go!’ to the campaign to ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’ for the US troops of the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War. However, in the two total wars of the twentieth century and in the more recent wars in Vietnam and Iraq, women have taken a more active role, working in uniform to provide the support services so vital to the successful maintenance of the military. At times, women have also taken part in combat. Although numerically insignificant, these women have a symbolic importance, both to those arguing for an expanded role for women in the military and to the nations for which they fought. The role of women combatants in Russia is probably the best known. During the First World War, the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death fought in battle against German soldiers and in the Second World War the Soviet Union deployed women in combat, most notably as fighter pilots and snipers. Maria Botchkareva, the Commander of the Women’s Battalion of Death claimed in her autobiography to have joined the army in 1915 as a foot soldier and combatant, on the special authority of the Tsar. In this rather self-serving memoir Botchkareva portrays her time in the ordinary army as a combination of masculine combat, fighting and bayoneting German soldiers, and female caring, rescuing over 50 men from no-man’s-land following her first battle.⁵ Botchkareva the female soldier also became a symbol of Russian resistance to German aggression, a position she drew upon in her creation of the Battalion of Death, formed primarily to shame Russian soldiers, increasingly deserting the Front during the 1917 Revolution, into military action. In her recruiting speech, Botchkareva encouraged potential recruits to set ‘an example of self sacrifice’ so that ‘you men will realise your duty’.⁶ Imagined less as an effective military unit than as a propagandist tool with which to lead men back into war and away from Bolshevism, 250 women from the Battalion of Death fought in the last Russian offensive, of whom 6 were killed and 30 wounded, before being disbanded by the Soviets.⁷

The Englishwoman Flora Sandes fought with the Serbian Army in the same war, a position she fell into almost by accident, having originally worked as a nurse in a military hospital in Valjero. When she returned from sick leave in England to find that the hospital was now behind enemy lines, she joined the Second Serbian infantry as a field hospital worker on the Serbian Army’s long and arduous retreat through the mountains of Serbia and Albania. Accidentally falling behind her Unit whilst riding with a Captain Stayodinovitch, Sandes was enrolled as a soldier with one of the Units protecting the retreat from the rear, taking part in battle and eventually being promoted to Sergeant-Major. Sandes was awarded the King George Star, Serbia’s highest military award, for her service, and after being wounded and declared unfit for military service, returned to Britain to raise funds for the Serbian cause.⁸ Constance Marciewicz, a nationalist and suffragist, was Second in Command of 100 men at St Stephen’s Green in the doomed Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 and was briefly sentenced to death by the British government for her part in the rebellion. However, these women are exceptions, either eulogised as extraordinary individuals as in the case of Botchkareva, Sandes and Marciewicz or ignored and warned not to ‘speak of the services you have rendered’ in the case of Soviet airwomen. Indeed, it seems that these women have been eulogised precisely because they are unusual. Established gender roles can survive the actions of a small number of individuals who are determined to break with convention virtually unscathed; it is when large numbers of people act in ways which have the potential to transgress social boundaries, as when women are drawn into the military in large numbers, that these roles are challenged.

The symbolic importance of the masculine nature of warfare can be seen in the organisation of militaries and in the status of their members. Within all militaries, the combatant man has the highest symbolic status; although in reality he may be the youngest, least educated and from the lowest social class of the army’s recruits, and thus the most ‘disposable’ of its members, it is the combatant who is remembered on war memorials and eulogised in poetry, prose and film. Many militaries have also worked hard at separating these combatant men from their support services, especially when these are composed of, or include, women. In the First World War and well into the Second, British women worked with and alongside the military, not within it, as they were enrolled for service, not enlisted as men were. The American Army resisted the idea of utilising women’s labour during the First World War, and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, formed in 1942, was primarily employed in communications and clerical work, and kept well away from combat. While camp followers were sometimes described as ‘belonging to the army’, and could at times be subject to military discipline their status was very different from that of the soldiers, and they were often perceived by civilian society as an embodiment of immoral behaviour and a potential threat to military morale.⁹ The role of militarised women, from the camp followers of the eighteenth century onwards, has been secondary to that of the militarised man, the fighter. Although the work of these support workers is vital to the logistical function, and therefore the success of an army, it is of far lower status than that of the combatant man. Combat remains an essentially male role, and even though the numbers of men who will actually take part in close physical combat are small, and diminish ever further as wars become more and more a triumph of technology, all men are potential combatants, and, as De Groot argues ‘all men enjoy the status which combat accords’.¹⁰ The overwhelming absence of women from combat thus serves to reinforce the gender divisions which exist in peacetime society.

Margaret and Patrice Higonnet have described the pattern of gender roles visible in wartime as a ‘double helix, with its structure of two intertwined strands’.¹¹ Within the double helix, they argue, the female strand is both opposed and subordinate to the male. Whenever the female strand moves, the male strand moves in tandem to maintain its position of superiority. In the First and Second World Wars, women moved forward to take up male roles, but men moved forward into the higher status role of combatant. Although women were working in large numbers outside the home in occupations previously only undertaken by men, gender relations remained essentially unchanged. In this game of follow my leader, both genders move forwards, with women always remaining one step behind men: only those killed in combat are considered worthy of war memorials and commemoration on national days of remembrance. The maintenance of gender roles in wartime means that the society that is being fought for can be represented as essentially stable, despite the enormous social, familial and economic shifts that war can bring about. When men return from battle, women will return to the home, as was overwhelmingly the experience in Britain following both of the twentieth century’s total wars. Women in uniform, even if not actual combatants, challenge this established pattern of gender roles; when men are working alongside women in the forces, they cannot be told that they are fighting to defend women and the home. The female soldier is both a necessary feature of British society in total war and a threat to social stability and the existing order.

The link between masculinity and soldiering can be seen throughout the centuries. Indeed, it is a relationship which is often valorised and exalted. As a counterpart to this glorified military masculinity, femininity has long been linked with peace and with pacifism. This gendering of warfare can be seen in one of the most ancient stories of war The Iliad, where Hector, anticipating his death in battle with Achilles, tells his wife Andromanche to

• Go home, attend to your own handiwork
• At loom and spindle
• As for the war, that is for men.¹²

The Iliad was read by Simone Weil, writing from occupied France during the Second World War, as a hymn to male force, as it valorises the male soldier and accepts death and destruction as an inevitable aspect of war.¹³ Throughout the books women remain within the city walls fulfilling the role of the ‘waiting woman’ so familiar from later wars:

• Now when Hector reached the Scaean Gates
• Daughters and wives of Trojans rushed to greet him
• With questions about friends, sons, husbands, brothers.¹⁴

Women of the Iliad were the opposite of the fighting men: their femininity has to be protected, but it is also dangerous, threatening to weaken the resolve of the men and sap their strength. As Helenus Priamides warns Hector,

• Here make our troops hold fast, before the gate
• Or back again they go, pell mell into the arms of women-
• A great day for our enemies¹⁵

This representation of women as non-combatants, as needing the protection of men, can be seen again during mediaeval and early modern modern periods. When, under the feudal system, noblemen went away to fulfil their duty to fight for the King, women stayed behind to defend their family’s property. During the religious wars of seventeenth-century Europe, undefeated cities were often represented in contemporary verse and print as virginal women. When Lutheran Magdeburg fell to Catholic forces in 1631, celebratory verse proclaimed: ‘Praise God in all eternity, Magdeburg is quenched and its virginity is no more.’¹⁶ This military penetration of a virginal city was matched by the rape of the city’s female citizens; an all too common expression of the city’s subjugation, seen again in the Bosnian War of the early 1990s.¹⁷ German women who ‘surrendered’ to soldiers too willingly were believed to have dishonoured their community and were often expelled from the city as a means of purifying it and maintaining civil order. Women represented continuity and the maintenance of the social order. Their role in wartime was to symbolise the society for which the men were fighting.

As the city states and autonomous regions of the early modern period developed into the nation-states of the modern world, this gendered division of warfare was codified into state policy. Despite the large numbers of women who acted as camp followers during the Napoleonic wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, providing essential support services to the large armies of the period, war was clearly seen as the concern of men. Only men were enlisted or conscripted to fight for their country, and the male soldier came to occupy an almost sacred space within the concept of the nation. Heinrich Von Trietschke, Bismark’s publicist and disciple, and Chair of History at Berlin University between 1874 and 1896, conducted a lecture series each year on the ‘virility of war’ in which he described war as manly and peace as effeminate. He argued that ‘it is war that turns a people into a nation… The men of action are the real heroes of history… The features of history are virile, unsuited to sentimental or feminine natures’.¹⁸ These sentiments, which place war as the great driving force of history, and men at the centre of wars, can also be found in the prose and poetry of Victorian Britain, in which soldiers and schoolboys alike were urged to ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game’¹⁹ and the ‘correct’ approach to warfare was characterised by Tennyson’s Light Brigade:

• Their’s not to reason why
• Their’s but to do and die²⁰

War was a man’s duty, and to die for one’s country was ‘the ultimate sacrifice’.

This glorification of warfare as the supreme fulfilment of men wasn’t really challenged until the mechanised slaughter of the First World War. In Brooke’s poem 1914, where the soldiers setting off for war

• Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move
• And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary
• And all the little emptiness of love.²¹

defined a man, separating him from the non-combatant ‘half-men’ and women. It was not only the Romantics who glorified war, looking backwards to find stories of gallant men riding out to defend the honour of noble women. The Futurists, who by their very name, scorned the past, also glorified both war and masculinity. Marrinetti, in his Manifesto of Futurism wrote that:

We want to hymn the spirit of the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the earth… we will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.²²

Proto-fascists, romantics, nationalistic historians, early modern legislators and pamphleteers and ancient Greek storytellers – all were agreed on one principle: war was man’s business.

This principle has been reinforced by the work of many military historians, much of which has tended to reinforce the gendered divisions of warfare. The respected military historian John Keegan, Professor of History at Sandhurst Military Academy, summarised his beliefs about women and war in A History of Warfare:

Half of human nature – the female half – is in any case highly ambivalent about warmaking. Women may be both the cause or the pretext of warmaking… and can be the instigators of violence… they can also be remarkably hard hearted mothers of warriors, some apparently preferring the pain of bereavement to the shame of accepting the homeward return of a coward. Women can, moreover, be positively messianic war leaders… Warfare is, nevertheless, the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders… Women, however, do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never, in any military service, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as universal as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limitation that it is an entirely masculine activity.²³

Keegan is correct in his assertion that combatant women form only the most ‘insignificant exceptions’ to the general rule that combat is a male affair, although wrong to state that women ‘never… fight men’ as the experience of Russian women in both world wars illustrates. However, his argument appears to be underpinned by a belief in an essential, natural division between the martial man and the peace-making woman. In Keegan’s overview of warfare, women may instigate wars, become great war ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1: Introduction: Gendering war
• 2: Early days: Women and the armed forces before 1914
• 3: ‘The Women Were Marvellous’: The First World War and the female volunteer
• 4: ‘Eve in Khaki’: The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps
• 5: Between the wars: Women’s military organisations 1919–1938
• 6: ‘The Gentle Sex’: The ATS in the Second World War
• 7: ‘Gentle in manner, resolute in deed’: Women in the postwar army
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography