The Women's Corps: Gender, Militarism and Modernity in Britain during the Great War and its Aftermath

这是英国妇女军团的社会和文化史，这是一个在第一次世界大战期间建立兵役作为妇女参与国家的一种形式的群众运动。该运动始于1914年，是一个志愿者部队网络，旨在帮助保卫英国免受入侵，采用军事组织和训练，并为当地军队指挥部提供支持。她们的倡议在战争的后半段得到了官方的批准，成立了政府批准的女性辅助服务。这些部队的建立是为了帮助缓解武装部队的人力短缺，它们招募了大约90 000名妇女，以取代现役支助职位的士兵。这本书旨在强调战时性别关系的一个关键转变，这一转变被许多历史学家忽视。虽然在1914年之前，妇女被排除在兵役之外，并因此被排除在公民身份之外，但她们的战时工作使辅助人员与士兵具有象征性的平等，如果她们在国外服役，无论她们的其他资格如何，都可以获得选举权。通过关注军团运动及其创造新的性别角色的努力，我试图揭示妇女在实现这一转变中的作用。我重建了军团的成员，他们的背景和动机，以揭示运动的目标，重新定义性别关系的社会基础。我的工作的另一个野心是通过军团的历史揭示性别，军国主义和现代性之间的联系。我探讨了兵役和现代性之间的当代关联，这激发了许多妇女加入武装部队工作。我还研究了辅助人员的军装，仪式，环境，工作和休闲活动，以阐明他们通过构建新的性别身份和与军人的关系的过程。最后，通过对退役妇女退伍军人协会的调查，揭示了在两次世界大战之间，当军国主义和现代性的定义发生重大变化时，她们如何利用自己的经验。我的书将对第一次世界大战和妇女史的学术和教学做出重大贡献。目前还没有全面的研究侧重于妇女在战争期间服兵役或其对前战争工作者的个人和职业生活以及在两次世界大战之间的政治参与的影响。因此，我的研究不仅会被研究这些领域的历史学家和学生阅读，也会被对这一时期感兴趣的公众阅读。

This is a social and cultural history of the British Women's Corps, a popular movement which established military service as a form of national participation for women during the First World War. The movement started in 1914 as a network of volunteer units which, seeking to help defend Britain from invasion, adopted military organisation and training and performed support duties for local army commands. Their initiative received official sanction in the second half of the war, with the formation of the government-sanctioned female auxiliary services. Created to help relieve the manpower shortage of the armed forces, these units recruited some 90,000 women to replace soldiers in support positions for active duty. The book aims to highlight a key shift in wartime gender relations, ignored by many historians. While before 1914 women were excluded from military service and, based on this, from citizenship, their wartime work gave the auxiliaries symbolic equality with soldiers and inclusion in the franchise if they had served abroad, regardless of their other qualifications. By focusing on the Corps movement and its efforts to create new gender roles, I seek to reveal women's role in bringing about this transformation. I reconstruct the Corps' membership, their backgrounds and motivations, in order to uncover the social basis of the movement's objective to redefine gender relations.A further ambition of my work is to shed light on the links between gender, militarism and modernity through the history of the Corps. I explore the contemporary associations between martial service and modernity which inspired many women to join up for work with the armed forces. I also examine the auxiliaries' military uniforms, rituals, environments, work and leisure activities to illuminate the process through which they constructed new gender identities and relations with servicemen. Finally, by investigating ex-servicewomen's veteran associations, I reveal how they utilised their experience in the interwar period when definitions of militarism and modernity underwent significant changes.My book will make a significant contribution to the scholarship and teaching of the First World War and women's history. Currently there are no comprehensive studies focusing on women's military service during the war or its impact on former war workers' personal and professional lives and political participation in the interwar period. As a result, my study will be read not only by historians and students researching these areas but also by members of the public interested in this period.