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Writing and Waiting: The First World War Correspondence between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton
Author(s) -
Acton Carol
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.00129
Subject(s) - home front , first world war , spanish civil war , front (military) , world war ii , period (music) , interdependence , interwar period , binary opposition , history , gender studies , sociology , literature , law , art , political science , ancient history , aesthetics , engineering , archaeology , mechanical engineering
The unpublished letters exchanged between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton during the First World War, and Brittain’s diary of the period, show the extent to which men’s and women’s war experiences were interdependent, thus collapsing those binary oppositions of home and front, women and men, within which we write war. In these texts, the woman Brittain defines as ‘waiting at home’ cannot be divorced from the official war arena ‐ the front. Furthermore, such interdepend‐ence reveals that women’s tendency to accept much of the discourse of propaganda occurred not because of their separation from the world of combat, but because their intimate connection with it demanded the site of mourning that was offered by such discourse.