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    Vera Brittain

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    Ramona Elena Spiridon
    Vera Brittain was a British writer and pacifist whose experiences during World War I transformed her perspectives. As a young woman, she dreamed of attending Oxford but her plans were disrupted by the war. She served as a nurse and lost her fiancé and brother in the war, leaving her in a state of disillusionment. After the war, she became a feminist writer and activist, campaigning for women's suffrage and rights. While she initially supported Britain in WWII, she later adopted radical pacifism, believing all war inflicted too much suffering. Her career demonstrated the complex and nonlinear journey from initial patriotism to eventual feminism and anti-war activism.

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    Vera Brittain

    Uploaded by

    Ramona Elena Spiridon
    38 views17 pages
    Vera Brittain was a British writer and pacifist whose experiences during World War I transformed her perspectives. As a young woman, she dreamed of attending Oxford but her plans were disrupted by the war. She served as a nurse and lost her fiancé and brother in the war, leaving her in a state of disillusionment. After the war, she became a feminist writer and activist, campaigning for women's suffrage and rights. While she initially supported Britain in WWII, she later adopted radical pacifism, believing all war inflicted too much suffering. Her career demonstrated the complex and nonlinear journey from initial patriotism to eventual feminism and anti-war activism.

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    Vera Brittain was a British writer and pacifist whose experiences during World War I transformed her perspectives. As a young woman, she dreamed of attending Oxford but her plans were disrupted by the war. She served as a nurse and lost her fiancé and brother in the war, leaving her in a state of disillusionment. After the war, she became a feminist writer and activist, campaigning for women's suffrage and rights. While she initially supported Britain in WWII, she later adopted radical pacifism, believing all war inflicted too much suffering. Her career demonstrated the complex and nonlinear journey from initial patriotism to eventual feminism and anti-war activism.

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    38 views17 pages

    Vera Brittain

    Uploaded by

    Ramona Elena Spiridon
    Vera Brittain was a British writer and pacifist whose experiences during World War I transformed her perspectives. As a young woman, she dreamed of attending Oxford but her plans were disrupted by the war. She served as a nurse and lost her fiancé and brother in the war, leaving her in a state of disillusionment. After the war, she became a feminist writer and activist, campaigning for women's suffrage and rights. While she initially supported Britain in WWII, she later adopted radical pacifism, believing all war inflicted too much suffering. Her career demonstrated the complex and nonlinear journey from initial patriotism to eventual feminism and anti-war activism.

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    Vera Brittain

    Overview
    • The Edwardian Family
    • Experience of War
    • The Interwar period
    • Conclusion
    Introduction
    • Vera Brittain (1893-1970) gives an insight into
    women and war; feminism and pacifism
    • She wrote in many genres, always addressing the
    most devastating experience of her life: WWI
    • Contrast between later autobiographiesand the
    more ambivalent writings of the war period
    • Wanted to show the attraction that war held for
    youth and relation between women and war
    • When war touched her personally she began
    rebellion against patriarchal values that
    dominated her pre-war life
    Edwardian middle-class family life
    • Carol Dyhouse argues there was a consistent
    set of rules about the right ordering of
    domestic life
    • Patterns of middle class life had become
    highly ritualised
    • Distance between social aspirations and
    income created tensions for middle class
    family
    • Affected women more than men
    Vera Brittain’s family life
    In her diary of 1913 when she was 20 she wrote:

    On the way to golf I induced mother to disclose


    a few points on sexual matters which I thought I
    ought to know, though the information is
    always intensely distasteful to me and most
    depressing – in fact it quite put me off my
    game! I suppose it is the spiritual - &
    intellectual – development part of me that feels
    repugnance at being brought too closely into
    contact with physical ‘open secrets’. Alas!
    Sometimes it feels sad to be a woman! Men
    seem to have so much choice as to what they
    were intended for.
    Daughters
    • Daughters treated differently from sons and adolescent
    girls spent long periods of their life at home
    • A daughter at home was initiated into the social
    routines of middle class women often centred around
    ‘calling’ – a highly complex and ritualised activity which
    functioned to establish and confirm social position and
    to cement the relationships between middle class
    families in the neighbourhood.
    • Her autobiography mirrors that of other early feminists
    full of impatience at what she considers to have been a
    futile waste of time
    • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_jhylzaXk
    War
    • When war broke out in 1914 she was just within
    reach of a feminist dream: to go to Oxford
    • She was the daughter of a Staffordshire paper
    manufacturer and received the education
    considered appropriate for a young lady – lessons
    at home from a governess, followed by five years
    at boarding school in Surrey.
    • Encouraged by her reading of Olive
    Schreiner’s Woman and Labour she persuaded
    her reluctant father to send her to Oxford
    • Her plans were shattered by the war
    Diary: 3rd August 1914
    Love, Work and Death
    War Experiences
    • She turned increasingly to patriotic and religious discourse.
    • She became a full-time nurse enabling her to emulate Roland
    particularly by sharing his physical discomforts
    • Her poem The German Ward written in 1917 captured the folly of
    patching up the Germans after the Allies had blown them apart
    • At the end of the war she realised that nursing had saved her from
    personal despair over her losses (her lover and brother)
    • When the war ended she was in a state of ‘numb disillusion’. On
    Armistice Day she wrote:
    ‘all those with whom I had really been intimate were gone; not one
    remained to share with me the heights and the depths of my
    memories’.
    Violets – April 1915
    Violets from Plug Street Wood
    Sweet, I send you oversea.
    (It is strange that they should be blue,
    Blue when his soaked blood was red,
    For they grew around his head:
    It is strange they should be blue.)
    Roland Leighton
    http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collec
    tions/brittain/
    Oxford
    • Spent two years at Oxford
    • Developed friendship with
    Winifred Holtby which
    continued until Holtby’s
    premature death in 1935
    • Supported campaign for
    women to receive degrees at
    Oxford
    • When she left Oxford in 1921
    she determined to follow a
    career as a writer.
    Feminism
    • Associated with active feminists working in London
    • In 1920 Lady Margaret Rhondda assisted by a
    number of other women including Rebecca West
    and Cicely Hamilton founded the feminist
    journal Time and Tide.
    • 1921 she inaugurated the feminist organisation the
    Six Point Group which took its name from its six
    goals: pensions for widows, equal rights of
    guardianship for parents, improvement of the laws
    dealing with child assault and unmarried mothers,
    equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities in
    the Civil Service
    • VB and Winifred Holtby began to work for the six
    point group shortly after their arrival in London
    • WH became a director of Time and Tide in 1926 and
    VB was a regular contributor.
    Marriage
    • VB claimed a new concept of marriage was
    essential if women were to achieve equality.
    • Marriage should be an equal partnership and
    women should no longer be forced into the
    roles of ‘either slaves, exotic greenhouse
    plants, or carefully reared animals’.
    • She rejected the convention that married
    women should abandon their careers
    • She and George Catlin (professor at Cornell
    University) agreed to a ‘semi-detached
    marriage’
    • Arrangement continued after her two children
    were born
    Pacifism
    • Became revolutionary pacifist through her
    encounter in 1936 with Cannon Dick
    Sheppard head of the Peace Pledge Union
    • Maintained stance throughout WWII
    • British government viewed her bi-weekly
    ‘Letters to Peace-Lovers’ which had almost
    2,000 subscribers at its peak, as pro-Nazi
    heresy
    • England’s Hour written in 1941 about civilian
    life in England during the war ended with a
    plea to forgive the enemy
    • Pamphlet against obliteration bombing Seed
    of Chaos, first published in America in 1944,
    emphasised consequences of bombing for
    victims and those who inflicted the suffering
    Conclusion
    • Tracing Vera Brittain’s career between 1914 and 1950
    demonstrates there is not a straight line to pacifism
    and feminism but a series of backward and forward
    movements
    • Should relate her experience to an understanding of
    women and war more generally
    • Early pro-war sentiments and desire to be active in the
    war seem part of her professed desire to be a man
    • Her nursing experiences brought her in touch with her
    suppressed female identity
    • Before the war all her intimates were men, after the
    war she found friendship with Winifred Holtby

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