“The Gentler
Sex? Responses
of the women’s movement to the First World War 1914-1919”
8th and 9th
September 2005, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, Senate House,
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Organisers: Ms Ingrid Sharp,
Department of German, University of Leeds i.e.sharp@leeds.ac.uk
and Dr Alison Fell, Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster
University a.s.fell@lancaster.ac.uk
Thursday, 8th September
9.00 - 9.30 Registration and Welcome
09.30 – 12.00: Plenary 1:
International overview
Chair: Angela K. Smith
Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Binghamton, US)
‘Networking Women: Women’s work against war’
Jane Potter (Oxford, UK) ‘Nobody
is a spectator: American women’s response to the First World War’
Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi (Tampere, Finland) ‘Finland’s Response to the War – Lotta
Svärd, A women’s Voluntary Defence Organisation’
Igor A. Shkolnilov (Ivanovo, Russia) ‘Russian Women in Wars: Women’s
Military Troops in the First World War’
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-14.30: Panels
Panel 1: Literary responses to the
war
Chair: Catherine O’Brien
Melanie Taylor (Cambridge, UK) ‘The
fiction of war: Virginia Woolf’s wartime writing’
Paul Jackson (Oxford Brookes, UK) ‘The Exquisite moment: May
Sinclair’s vision of a new spiritual reality forged through war’
Katherine Kennedy (UK) ‘The
brother/sister incestuous ‘we’ of the narrative of war: Sibling relations and
female identity’
Panel 2: Mobilisation and response
to the war
Chair: Frances Early
Elizabeth Townsend Gard (Stanford Law School, US) ‘Sorting
out the War Generation’s Response to the War: Suffragettes, War-participants
and Women of 1914’
Claudia Siebrecht (TCD, Ireland) ‘Martial Spirit and mobilisation
myths: women and the ideas of 1914 in Germany’
Judit Ascády (Budapest, Hungary) ‘In a Different Voice’: Responses
of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War’
14.30-15.00: Coffee Break
15.00 –17.30: Plenary session
2: Exceptional women
Chair: Erika Kuhlman
Angela K. Smith (Plymouth, UK) ‘The Woman who dared: Major Mabel
St Clair Stobart, Feminist Politics and the Wartime Media’
Frances Early (Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada) ‘Jessie Wallace Hughan, the
founder of the War Resisters League in the US’
Margaret Vining and Barton C Hacker (Smithsonian Institute,
US) ‘Suffragists in uniform: Women Volunteers in the World War’
19.00 Dinner
Friday 9th September
09.30-12.00: Plenary session 3:
Pacifism and Blame
Chair: Jane Potter
Erika Kuhlman (Idaho State University, US) ‘We Women can build a bridge’:
Gender and American Women’s Roles in Postwar Reconciliation’
Kristen E. Gwinn (The George Washington University, US)
‘Women’s Activism for Peace: from International Goals to National
Implementation’
Joanna Shearer (Oxford Brookes, UK) ‘The
Defence of Hélène Brion: Pacifists/Feminists in the French Minority Media’
Ingrid Sharp (Leeds, UK) ‘Blaming
the women: women’s moral responsibility for the war.’
13.00 – 15.00: Panels
Panel 3: Nurses and Medical women
Chair: Alison Fell
Katherine Burger Johnson (Louisville, US) ‘“Anything we can do for the
soldiers is not half enough”: Attitudes of American Nurses at the Front in
World War I’
Kimberly Jensen (Western
Oregon, US) ‘Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., the
First World War, and a Feminist Vision for International Health’
Santanu Das (Cambridge, UK) ‘Deep
into his body: Intimacy and Knowledge in Women’s Writing of the First World
War’
Jane McDermid (Southampton, UK) ‘No Woman’s Land? The Scottish
Women’s Hospitals in the First World War’
Panel 4: Germany
Chair: Ingrid Sharp
Caroline Bland (Sheffield, UK) ‘Responses to World War One in the
work of Lily Braun and Clara Viebig’
Annika Wilmers (University of
Tübingen, Germany): ‘Debatten über Pazifismus, Nationalismus und
Internationalismus in der Presse ausgewählter europäischer Frauenbewegungen
während des Ersten Weltkrieges.’
Catherine Dollard (Granville, US) ‘Service, Society and Single
Women: Dienstpflicht in WWI Germany’
Peter Davies (Edinburgh, UK) ‘Preserving Utopia: The ‘German
league for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform’ in the First World
15.00-17.30: Plenary session 4:
Suffrage and Sacrifice
Chair: Gisela Brinker-Gabler
Catherine O’Brien (Kingston, UK) ‘The Nature of Sacrifice’ (on
French & German women)
Marc Calvini-Lefebvre (Goldsmiths, UK) ‘Gendering
the war and peace debate in Britain: a capitulation to separate-sphere
ideology?’
Matthew
Stibbe (Sheffield, UK) ‘Elisabeth Rotten and the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für
Deutsche im
Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, 1914-1918’
Olga Shnyrova (Ivanovo, Russia) ‘Feminism, Women’s Suffrage and War: Patriotic and Civil Activity of
Russian Women’
17.30 End of conference