Conflicting attitudes to the war in Europe in women’s diaries from the Great War

This paper discusses the change in women’s mentality towards the concept of war and their own role in it according to autobiographical sources such as was journals, diaries, letters or autobiographical novels authored by women who were present at the front during the Great War. The primary sources quoted in this analysis include letters and diaries from nurses who worked in Dr. Elsie Inglis’s Scottish Women’s Hospitals unit as well as the “testament” of Vera Mary Brittain, famous English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and writer and women’s rights activist. Among the secondary sources employed in the analysis are the seminal works of Christine E. Hallett, Maxine Alterio, Santanu Das, Eric J. Leed and Claire M. Tylee. Before arriving at a conclusion, the paper highlights important changes in women’s discourse towards the war as well as the way in which such changes were supported by the novel situation in which women found themselves, namely as active participants at the front, and their aspirations towards equal rights and equal treatment.

Images of governesses', teachers, nannies in women's diaries and memories of the XIX-th – early XX-th centuries

In the context of the development of female education in the XIXth  early XXth century approaches to the home education of all the girls are of great interest. The analysis of these approaches let us not only to identify the degree of educators influence and moral development of the girls, but also we are able to observe a controversial image of governesses, nannies and teachers in the girls minds. A low level of morality, teacher training and poor material security formed a negative image among the girls, and also all those factors did not meet the goals of the education and upbringing at the education at that time. Families lacked control over the educators and the teachers, and, because of this, the situation became worse. In addition, most mothers of that time did not have the necessary pedagogical education. Anyway, the role of the mothers increased significantly, when most women began to perceive upbringing as their important social duty. Womens diaries and memories allowed us to trace this trend.

Slaves

This chapter focuses on what (and how) southern women diarists of the slave-owning class wrote about slaves as the Civil War crushed the system of human bondage that had benefited white southerners for so long. Individual enslaved African Americans begin to show up in the pages of white women’s diaries. Diarists transcribe what many of them say and do, sometimes with hostility or fear, but often thoughtfully and with surprise. Diaries thus reveal not the “end” of slavery, but rather slavery in the midst of ending. In writing about the uncertain future that the war presented to everyone, diarists in effect gave accounts of the personal relations that had held slavery together, day by day, before the war. They sketched enslaved people as individuals, more interested in how the end of bondage revealed their connection to certain black people than they were in assessing the blanket “loyalty” of servants. Inscribing what she saw of slavery and race, a diarist discovered how slavery—enslaved people—were inseparable from all she had known as “my life.” Seeing this life explode was one story she told to her pages. Diarists’ struggle to write and to understand this (as historians do, too) is a small opening for our historical empathy with these white women who deserve no sympathy.

Men

This chapter picks up a question that runs through the Civil War diaries of southern women: what is the tie between men and war, and what will war reveal about men? The question was rich enough to develop into thoughts and speculations about the nature of men, “the harder sex,” and whether the men who opted for war would have an answer to what it meant and how it would end. Diarists reflect (and worry, and sometimes joke) about worldly men who now seemed to improvise far more than they let on. They wrote about duty and morality, and how war shook up how to meet men and what to say to them. And while diarists wrote about the men they knew, they also wrote with curiosity and attraction for new men, the men war brought. So diarists wrote about love, and whether love would stand up to war—a compelling question for women and men at war, though not one often explored by historians. Women’s diaries open a door to such exploration, and to the way a diary’s page captures “timeless” themes amid a diary’s time-bound days.

Women Artists’ Diaries

Chapter 4 considers the diaries of Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan in conjunction and in relation to their emerging political positions. It includes an analysis of the author’s transcriptions of Mary’s diaries and of Evelyn’s diary, bringing to light previously unseen archival material in order to assist the recovery and revival of women’s marginalised life writing. A reading of Mary’s multiple, detailed diaries informs a reading of Evelyn’s relatively short, single diary, and the significance of the latter is highlighted through comparison with the former. The author aims to show how these women artists’ narratives, views and voices relate to each other and to other women’s diaries and life writing of the period, challenging traditional assumptions about these women as well as ideological assumptions about Victorian women writers.