ABSTRACT
As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. Building on this historiography, historians place women’s histories and questions about gender more centrally in our understanding of the conflict. The critical approach of Jonathan Rayner’s article ‘The Carer, the Combatant and the Clandestine’, exploring the representation of women in War Illustrated magazine, is a welcome contribution to contemporary scholarship. Sarah Hellawell’s article also reveals the extent to which the First World War amplified the growing preoccupation of social welfare and medical reformers with motherhood. Practices of everyday life and the cultural production of the era also significantly or subtly evolved as the influence and impact of the war rippled out into music, theatre, and fashion.
