ABSTRACT
Woolf, Brittain, some feminist pacifists and the more successful of the Voluntary Aid Detachments had faith in the argument that the war, even if it was a manifestation of a particularly brutal kind of masculine madness, created space for women to work, think and practise as artists. Feminism is beyond the stage of illustrating women’s experience and seeing it as being unproblematically represented and universally available. The politics of race lay behind much of the rhetoric concerned to remind women of their ‘natural destiny and duty’: the hand that rocked the cradle should not be stained with the impurities of paid employment if the world were to be properly ruled. But the kind of national identity that was based on competition and the shameless pursuit of supremacy was undermined by socialist, feminist pacifists who saw capitalism as part of the structure that encouraged war and relied on the permanent subjection of the physically, politically and financially powerless.
