Women's Organisations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923

Recent developments in the social and cultural history of modern warfare have done much to shed new light on the experience of the First World War, and in particular how that experience was communicated in popular and high culture, and in acts of remembrance and commemoration after 1918. Above all the new historiography has shifted emphasis away from narratives centred on high politics and strategy alone, and has challenged the idea that the war came to an end with the cessation of military hostilities in November 1918. Indeed, away from the western front the war continued through conflicts over the repatriation of refugees and POWs; revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence in parts of central Europe; and new ethnic and national conflicts arising from the collapse of the former Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
Within this context, the role of organised women's movements and female activists in the post-war period takes on a new importance, especially when seen from a transnational and comparative perspective. Two international conferences on the response of the organised women's movement to the outbreak, duration and aftermath of war, organised by the investigators in 2005 and 2008 and later transformed into two edited volumes of essays, have identified a distinctive and clearly focused area of enquiry and established strong links between an informal group of international scholars eager to take the project forward. The group is both highly international - researchers from eleven different nations working on the women's organisations within some fourteen nations - and highly interdisciplinary. The international nature of the group and especially the involvement of a significant number of researchers from central and eastern Europe facilitates genuine comparative work which will also be enhanced by the different methodological approaches of the historians, social scientists, gender specialists and researchers into literature, culture and film.
Funding under the Research Network scheme would enable this informal network to become a cohesive and sustainable group and the proposed schedule of workshop-style meetings would allow it to make rapid progress in knowledge and understanding.
Although the research questions will be defined and clarified during the course of the project, major comparative themes such as citizenship, suffrage, nationalism, and women's desire to respond to extremes of need in the post-war era (dislocation, internment, violence and hunger) will be the starting point of our investigation. The group will examine the role of women's organisations and female activists in cultural demobilisation, referring to the 'dismantlement of the mindsets and values of wartime' (John Horne), which has become a major theme in recent international conferences. The launch in December 2008 of a major research project, Paramilitary Violence After the Great War, 1918-1923: Towards a Global Perspective, funded by the Irish Research Council and focusing largely on the response of younger men to the aftermath of the war, provides a welcome point of comparison here, especially in relation to understanding gendered responses to the challenges of de- and remobilisation.
The group will also examine the work of organisations which were able to move across international borders, such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and individual activists such as the campaigner on behalf of prisoners of war and their families, Elsa Brändström, and the journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who reported on the social conditions throughout post-war Europe. The role of such women and organisations in bringing about reconciliation and facilitating cooperation between former enemy nations will also be examined, as will the role of nationalist women's organisations in maintaining discourses of war and in facilitating the rise of new forms of ethno-nationalism and racial intolerance during the period 1918-23.

The PI has considerable experience of working with partners, most recently with Routes into Languages (the HEFCE-funded project launched in 2006 to encourage the study of Modern Languages), the Bradford Peace Museum and Opera North, and will therefore take the lead in ensuring that the findings of the group are disseminated beyond the academy. Several events are planned to share our ideas with the wider community. The international perspective and the potential for challenging popular myths about gender relations and feminist activities during this period make this aspect especially interesting and worthwhile. In the US, for example, the popular imagination has more often been captured by the events of the Second World War, so the opportunity for a US audience to engage with US involvement in and representation of the First World War is invaluable. In the UK, the aim will be to broaden popular understanding of the war experience beyond that of male soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front.

The University of Leeds has well-developed structures for supporting impact activities with a Director of KT/Impact at Professorial level, a project officer and a range of established and active strategic partnerships. All the network activities will feed into ambitious plans involving a number of local partners for marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014, will be fully supported by the Faculty and will continue to have resonance beyond the funded period. Our US partner, Hamline, situated in St Paul, Minnesota, has been chosen for its long-standing commitment to sharing knowledge with the local community and the funding offered by its endowed Chair in the Humanities will partly be used to support a day-time event aimed at local schools and colleges and an evening round table discussion aimed at the wider public to follow on from the open workshop in September 2011. At Sheffield Hallam University, Clare Midgley is also interested in exploring knowledge transfer opportunities with us in relation to her above-mentioned five-year term as President of the IFRWH. In all three institutions, the Press offices have considerable experience in marketing and publicising KT events and disseminating key findings.

At Leeds, two events are planned in March 2013. The first will be a widening participation event aimed at schools within the White Rose consortium (both Sheffield Hallam and Leeds are members) and will use a mix of short lectures, interactive workshops and panel discussion to address popular myths about the experience of the First World War as outlined above. In particular it will challenge the notion that the war represented a 'watershed' for gender relations and, through its focus on women activists, broaden public understanding of what constitutes a wartime experience.

The second event will work with Centres based at the University of Leeds, including the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) and the Centre for Jewish Studies as well as our community partners, the Bradford Peace Museum, the faith organisation Pax Christi and its partner, Fellowship of Reconciliation. We will also issue invitations to further interested institutional parties. These will include the Women's Library in London and one of our strategic partners, the Royal Armouries, which is based in Leeds. In an exploratory workshop held at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, we will present short discussion papers exploring gendered approaches to conflict resolution and the aftermath of conflict. We will use our key concept of 'cultural demobilisation' to examine the role of organised women's groups and individual female activists in the aftermath of other conflicts, both contemporary and historical, from a variety of perspectives. This forum, which brings together researchers and activists, will allow us to test the