The current focus in television representations of the
First World War seems to be on the role of women as nurses. It is a forum which at least gives some status to older women, who in this
environment are often shown as professional, distant and strong, and often
phlegmatic, even tight-lipped. All of which connects strongly to the
relationship between women and speech during the First World War, as shown in
two of the essays in the volumes Languages and the First World War, currently
in the process of publication.
The need to silence women was clearly apparent in the case
of Mata Hari, a woman seen as threatening, dangerous, exposing weakness, and
therefore needing to be rooted out. In Julie Wheelwright’s essay for the second volume (Representation
and Memory) the concept of espionage and the implications of secret language are
ultimately about revealing the hidden, and hiding that which should not be revealed; far from state censorship but equally a
relationship between fear and the state, the story of the ‘spy’ shot by the
French is one of mysogyny, control, and race. But it also raises the
question of womens’ relationship with language in the context of shifting
communication structures and the sudden changes of cultural focus during
wartime. The language of race framed the fear of the threat presented by the
outsider Mata Hari, as she was used and blamed, as she was both the mangeuse and the tool,
in ultimately what was a sadly clumsy and all too recognisable failure of the
male to manage fear and desire. The name 'Mata Hari' evokes confusion, not
knowing where we stand in terms of power, as regards fiction and non-fiction,
and politically, racially and sexually, and reaches out into a future
post-1918.
What happens when women’s opportunities for verbal
communication are severely circumscribed is considered by Milos Damjanovic in
his essay on the effects of the conflict on the Jewish community of
Kosovo-Metohija in the Balkans. Women in this urban context were strongly based
in the home and the cultures of the home; this is particularly seen in the
linguistic field, where women acted as the guardians of the traditional
language, Ladino, ultimately transferred from the Iberian peninsula. The
unintended consequence of the limitations on women applied by the
social structure led to Ladino being not so much actively defended from
influence, as becoming a ‘home’ language in a multilingual environment.
Damjanovic proposes that this gaurdianship occurred because women in this
culture were prevented from having linguistic contact with other cultures.
While women, particularly mothers, clearly had a major role
as guardians of the concept of ‘home’ during the war, older women had a more
difficult position. Often satirised as out of touch, useless, and dressed in
the fashions of the late Victorian period, their status was highlighted in
their supposed restricted awareness of language change or by a limiting of
their voices. A humorous postcard shows an elderly woman visiting a wounded
soldier – ‘You weren’t wounded at the Front, then?’ she asks; the wounded
soldier replies to the discomfited visitor ‘No, lady! A shell exploded at the
base, but the base happened to be mine’. She is embarrassed, while the soldier
in the next bed is laughing.
In others, an elderly woman talks to a sailor: ‘I see the
papers say you were stripped for action – I wonder you didn’t catch your death
of cold’, or tells a soldier on crutches ‘I know just what it must feel like,
poor fellow – I had a corn plaster on all last week, and it’s been somethink
awful’.
‘Getting it wrong’, in one advert, provokes what now, in a period
supposedly less affected by decorum and politeness, seems to be staggering
offence. An advertisement for Ariston Cigarettes was published in Punch 16 May 1917.
Cigarette Situations No 6 - If the dear old lady asks you what you think of the war – the fitting smoke for this situation is Ariston.
In all moments of exasperation, of embarrassment, of disquietude, the smoking of an Ariston – and yet another – assists in readjusting matters to harmony; its fragrant, unparalleled taste helps thought and brings an appreciation of the things that really matter.
It is a pretty damning avowal that elderly women do not
matter. Hospital visiting was regularly shown as unwanted interference: in this
postcard a visitor is told to ‘Oppitubitch’ as well as being shown as mistaking
the term for the name of a Russian; our attention may be taken entirely by the
use of ‘bitch’, so we might not notice the implication that she is parochially
startled by the foreign.
In an environment where people went to great lengths to show
that they were ‘doing their bit’, for women above a certain age contributions
to the war effort were undesirable and fit only for ridicule. Their attempts,
and as a result they themselves, were seen as tiresome, interfering,
embarrassing, and unwanted.
Even after the war older women were held up as making verbal
mistakes or as being the subject of verbal mistakes. Three cartoons in Punch show older women making verbal mistakes (the issue
of 8 January 1919 seemed to be out to show older women in a bad light). One
cartoon has a ‘Dear Old Lady (to returning warrior)' saying: “Welcome back to Blimey”.
Another cartoon shows a priest addressing an older woman: ‘I hear your husband
is home from France. Is the army going to release him?’ ‘Well, he’s got a
fortnight before he goes back, but by that time he hopes to be demoralised’. In
another cartoon in the same issue one older woman is talking to another: ‘I
wish my hsband had joined them pivots instead of the foosileers. He’d a been
demobilised by now’. In
these instances older women are shown on the edge of the ‘adversity group’ who
were identified by their familiarity with, and their correct use of slang. If
we think of slang as being centred on the soldiers, sailors and aviators, with
a secondary ring of familiarity being the officers, and then the press, and
then readers of the press, older women are clearly the users of ‘failed trench
slang’, not quite outsiders, but indicators again of what not to do, despite
and indeed because of their best intentions. Older women’s mistakes – ‘blimey’,
‘demoralised’, ‘pivots’ – show the standard; this is what the language at the time should not be. Even if they did use a term correctly this
was likely to be interpreted as an encroachment into a register that was
inappropriate.Helen Z Smith in her semi-autobiographical novel Not So
Quiet (1930) mocks the mother’s use of the
word ‘cushy’ – ‘How well up in war slang is Mother’. They were damned if they
did and damned if they didn’t.
Perhaps older women’s most positively shown power was that of
tight-lipped outrage. Silence could be strong, and potentially intimidating to
an enemy – this cartoon by the celebrated Charles Graves appeared in the Hun's Handbook (1915).
