Investigations of a Dog

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that.

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

This is a selection of First World War photos from my collection, mostly bought from ebay. I’ve posted some horse photos over at The horse in history and culture. The ones here have more of a gender theme. Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions.

Four male prisoners of war, two in drag. This was taken in the theatre at Cottbus PoW camp, where my great-grandad was held from 1917 to 1918. He performed in the theatre but there’s no evidence that he dressed as a woman. One of the paradoxes of the hyper-masculine environment of the 20th century British Army was that it often forced men into stereotypically feminine roles in order to stand in for the women who were excluded.

Royal Army Medical Corps group, taken in France, 1919. It clearly shows how uniforms reinforced gender roles. The men are wearing army service dress, just like combat soldiers, although their role is to provide medical care. The women are wearing long skirts and big head-dresses. Also notice that some of the men are very short. The man on the left of the middle row, standing between the corporal and the nurse with a dog at their feet, looks shorter than some of the women. If you look very closely you can see that some of the group are holding puppies.

A man and woman called Fred and Kitty, but I don’t know their surnames. Fred is a sergeant in the Army Service Corps, and Kitty is in civilian clothes. The poses reinforce the differences in dress, suggesting male dominance and female submission.

Territorial Royal Field Artillery corporal with a small boy. Probably taken in Cardiff or Pontypridd. Like the Sergeant in the previous photo, the corporal is wearing spurs. These were standard equipment for troops classed as mounted, which included field artillery and service corps because they relied on horses for transport. I love the little boy’s pose. Although man and boy are both male, they illustrate the hierarchy of masculinity: the corporal is more of a man because of his age, independence and military service.

A group of female munitions workers. The unprecedented expansion of both the British Army and the arms industry in the First World War, along with the assumption that women couldn’t or shouldn’t fight, led to more women working in munitions factories. This temporarily gave some women increased pay and freedom, but 90 years on women as a group still earn less than men as a group. Although the uniforms make some concessions to the practicalities of working in a factory, they also signify femininity.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from. (more…)

There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

I’m finally back to blogging after a few months off. This post is a quick roundup of some things that happened while I was away.

First of all, the Military History Carnival always needs more hosts. Although it’s not my responsibility any more I’d like to see it continue, so if you can help please contact TJ at tj$linzy$@$gmail$.$com (remove the dollar signs)..

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account as I was finding the whole thing too annoying. I’ve opened an account at LinkedIn but I’m not sure if I’m going to use it. It seems very much aimed at The Businessman In His Suit And Tie. Does anyone use it, and is it any use? I’d like to see a social networking site specifically designed for academics. Maybe with facilities to self-archive our publications.

The Great War Archive (which I posted about here) opened on time in November, and looks really good. They’re also continuing to collect submissions through a Flickr group. Reviews in History have published a review by Esther MacCallum-Stewart and a response by Stuart Lee. This project gives us proof that there are lots of interesting documents in private hands and that at least some people are willing to share them on the web if given the chance. Although 6,500 documents sounds like a lot I suspect it’s a tiny fraction of what’s still out there.

The 1911 census has been released early (but some counties aren’t available yet). Although access is relatively expensive you get very good quality colour photos of the original documents: much better than the 1901 census.

EThOS, the British Library’s new online thesis sevice, is now in public beta. I’ll probably post about it in more detail later in the week, but for now I’ll just say that I’m very impressed.

90 years ago today 46th Division broke through the Hindenburg Line. You can read about 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment’s part in the battle in the relevant chapter of Sandall’s history (and if you click linked names in the text you can get to medal citations and an interactive map). Although my great-grandfather served with the battalion he missed this action – by this time he’d been a prisoner in Germany for nearly 2 years.

It’s interesting to note that although people who are down with the revisionist work that’s been done in the last 20 years or so know this as one of the greatest achievements in British military history it still doesn’t seem to have broken into popular awareness in the way that the Somme or Third Ypres have. The coverage in Wikipedia is very poor, with 46th Division’s spectacular success on 29th September given only one sentence! The article gives far more attention to the less successful American and Australian attacks. Is this because people still can’t help thinking about the First World War in terms of failure?

Yesterday I tried uploading some material to the Great War Archive (which I previously posted about here). I’m pleased to say that it was very easy to do and that the site works very well. It took me less than one hour to upload about 27 items, so about 2 minutes per item, but that would vary depending on how many pages each item has. These were all letters and postcards with only two images per item. Most of the time was spent waiting for the files to upload, which depends on the speed of your connection (my ADSL is 8Mb downstream but only 500Kb upstream). Although there are several pages to click through during the submission process they all load very quickly, and there is an option to remember your personal details so you only have to enter them once.

There’s surprisingly little opportunity to enter structured metadata, but I think the idea is to make the submission process as easy as possible for people with no technical skills. This is likely to be a big advantage – I’ve previously mentioned that the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives requires an unusual combination of skills and experience which probably limits the number of people who can contribute. The important thing with the Great War Archive is to get hold of previously unseen material and make it accessible to the public (access to the archive will definitely be free for everyone). This means not making too many demands on the people who hold this material. It’s important to recognise that even uploading photos can be difficult for some people – many new users on the Great War Forum have problems with this, although that’s partly down to the 100K file size limit. The GWA allows each file to be up to 25MB, which should mean that contributors don’t have to worry about resizing or compressing images.

The submission form asks for as much information as possible in a human readable form. It will then be down to the project staff to convert this into structured metadata. It looks like they have the time, budget and expertise to do this – project director Stuart Lee said in a comment on my previous post that 60% of the timetable is devoted to cataloguing, and that the Centre for First World War Studies is involved in the project. The result should be very different from Ancestry’s sloppy indexing of service records. Now we’ll just have to wait until November to see how it turns out.

Today the Great War Archive opened for submissions. This is a very big and very innovative project started by Oxford University to collect digital facsimiles of documents, photographs, recordings, and artefacts relating to the First World War (it seems to be primarily about the UK but they haven’t explicitly mentioned any geographical limits) from private individuals. This means that lots of family collections which were previously unknown and inaccessible will be made available to the public (and since the terms for contributors state that material will only be used for educational non-commercial purposes I’d hope that access is going to be free). Anyone can contribute material by uploading it through the project’s website, and there will also be special events where people who don’t have the IT skills or equipment can bring items along to have them digitized.

This is a really exciting project, and I hope it all goes well. We’ll be contributing the Wenham letters that I’ve been working on (although I’m still planning to put TEI transcripts on my own site eventually, along with all the same kind of record linkage that I’ve done with Sandall’s history), so I’ll soon be able to report on how easy it is to upload stuff and what kind of metadata they collect.

If everything goes to plan the archive will be open to viewers from 11th November 2008.

On to the next stage of digitizing Sandall’s History of 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. Having marked up the structure of the text and written XSLT to split the book into several HTML pages with working internal links, I could move on to Phase 2: marking up name, dates, and abbreviations.

(more…)

I’ve now uploaded a new version of Sandall’s history of 5th Lincs with each chapter on a separate page. I thought splitting the pages and getting the internal links to work would be difficult but it turned out to be easier than I thought, although it involves some quite complicated XPath expressions. I’ve also uploaded the new XSLT to show how I did it. This could probably be better in some ways but for now I’m just pleased that it works. While doing this I decided to change the n attribute of the chapter divs from a number to a slug that could be used to make a Google friendly permalink.

Now I’m waiting for Google to re-index the site so that the custom search actually works. Meanwhile I’ve started tagging people, places, dates and abbreviations. More on that when I’ve finished. I’m also increasingly confident that the photos are in the public domain (see these guidelines, which make things a bit clearer, if they’re right), so they’ll probably be added soon.