More filler this week as I’m too busy to write anything intellectual. As it’s Remembrance Sunday, here’s a selection of WW1 pictures from my random ebay acquisitions. Click the thumbnails to see full size versions at Flickr. First of all I bought another photo of the frisky horse that I posted here. Not much need for an epic Errol Morris style investigation as I think it’s pretty obvious what order they go in.

Before:

After:

London Division horse show, Overath, Germany, 1919. Even during the war divisions and corps often held horse shows to encourage the men to look after their horses as well as possible. This was important because infantry and artillery depended very heavily on draught horses throughout the war. This one’s really worth viewing at full size as there’s so much detail.

This looks like two women in the uniform of the Scottish Horse. It apparently wasn’t unusual for women to dress up in men’s uniforms to have their photos taken.

A mounted artillery driver, photographed in Edinburgh. Photos like this cause lots of confusion because people get the idea that their ancestors were in the cavalry and then go off looking in the wrong places and asking the wrong questions.

Girls on ponies watching a Royal Artillery column. Not strictly WW1 as it looks like it was taken in the 1920s or 1930s. The Royal Field Artillery wasn’t fully mechanized until 1939. This photo captures the period when horses were making the transition from useful work in the army and economy to a hobby seen as mostly for girls.

From now until the end of 13th November 2011, Ancestry.co.uk is offering free access to First World War British Army service records and medal cards. They’ve also just finished digitizing Silver War Badge rolls, but these aren’t included in the free stuff.

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.

While I was taking advantage of free access to Ancestry this week, I decided to look for the medal index card of Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, the famous poet. I couldn’t find it. These medal index cards show entitlement to campaign medals for British soldiers who fought in the First World War. Since Sassoon served on the Western Front as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he would definitely have been eligible for campaign medals. Although campaign medals were issued automatically to Other Ranks (or their next of kin if they were dead), officers had to apply for their medals and it isn’t certain that all of them did. If they didn’t then there probably wouldn’t be an index card for them. Sassoon is famous for becoming an opponent of the war and throwing away the ribbon of his Military Cross, so maybe he didn’t claim his campaign medals. But he changed his mind about the war more than once, and went back to the front after his protest, so maybe he did claim them. I already know whether he did or didn’t have a medal card but I’m saving that for later. First, here’s some background about campaign medals and related documents.

There were several campaign medals which were issued for taking part in the war, with different criteria for each one. The most common were the British War Medal, for anyone who served overseas, and the Victory Medal, for anyone who served in a theatre of war. Those who served in the early years of the war could qualify for the 1914 Star or the 1914-15 Star (more details and pictures). The Army Medal Office recorded entitlement to these medals on medal rolls. Despite being called rolls, these are actually books, containing lists of eligible soldiers arranged by regiment. The War and Victory medals are recorded together in the same rolls, and there are separate rolls for each of the stars. These rolls are now held by the UK National Archives in class WO 329, and are not available online. The Medal Office also created a card index to pull together details of each soldier from the different rolls. Every eligible soldier should have at least one medal index card showing name, rank, regiment, service number (except for officers, who didn’t have numbers), campaign medal entitlement and references to the relevant medal rolls. Some soldiers have more than one card, especially if they also won a gallantry medal (although cards for some kinds of gallantry medal are recorded elsewhere and not included in this collection; Sassoon’s Military Cross award card wouldn’t be here as these are in a different class and can only be seen on microfilm at TNA) or qualified for a Silver War Badge by being discharged as unfit for duty. These medal index cards were also transferred from the Medal Office to the Public Records Office (now the UK National Archives) and put into class WO 372. They were arranged as follows:

• WO 372/1 to WO 372/22: British Army campaign medals A-Z
• WO 372/23: Women’s Services, Distinguished Conduct Medals and Military Medals
• WO 372/24: Mentions in Despatches, Meritorious Service Medals and Territorial Force Efficiency Medals
• WO 372/25 to WO 372/29: Indian Army campaign medals

The cards were microfilmed and the originals put into storage. The microfilm was in black and white, and only the fronts of the cards were filmed. It’s usually reckoned that about 5% of the cards have something written on the back. This information became completely inaccessible. At some point (I think in the early 2000s) the microfilm was digitized and PDF files of the cards were made available for download through TNA’s DocumentsOnline service. These low resolution scans of black and white microfilm were not easy to read, and the information on the back was still inaccessible. The collection was indexed so that individual cards can be found by searching for name, rank, number or regiment. There are some transcription errors, so the index isn’t completely reliable. For example, the card for Arthur Evans shows that he was in the Lincolnshire Regiment, but the DocumentsOnline index wrongly gives this as 32nd London Regiment.

Thanks to DocumentsOnline we can see that Siegfried Sassoon did have a medal card, which can be downloaded here (ref WO 372/17, image 27085). The Medal Office had incorrectly written his name as Siefried Lorraine Sassoon, but as a captain in the 3rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers with a Military Cross, it’s got to be him. There’s even a note saying that his MC was cited in the London Gazette on 27 July 1916 (view page as PDF; the Gazette also incorrectly spells his middle name as Lorraine). The card shows that he was awarded the British War Medal, the Victory Medal and the 1914-15 Star. Although there is a note saying he was eligible on 20 February 1919, the medals don’t appear to have been issued until July 1985. This is nearly 20 years after Sassoon died, so it looks like he didn’t claim his medals himself and that they were claimed later by his family (no more claims for First World War campaign medals are possible now, and all unclaimed medals have been destroyed). The card is in a form usually used for Silver War Badge awards rather than the normal campaign medal styles. The box for date of discharge is blank, but “11/3/19” is written at the top of the card, which ties in with Sassoon resigning his commission through ill health (the London Gazette gives 12 March 1919). The most frustrating thing is that there’s a “PTO” at the bottom of the card, but we can’t turn it over and see what’s on the back.

In 2005 it was announced that the original cards would be destroyed to save storage space, but they were saved at the last minute. The Imperial War Museum took the women’s cards, and the Western Front Association took the rest (you can follow the story on this thread at the Great War Forum; there’s also a report at Your Family Tree magazine). For a while the WFA offered a service where they’d copy both sides of a card in return for a donation. Then they agreed to let Ancestry scan the cards and make them available online to subscribers. Ancestry scanned both sides of the cards in colour, making them much more legible than the TNA versions and making the backs available for the first time since the cards were microfilmed. But Ancestry’s indexing is notoriously bad. The Great War Forum has a whole thread dedicated to showing up the worst examples. It looks very much like Ancestry has done the transcription on the cheap by outsourcing it to people whose first language isn’t English and who know very little about British history and geography. There doesn’t even seem to have been a checklist of regiment or county names, or very much quality control. For example, T. E. Sandall, commanding officer and historian of the 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment is shown on Ancestry’s medal card index as belonging to “1/5th Essex Tegt” [sic]. Ancestry has about 4.8 million medal cards compared to 5,482,260 on DocumentsOnline, but this seems to be accounted for by the fact that Ancestry hasn’t scanned the women’s cards from the IWM (WO 372/23), or the Indian Army cards (WO 372/25 to WO 372/29).

I can’t find Siegfried Sassoon’s medal card on Ancestry. Given their bad indexing it’s possible that the card is there but can’t be found because the name is completely wrong. But I’ve tried lots of different variants, and Ancestry has a fuzzy search which picks up similar names, and still I can’t find it. Maybe they haven’t scanned it, but it should be with the cards that they have scanned. Fortunately, there’s a way we can check this in more detail. When the cards were microfilmed, they were photographed in batches of six, arranged in two columns and three rows on the same image. When you download a card from DocumentsOnline, you get a whole page showing all six cards. These are the ones which come with Sasson’s, shown in the order that they appear:

Knowing this, I searched for the other five men on Ancestry. Their cards are all there, and their names are all spelt correctly.

Siegfried Sassoon is the only one of the six whose card can’t be found on Ancestry. This tends to suggest that this isn’t down to Ancestry not scanning the card. They clearly have scanned the batch where it should be. It would need to have moved a long way in the filing system to end up among the cards that haven’t been scanned, and it’s hard to see how that could have happened by accident. That leaves two possibilities:

1. Sassoon’s medal card has been scanned by Ancestry but so badly mis-transcribed that it can’t be found
2. The original card was removed some time between TNA’s microfilming and Ancestry’s scanning

Either would be quite embarrassing for all the organizations involved. This post has been a cautionary tale about some of the problems with digitization of historical records. There’s a real danger that archives can use digitization as an excuse to destroy original documents, even when the digital copies aren’t adequate substitutes. When private companies digitize records for profit their cost-cutting can result in poor quality transcription, paradoxically making records harder to find. Keeping public records behind pay walls is also elitist. In Ancestry’s case this is pure economics: if you can afford the subscription you’re in, if you can’t you’re out (although they do offer free trial periods). Early English Books Online takes elitism to a whole new level: they only deal with libraries and won’t even sell you an individual subscription. Meanwhile, if anyone does find Sassoon’s medal card, please let me know.

This week ancestry.co.uk is giving free access to military records, including First World War army service records and medal index cards. The medal cards are full colour double sided scans, so much better than the versions you can buy from the National Archives DocumentsOnline.  Just go to Ancestry, search for the records you want, then when you click to view them you just have to enter your name and e-mail address. I think the offer ends on 14th November.

[Cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

Over the summer I read two PhD theses which challenge a lot of preconceptions about cavalry in warfare, one on the Anglo-Saxon period and the other on the First World War.

1. Kerry Cathers, “An examination of the horse in Anglo-Saxon England” (PhD, Reading University, 2002).
2. David Kenyon, “British Cavalry on the Western Front 1916-1918” (PhD, Cranfield, 2008). 
   

(Both of these can be downloaded free from EthOS, although you’ll need to log in and search for them as there are no direct links. Kenyon’s can also be downloaded directly from Cranfield, which is much easier.)

Historians used to assume without question that horses played little part in Anglo-Saxon warfare and society. Kerry Cathers has challenged these assumptions, showing that they are based on very little evidence. The lack of evidence makes it difficult to be certain, but there is enough to suggest that horses were widely used and known by the Anglo-Saxons. Horses were conventionally associated with warriors in Anglo-Saxon culture (Cathers, 181, 306). Although their most well known battles were fought on foot, Anglo-Saxon armies used horses for raiding and for transporting soldiers to battlefields (Cathers, 288-9, 383). The Aberlemno stone probably represents a battle between the Northumbrians and the Picts, and shows both sides using cavalry (Cathers, 276-82). Cathers also discusses the development of the stirrup and its influence (or not) on medieval warfare. She sides with critics of Lynn White’s view that the stirrup was the fundamental basis of feudalism. Ann Hyland found that Roman cavalry saddles provided a secure seat even without stirrups, and Littauer argued that the stirrup was developed to support the feet and avoid cramp on long journeys (Cathers, 189-90, 267-9). R.H.C. Davis attributed the couched lance to the great horse more than the stirrup, but still ended up privileging cavalry over non-military uses of horses, and deriving feudalism from a fairly narrow technological development. Cathers shows that Anglo-Saxon horses were no smaller than horses in other parts of Europe but that this fact has tended to be covered up by historians’ linguistic biases: referring to Anglo-Saxon horses as “ponies” signifies the idea of a small animal. She was also an early advocate of the idea that there is no such thing as native breeds, and that the idea was invented much later: “Though, as noted, some horse enthusiasts like to push the date of certain breeds back into the furthest reaches of the past, the claim that breeds existed during this period is entirely false and without substantiation ” (Cathers, 160). The spurious idea that the Exmoor pony is an authentic native breed led some historians to assume that Anglo-Saxon horses were similar. I don’t think a big horse would have been necessary for shock charges with the couched lance, because even the mass of a small horse could put a lot of momentum behind the lance. One particularly weird result of historians’ prejudice against the idea of Anglo-Saxon horses is that one place name study assumed that places including the element “wig” must be named after earwigs, and failed to mention the possibility that they could be derived from “wicgela”, an Old English word for stallion! (Cathers, 67-8)

If cavalry played a role in English/British warfare earlier than most people thought, they also remained important long after most people think they became obsolete. It might appear that the Western Front from 1916 to 1918 is not a very promising area for studying cavalry, but David Kenyon confounds expectations in even more detail than Stephen Badsey has done. The key to the argument is that although new technology created problems for cavalry it also created opportunities. Barbed wire was as much an obstacle to infantry as it was to cavalry. Neither could attack effectively unless the wire was removed by artillery, tanks or engineers. Machine guns and breech loading magazine rifles increased the firepower of cavalry as well as infantry. Between the Second Anglo-Boer War and the First World War, British cavalry were retrained to fight primarily as mounted infantry, although they were still trained and equipped to charge into close combat when the opportunity arose. In the early years of the First World War, every cavalry regiment had a machine gun section armed with Vickers heavy machine guns, which were transported on pack horses. In 1916 these were replaced with Hotchkiss light machine guns, and the Vickers guns were reorganized into Machine Gun Corps (Cavalry) squadrons (Kenyon, 33). This mobile firepower allowed cavalry to engage enemy machine guns in firefights. For example, when the 7th Dragoon Guards came under fire from German machine guns near Longueval on 14th July 1916, their own machine gun section knocked out the German guns (Kenyon, 60).

Although cavalry regiments mostly depended on firepower, changes in technology and tactics made cavalry charges more viable in some circumstances. From the medieval period into the nineteenth century the best way for infantry to resist a cavalry charge was to stand still in a very tight formation, because the horses would usually stop or turn away from an apparently solid object as long as the infantry had the confidence to stand firm. The massive firepower on early twentieth century battlefields made such close formations suicidal. When infantry dispersed to protect themselves from artillery and machine guns, they also made themselves more vulnerable to cavalry charges. On 14 July 1916 some German infantry were dispersed in a field near High Wood, sheltering in shell craters. This was the best way to protect themselves from artillery, which was the most likely threat, but they were charged by a squadron of the 7th Dragoon Guards, which had pushed through a gap in the German front line. Of these German infantry, 16 were killed by lances, 32 captured and the rest ran away (Kenyon, 60).

Rapid firing artillery was a much bigger threat than the machine gun. The worst combat casualties for British cavalry horses happened when their riders had dismounted to defend positions which were then shelled by the Germans, as at Monchy-le-Preux in April 1917 (Kenyon, 136). The increasing quantity and quality of allied artillery forced the Germans to abandon linear trenches and switch to defence in depth by the spring of 1917. In this system the front line consisted of a network of outposts rather than continuous trenches, designed to break up attacks gradually and funnel them into killing zones where they could be counter-attacked by reserves. Because the defences were more dispersed there was more room for cavalry to manoeuvre. Cavalry and infantry were able to employ fire and movement tactics which involved one unit suppressing an enemy position with its fire while another unit moved around its flank. Kenyon points out that these tactics had been in the Cavalry Training manual since 1912 (Kenyon, 109-10). When the allies broke through the Hindenburg Line in the autumn of 1918 and began advancing more rapidly, cavalry played a vital role in maintaining contact with the retreating Germans (Kenyon, 269).

Opportunities to use cavalry effectively in set-piece attacks were often missed because of failures in command, control and communication. While Kenyon rehabilitates the cavalry, he is critical of Cavalry Corps and its commander, Kavanagh. Having the cavalry divisions in their own Corps under GHQ complicated the chain of command, delayed the transmission of orders and intelligence, and made it hard to co-ordinate cavalry attacks with infantry and artillery. Cavalry divisions worked better when they were integrated into infantry corps attack plans but with the divisional commander free to use his own initiative to reach his objectives. There was also a pressing need for more cavalry squadrons to be attached to infantry divisions and corps for reconnaissance. Kavanagh was perhaps not well suited to command of a corps. His aggressive tendencies served him well as a brigade commander, but were directed at his subordinates more than the enemy once he was a lieutenant-general. The chain of command through Cavalry Corps HQ gave him too many opportunities to interfere with plans and overrule his divisional commanders, who were better placed to know what was going on at the front. Cavalry Corps also lacked the logistical infrastructure and heavy artillery which were found in infantry corps.

Despite all the problems, when cavalry were used effectively they were able to double the depth of “bite and hold” operations. Unfortunately, cavalry tended to be wrongly perceived as obsolete by people who didn’t understand them. The prejudiced opinions of a few tank officers have had a disproportionate influence on historians of the First World War. Tanks played a useful role in some battles, but they were much slower than cavalry. Wheeled armoured cars could move faster than tanks on good going but often got stuck in the mud. These problems weren’t effectively solved until the 1930s, when the British Army rapidly mechanized because horses genuinely were becoming obsolete. Erik Lund continues the story over at Bench Grass, with a look at mounted warfare and the development of the armoured division…

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. [ETA 13 May 2011: I stopped doing this because it was too much trouble!]

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.

As I said in my previous post, Goldstein’s book didn’t pay enough attention to cultural differences within the west over the last several hundred years. This is understandable in such an ambitious and wide-ranging book. To cover so much ground he necessarily had to abstract things and omit lots of details. Previously I pointed out that the ideal of the warrior as the epitome of masculinity doesn’t seem to hold for 17th century England. Since then I’ve become more aware that although women have nearly always been excluded from combat roles, this exclusion hasn’t always been the same. In contrast to the Whig idea of progress, there might actually have been more opportunities for women to participate in combat in the past. Brilliana Harley and the Countess of Derby were both elite women who effectively commanded garrisons when their houses were besieged by the enemy during the English Civil War. In these cases their social status, and particularly their position of authority over the household in the absence of their husbands, overrode normal gender roles. In practice there isn’t necessarily that much difference between commanding servants and commanding soldiers. As I said in my last Horses, War and Gender post, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms, which suggests that it was considered to be a real possibility. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby in 1645 was that they were carrying knives, and were therefore seen as a threat (although the women who were killed and mutilated there probably weren’t Irish or whores or likely to kill anyone). In Warrior Women and Popular Balladry (pp. 128-8), Diane Dugaw pointed out that boundaries between combat and non-combat roles got very blurred by the presence of women on board Royal Navy ships in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Although women were eligible for campaign medals for service at the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, they were denied them on the grounds that it would leave the army and navy “exposed to innumerable applications” from women! Dugaw also showed that the cross-dressing warrior woman wasn’t just a fictional character in ballads. In the early-modern period many women actually did disguise themselves as men and join the army or navy. That they got away with it suggests that perceptions of gender were very different in that period, and that clothes were probably more important than the body. Although the ballads make breasts (often lily white) an important signifier of gender, they also suggest that it was easy to keep them hidden. Later ballads from the 19th century show an increasing preoccupation with the slenderness of waists and fingers, which suggests that perceptions of the body were changing.

Things had changed even more by the First World War. There was a new obsession with biology: new recruits to the British Army had to undergo a thorough medical examination and were graded on a scale of fitness for combat. This would have made it pretty much impossible for someone with female genitals to pass as a man. But despite this new fashion for empirical scientific measurements of the soldier’s body, the idea that women were weak and unsuitable for combat was much more dominant than it had been 100 years earlier. Remembering the evidence presented by Goldstein, this is the opposite of what you might expect. It’s easy to imagine a Whiggish narrative of the progress of science and reason, where a “medieval” superstition that women are “the weaker vessel” gives way in the face of hard empirical evidence, allowing women to achieve equality and men to congratulate themselves on how progressive they are. No such thing in reality, of course. During the First World War the idea that women might serve in combat roles in the British Army was not even on the cards. It was just assumed that they couldn’t and shouldn’t. This is despite the fact that the British Army was in a desperate situation. The pre-war regular army was very small, while the Territorial Force was under strength and hardly trained to fight at anything above company level. During the war the army suffered unprecedented casualties and expanded at an unprecedented rate to an unprecedented size. In 1916 Britain introduced universal conscription for the first time ever. Things got so bad that the minimum height requirement was reduced from 5’3” to 5’1”. Short men were initially recruited into special “bantam battalions”, and later mixed in with normal battalions. Men who were unfit for front line combat were still retained by the army when possible, often for manual labour or home service. For example, the service record of my ancestor Thomas Wenham shows that he was only 5’2” tall, and so wasn’t called up for service immediately. When he did get into combat he was wounded in the head, which rendered him unfit for further combat, so he went on to serve with the Royal Defence Corps in Britain, then went back to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. It’s quite likely that some of the women who went to work in factories as part of the war effort (something which is often seen as a Whiggish step forward) would have been at least as able to fight as many of the men who served in the army.

So the exclusion of women from combat roles in Britain is constant at a certain level of abstraction, but if we look closer we can see that it changed quite a lot. The way that it fluctuates reminds me of Judith Bennett’s concept of patriarchal equilibrium. Bennett used the wage gap to illustrate this: in medieval England the average woman’s wage was about 75% of the average man’s wage, and it’s about the same now. The wage gap hasn’t always stayed the same, but it has fluctuated within a certain range: women’s wages have always been between 50% and 75% of men’s wages. Equal opportunities legislation hasn’t fundamentally changed this situation. The exact size of the gap often changes, but it’s always true that women’s wages are less than men’s wages. Bennett came up with patriarchal equilibrium to describe, and start to explain, this situation. Although some things might improve for women in some ways, the system always manages to readjust so that women never quite achieve equality. This idea is exactly what we need to allow us to move beyond Goldstein’s model of universal exclusion of women from combat. Things can change, but in a more fundamental way they stay the same. The gendering of combat roles isn’t just analogous to patriarchal equilibrium: it’s part of the same thing, and possibly a very important part. Historiann is right on the money when she says:

Mark my words:  the U.S. won’t give up on sex segregation in the military so easily and quietly as the officers quoted in the New York Times say they have, because military service, and in particular combat service, is the one thing that differentiates men from women citizens.  Of course, this difference is for the most part theoretical, since the vast majority of Americans don’t in fact serve in the military, but a whole aircraft carrier’s worth of assumptions and privileges rests on this slender thread.

The exclusion of women from combat roles justifies male privilege. The really neat ideological trick here is that being exempt from combat duty can be portrayed as a privilege itself, but it’s a false privilege. The male British soldier can say, “we have to go off and fight in the muddy trenches and get killed and wounded, while you get to sit at home and enjoy unprecedented freedoms and have sex with American sailors and airmen”. The perception that men suffer in wars for the benefit of women, and that women are spared the suffering, is not true and has all sorts of dangerous consequences. The rhetoric of remembrance says that we’re all (men and women alike) supposed to be grateful to the men (and a few women, but fewer than there could have been) who fought for our freedoms, but in Britain during the First World War women were not allowed to vote, abortions were illegal, and marital rape was not illegal. The men who joined up in 1914 were probably not fighting for gender equality (and any argument that British victory led to greater equality logically depends on Whiggish assumptions about inevitable progress). It could be argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 was a setback for the suffragettes, because everyone “knew” that women couldn’t fight, therefore why should they be given the same rights as the men who were fighting?

There must be plenty more scope to look for examples of how the exclusion of women from combat roles is used to justify male privilege. I’m not claiming that war is the key to patriarchal equilibrium, but it has to be one of the things which contributes to long term gender inequality.

1. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2007).
2. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
3. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
4. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003). 
   

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.