World War One Flashcards
1
Q
Lawrence (3)
(State/ Structure)
A
State/ Structure
- Implication war efforts were essentially haphazard, with social changes designed to meet immediate short term needs rather than long-term goals.
- Beneficiaries of the war effort generally reflect this – although women are often painted self-realising during this period, tacit acknowledgement of the ephemerality of the project
- Long term social issues such as deprivation, though undergoing a face lift, did not fundamentally change.
2
Q
Greaves (2)
(State/ Structure)
A
State/ Structure
- Postwar - government consciously attempts to work back to the pre-war state - reduction in the size of the state, return to prewar parity of gold, deflationary measures etc.
- State expenditure is 2x 1914 - but remember immense levels of debt - increase by factor of 10.
3
Q
Gregory (2)
(Memory)
A
Memory
- Jingoism and desire for state intervention a bottom-up phenomenon - draws on personal diaries and actions of people typically passive - i.e. Welsh were anti-Boer, pro-WWI - often forgotten in the fave of public expression in London. Equally, resistance did exist, but not organised or recorded in public memory.
- Media present war atrocities to meet desires of the people
4
Q
Winter (3)
(State/ Structure)
A
Structures
- Socio-demographic impact: unprecedented recruitment and attrition of British manpower, unparalleled carnage matched by significant improvement to civilian life - eclipsed by the ‘lost generation’
- Eliminated some if the worst features of urban poverty, which lay behind the appallingly high death rates in Victorian and Edwardian Britain
- Underpaid and underemployment wiped out by war machine.
5
Q
Bourne (4)
(Traditional/ Memory)
A
Traditional/ Memory
- “War” declared Trotsky “is the locomotive of history
- The idea of an omnipotent state was not desirable - WC looked to self-help for, well, help
- State interference was immediate (contra Greg) - Took railways - Sugar control - Mines - 3m acres of land
- National pride was revived. The national anthem, once shunned, was sung again.
6
Q
Kirkby (6)
(Labour)
A
Labour
- Continuity/ Discontinuity argument
- basic industries temporarily revived by war, failed post
- growing influence of TUs – continues to 1926, then undermined. Legacy is long term on Labour however
- Major discontinuity with MoM – demonstration of potential of government
- War precipitated boom and bust – socially transformative immediate shocks
- Emphasis on the breakdown of collaboration after 1918 runs counter to Middlemas - that the war years precipitated and emergent corporatism in British society.
7
Q
Phillips (3)
(State/ Structure)
A
Structure/ Memory
- Death of landed classes - agricultural desire made market buoyant - gentry liquidated stock due to pressures from government - tax burden
- Even if war is only a catalyst, it should be recognised how significant a catalyst it was - rapid/ specular change dislodged grounded beliefs and attitudes
- “symbolic national drama. The conflict, and its repercussions, represented and experience more widely shared, and yet more unprecedented, than anything within national memory. The boer war, in contrast, had been a marginal affair.”
8
Q
Braybon (3)
Women
A
Women
- TNT = poisonous. Led to toxic jaundice - 349 serious poisoning cases in 14-18.
- Women’s Employment Committee and War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry - considered impact on women. Not just focused on physical health, but also “discontent, apathy, monotony, boredom and lack of interest in life”
- However, was clear that nothing should stand in the way of munitions production, not even the death or illness of workers from TNT. The mothers of the race were not that important.” Belief in return to women’s trades did not occur however - 494,000 unemployed women in march 1919. - Women who refused to return to old trades were refused benefits.
9
Q
Smith (1)
Memory
A
Memory
- Monumentalisation of war. “The First World War marked a fundamental cultural disjuncture in British history the beginning of the period that we all recognise as being modern, as part of us rather than part of history.”
10
Q
***Marwick (5)***
(State/ Structure)
A
Traditionalist
- Chief proponent of traditional view - brought about ‘deluge’ removing aspects of Victorian society.
- Impact of war (7) - Loss of life - Destruction of treasure - Destruction of trade system - reorg. of society for war machine - Reorient. - British awareness of relative decline - Scale, horror and scope of war
- Additionally outlines compression of wage differentiation, alongside the dropping of the tax-line to £130 at a time when wages nominally increased by factor of 2.
- Often exaggerated by historians - Marwick acknowledges limitations - Rhondda 1922 5. Long term effects - Sense of oneness led to propagation of social welfare policies - Hysteresis effect on future lead politicians - War exp. critical to labour - War exp. critical to women - Decline of the elite
11
Q
Degroot (1)
(Revisionist)
A
- Revisionist*
1. If war is the locomotive of history, the rolling stock in this case was typically British: slow, outmoded and prone to delay and cancellation.
12
Q
Robb (5)
(Race/sex/structures)
A
Race/Sex/Structures/Snobs
- Racial differences - preached unity among colonies, but consigned blacks to menial jobs - could not fight white men
- Marital differences - Marie Stopes Married Love taught of mutually satisfactory sexual relations
- Revisionist historians have underscored the resilience of social hierarchy and pointed out that the gains of some group promoted resentments in others, dramatised most notably by postwar industrial conflict and conservative retrenchment
- At the end of the war, the British social structures stood essentially as it did before 1914, but there were important modifications in its composition, attitudes, and modes of interaction.
- The aristocracy was irrevocably weakened by the impact of the First World War. Not since the Wars of the Roses had so many young patricians died so suddenly and so violently
13
Q
Reid (5)
(Revisionist)
A
Revisionist
- Rebrands argument as between revolutionary and social democratic (interestingly within the parameters of egalitarianism)
- Conditions for unemployed rose significantly
- Wage contraction significant
- Rise of unions had revolutionary potential
- Teachers, clerics, and other white collar workers on fixed incomes suffered most from inflationary price rises - led to decline in deference and participation in labour organisations for the first time
14
Q
Kent (3)
Women
A
Women
- shift in narrative, not overhaul*
1. The promotion of the ideology of motherhood and marriage together with the stigmatising of lesbianism helped to reinforce women’s dependence upon men.
2. discourses about female sexuality, which before the war had emphasized women’s lack of sexual impulse, and even distaste for sexual intercourse, underwent modification to accommodate the political, social and economic requirements of the post-war period’. Importance of sexual compatibility between husband and wife. Sex within marriage.
3. The Great War shattered the category of ‘women’ in ways that may have made it impossible, before the 1960s, for feminists to effectively recover their movement, its goals, and its critique of the gender system’. WW2 needed to give momentum back to the feminist movement.
15
Q
Robert (5)
(Women)
A
Women
- Women wearing uniform was defeminising, for women to mix with uniform men (drunk, licentious) was immoral.
- Patriotism provided means to transcend traditional gender narratives - patriotism as ideology of unification
- By setting up, and by joining, paramilitary units, women appropriated a male version of patriotic involvement in the war effort. Instead, as previously, of being the passive onlookers for whom the men fought, they fought themselves.
- Although most of their fighting took the form of traditional women’s work, they now did it for the armed forces, in the service of their country, and wearing the King’s uniform. Their patriotism thus helped women to redefine their identity and to create new gender roles
- Fighting provides motive for franchise? In defence of nation
