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 stacy gillis

are several references to some semiotics of luxury which are clearly absent in
war-timeLondon:

In one of London’s most exclusive haunts,

Amid the shining lights and table ware,

We sat, where meagre Mistress Ration flaunts

Herself in syncopated music there.^23

Allusions to moments of luxury which are used to highlight the incongruity of
the wartime setting are also to be found in Jessie Pope’s ‘The Nut’s Birthday’,
in which the gifts of past birthdays—‘Some ormulu, grotesquely chased|A little
bronze Bacchante’—are compared with the infinitely more useful birthday gifts for
a soldier: ‘Some candles and a bar of soap,|Cakes, peppermints and matches,|A
pot of jam, some thread (like rope).’^24 The emphasis on items of use may be
extended to how women were considered during the war—as items of use in the
large machinery of war.
One root of a pervasive gendering of the Home Front female is the fact that
during the war, women were often doing what needed to be done everywhere
else aside from the trenches. While the figures of the plucky working-class female
munitions worker and the upper-middle-class VAD who overcomes her initial
squeamishness are now just as much a part of the mythological afterlife of the war
as the aristocratic officer whose ‘play up and play the game’ ethos is disabused, the
circulation of these figures in the popular imagination does, in part, testify to the
ways in which women used the space of the war to carve out new identities, however
transitory, for themselves. With the need for manual labourers, women moved into
factories, shipyards, railways, and on to the land. These sorts of opportunities were
largely taken up by those previously in domestic service, as Nina MacDonald’s ‘Sing
a Song of War-Time’ details:

Mummie does the house-work,

Can’t get any maid,

Gone to make munitions,

’Cause they’re better paid.^25

The middle classes and above moved into volunteer positions—albeit ones
which merely brought into a public domain those activities often associated
with women—as Jenni Calder identifies: ‘women’s organizations [were] set up
within an established middle- and upper-class tradition of volunteer work and
fundraising...although efforts were made to give these organizations status and
authority, relished by many of the women, often the work they did was much

(^23) Helen Dircks, ‘After Bourlon Wood’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and
Verse 24 , 29.
Jessie Pope, ‘The Nut’s Birthday’, ibid. 89.
(^25) Nina MacDonald, ‘Sing a Song of War-Time’, ibid. 69.