Nicolleta Gullace's book centres on the fundamental renegotiation of British citizenship that occurred between 1914 and 1918. The central argument is that the concept of who could exercise responsible citizenship ceased to be formulated in terms of gender (and class) to be replaced by an idea of citizenship based on service and sacrifice, ideas that came to be embodied in the Representation of the People Act in 1918. I am very drawn to this argument. Gullace correctly identifies the central strands of wartime British culture, the centrality of ideas of shirking and sacrifice, patriotic duty, and the defense of home. She is undoubtedly right to argue that this developing cultural context was vitally important in determining how, why, and when a massive increase in suffrage was implemented. Where I find myself parting company tends not to be in the broad outlines of the thesis, but on some interpretation of detail.

The book starts with a rather standard account of the nature of British atrocity propaganda in 1914–15, onto which an often genuinely useful gendered reading is juxtaposed. But it is not unproblematic. Quantitatively, at least, the emphasis on sadistic sexual atrocities is simply wrong (which is not to deny that such stories probably had a disproportionate impact). In the early months of the war, the principal strands of press reporting centered, as Gullace rightly notes, on dry issues of legality, but also on wanton destruction of property and civilized heritage (Rheims Cathedral and Leuven in particular). This is what was summed up in the critique of German “kultur.” In the first months of the war the sexual undercurrents and the idea of violation operated mostly as a word-of-mouth phenomenon and was not a major part of press coverage. What really turns things around is something that Gullace does not mention, the bombardment of Hartlepool and Scarborough in December 1914. Massive press coverage complete with photographs of actual and verifiable British female and child victims underlined in red the argument that it was a male duty to defend British women. It is after this date that there was a distinct escalation of specifically gendered language in propaganda, which was of course further reinforced by the Lusitania sinking in May 1915. This point would actually reinforce the central thrust of Gullace's argument that this was an “unanswerable rhetoric.”

Perhaps more fundamental is the need to raise some serious questions about the relationship of that rhetoric to individual behavior. There can be little difficulty with the broad thesis about the public language of citizenship, but the issue becomes more slippery when we consider what people actually did. That there was a widespread atmosphere of moral coercion directed at “slackers” in 1915 cannot be doubted and that many individuals were driven to enlist partly against their own instincts is clearly true. But the controlling power of this discourse should be examined skeptically. To some extent this is a product of looking down the other end of the telescope. The often overlooked fact that during the period of voluntary recruitment nearly percent of British men of military age did not choose to enlist deserves much more attention than it is traditionally given. Even among young unmarried men, a majority waited to be conscripted. In other words there must have been some sort of counter discourse, perhaps a “hidden discourse” that could validate the decision not to join, at least immediately. This was almost certainly not pacifist but, rather, a genuine belief that other responsibilities could prevail over the call to arms. Furthermore, women were also both subjects of this language and participants in promulgating it.

The record of appeals against conscription heard by tribunals in the years 1916–18 is partial and patchy, but from what exists we can be reasonably confident that somewhere in the region of a million British men appealed against being called to military service. Of particular relevance is that in perhaps 40 percent of the cases the main grounds for the appeal was “domestic hardship.” In other words, a significant number of men took their domestic responsibility to be to stay at home and look after dependents. Doubtless in many cases this was simply a cover for a general disinclination to serve, but the decision to appeal suggests frequent female approval and perhaps in some cases female pressure against enlistment. In at least some of the cases, the initial initiative to appeal seems to have come from women. Furthermore, a large number of these appeals for exemption were upheld by tribunals, suggesting that this reasoning was accepted as legitimate. The Victorian ideal of masculinity suggested by John Tosh, of the male as provider, had clearly not disappeared entirely in favor of male as military protector.

This leads to the question of how far enlistment decisions were really based on female pressure. In some cases the answer is almost certainly “yes.” Women were also certainly encouraged to tell men that “they really ought to go,” raising the white feather problem. Gullace describes the practice of handing out white feathers to young men in civilian clothes “as widely imitated by young women all over the country” (p. 73). Gullace makes as good a case as can be made for this, but I remain unconvinced as to the ubiquity of the activity. The fifty letters sent to the makers of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Great War program in 1964 describing white feather incidents should be treated with extreme caution. After all, if we are prepared to discount “atrocity stories” recounted in 1914 as generally unreliable, how much more skepticism should we apply to the recounting of a legendary wartime abuse fifty years after the event? It is likely that at least some of these accounts are embellished. Contemporary evidence of the practice remains pretty scant, and some of the sources need careful handling. For example, the “diary” of P. M. Yearsley at the Imperial War Museum was in fact written up after the war; it is frequently demonstrably unreliable and is, as Gullace points out, shot through with misogyny. This is not to say that white feather incidents did not happen, and, to the author's credit, I have been convinced that it was somewhat more widespread than I had previously thought. The accounts given to the BBC by the two women who actually gave out white feathers definitely carry more weight than the line shooting stories of servicemen who claim to have collected white feathers. But it is worth reemphasizing that the general wartime attitude toward white feather giving on the occasions when it is described tends to be one of contempt. Even in wartime white feather stories rarely appear in a context other than a negative one. Most stories end in female humiliation. In fact, given this negative view, I find myself if anything more tempted to one of Gullace's points about the transgressive nature of feather giving and its power as an act of symbolic violence. The broader issue of female pressure and bluntly sexual favor as a recruiting tool still remains. It was undoubtedly used, and its use was encouraged. But again it was a double-edged sword. Full employment, rising wages, and the absence of a proportion of the competition could also provide a powerful sexual incentive not to go as long as a reasonable proportion of young women did not sign up to the program of the likes of Baroness Orczy and refuse to date civilians. After all, female favor would be a little academic once you were actually overseas. It is at least plausible that these initiatives were in response to a widespread failure of women to censor civilian males adequately and represent a rather desperate attempt to deal with this problem.

Despite these qualms, the key chapter in Gullace's book, “the ideological origins of the Representation of the People Act” is very important. The key that unlocks the act, as Gullace rightly points out, is the temporary exclusion of male conscientious objectors from the franchise. It was near-run thing, but men who had done no more than claim their legal right under the legislation establishing conscription were debarred from voting. The relationship between citizenship and military service was crucial. All servicemen were to get the vote, and those who refused to serve would not.

This then unlocked the door, both rhetorically and practically, to female suffrage. In practical terms the mass enfranchisement of young men scared the Conservatives. An electoral counterweight was required. Middle-aged and propertied women were a natural choice. A fascinating aspect of Gullace's book is the description of the crumbling of the antisuffrage arguments on the political Right in the face of the tactical positioning of a wide range of prosuffrage opinion as patriotic. But there remains a problem. The evidence, including most of that which Gullace presents, strongly implies that female enfranchisement was largely a by-product of specifically male military service. The case for rewarding “patriotic motherhood” was made and honored, but the vast majority of women who served, either in workplace or uniform, were not enfranchised in 1918. The comment at the end of the chapter is in that sense only half right. Women won the vote, “not by throwing bombs but by making them; not by raising children but by sending them to die” (p. 196). The second clause seems to have been vastly more important than the first. This is a nuance, but it is an important one, as the former argument (a very traditional one) stands up poorly. The second is relatively new, convincing on the evidence, and interesting.

The criticism in this review should be taken in context. Serious and important books require serious consideration, and Gullace's work is important and pathbreaking. So is Deborah Cohen’s. There is a cartoon published in The Passing Show in 1917 where a woman confronts a soldier in hospital blue and demands “why aren’t you in Khaki.” Gullace points to the significance of stories of wounded men being mistaken for shirkers and hounded. Cohen picks up the story of the war wounded in Britain and Germany, expanding on themes of service and sacrifice. The war wounded presented a particular and peculiar problem in these terms. By definition the sacrifice of wounded survivors was less than the “supreme sacrifice” of the dead. In the immediate circumstances of combat, a “blighty” was frequently a desirable release from the front line. But once the war had ended there was a particular need to assess the entitlements of wounded citizens. As the slogan of the British Legion put it, “Remember the dead, serve the living,” and the living wounded became a major focus of its activities.

Cohen skillfully uses the comparative dimension to illuminate both of her cases. The starting point is an apparent paradox. In Britain the proportion of permanently disabled war veterans to total population in Britain was 1.9 percent; in Germany it was 2.3 percent. War pensions as a proportion of the national budgets in 1931–32 were 5.9 percent for Britain and 20.9 percent for Germany. Even during the terminal year of the Weimar Republic, when both Britain and Germany were responding to the onset of depression with serious cuts in government expenditure, the German government treated the debt of honor to wounded veterans (and to war widows) as one of its most important tasks. Yet it was German and not British veterans who turned profoundly against their state.

Cohen suggests that the answer to this paradox lies in the particular dynamic of British philanthropy. Whereas in the German case the responsibility of care for wounded veterans fell on a state increasingly unable to fulfil that duty, in Britain that responsibility was more widely diffused, allowing the state to behave with often shameful neglect while civil society responded to moral exhortation to paper over the cracks. Paper over at best: even ubiquitous and well-organized philanthropy could never make up this funding gap. British veterans (nominal winners) found themselves considerably worse off than German veterans (nominal losers). One could push this in a “Fergusonesque” direction by pointing out that the British state was too busy paying for the war to care for its victims, while Weimar, by evading paying for the war, had resources to spare to care for the victims.

An even more radical interpretation is possible and hinted at. British veterans did not turn against the state in disillusion because they had never believed in its benevolence in the first place. An extraordinary debate at the British Legion conference in 1929 shows the delegates unwilling to even ask the state to provide “matching funds” for that year's poppy appeal—if disabled veterans needed to rely on the state because the public had failed, then the state itself was doomed! One senses that despite the massive expansion of state power and responsibility in the latter years of the First World War, “statism” had remained a weak idea in British Society, and indeed the wartime extension of state responsibility had hardly been unambiguously welcomed.

There is an interesting area of crossover between the concerns of Gullace and Cohen, and their work is mutually illuminating. On a thematic level, both books bring to the fore the key issues of citizenship, entitlements, and sacrifice (the acknowledged debt of both authors to Jay Winter, which I share, is revealing). Intriguingly, Cohen picks up some of Gullace's wartime female activists operating in a different guise. For example, one of the early movers in philanthropic provision for disabled servicemen was the Actresses Franchise League. Flawed as the philanthropy was in many ways, the sustained impulse to charity gives the lie to misogynist accusations, noticeable in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, that women who cheered soldiers off to war were indifferent to them when they returned maimed. Whether or not significant numbers of middle-class women handed out white feathers in 1915, there can be no doubt that significant numbers badgered passersby to buy poppies by 1925.

If sometimes Gullace pushes the gender analysis of public rhetoric too far in the face of countervailing evidence, then sometimes one wishes that Cohen would push a bit more in this direction. There is more to be said about the issue of “dis-membered” male bodies, although admittedly Joanna Bourke has already said much of it. But the pose of masculine “stoic cheerfulness” on the part of disabled veterans was always in danger of being undermined by their physical incapacitation. If it is possible for any subject to have been overstudied it is probably shell shock, but it seems likely that this study would have benefited from some consideration of the issue. These are quibbles, because this is an excellent study. While detailed consideration of the German material would be out of place in this journal, Cohen builds on the foundation of Robert Whalen's pathbreaking study, using the British comparison to bring out fully the failure and naivety of the Weimar Republic's hopes of paying a debt of honor that it had not incurred.

What do these books finally tell us? The historiography of Britain during the First World War has gone through an interesting evolution. The confident “progressive” assumptions of Arthur Marwick about the growth of the state, citizenship, and entitlement have been disrupted by a cultural history that has stressed conservatism during the war and dominant in its aftermath. Gender-inflected history has been at the forefront of this. But in turn it was in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Citizenship does not just emerge sociologically from the military participation ratio, but cultural history cannot ignore the wartime imperative to discuss citizenship. Both practices and discourses in this respect turn out to be messy, as Sonia Rose demonstrates in a similar turn in Second World War historiography. These are not the simple stories we once thought, but they matter: the socioeconomic imperatives of the war effort and the moral and ethical language that make mobilization possible interact in ways that permanently affect the big picture of twentieth-century Britain.