The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700 Book

The two-thirds of The Blood of Our Sons which address propaganda, society, shaming rituals, and sexuality are worthy of four stars, the final third discussing suffrage itself merits only three. One gets the sense Gullace set out to fill a gap in the scholarship on suffrage, found a tremendous amount of interesting material on the altered understanding of citizenship, and tried to meld the two together. I'm sticking with three for this review because, taken as a whole, the book doesn't quite rate the fourth.

Gullace advances some exceptionally interesting insights on the re-conceptualization of citizenship in World War I Britain, as justification for granting the franchise shifted from a claim based on sex to one based on wartime service. These come as part of her desire to move beyond the tendency of most scholarship to position suffrage as a purely political movement, instead taking suffrage and situating it within the broader culture of Britain during the war years, including attention to the influence of propaganda on popular expectations of masculinity, civic responsibility, and ultimately, citizenship. Gullace takes care in explaining how officially sanctioned propaganda and unofficial "propaganda in action" placed pressure upon men to enlist, and demonstrates that women played a significant role as recruiters, both as rhetorical objects to defend, and individuals operating within civil society, compelling men to enlist. Gullace claims that what ultimately won suffrage for women was their willingness to engage with civic responsibility not only as workers in munitions plants and other war industries, but their claim upon male military service as the mothers, wives, and sweethearts who patriotically offered up (or compelled) their men in service to the nation. As a note, the chapter on women distributing white feathers to men in civilian clothing as a method of shaming them for (by appearances) shirking their duty to go off to war was fascinating and exceptionally well done.

What is missing from Gullace's work is any follow up regarding the perspective of the men who fought in war on the redefinition of masculinity taking place on the home front. One encounters notions of masculinity tied not only to the wearing of a military uniform, but to visible war wounds such as amputation, as an outward mark of respectable masculinity. Given the terrible wounds - multiple amputations, the myriad complications from exposure to poison gas, and the creeping shadow of shell shock - men sustained in service to King and country, one wonders what the veterans of the war shared the home front's prizing of severe wounds as a sign of respectable masculine virility. An chapter dealing with the resolution of the redefinition of masculinity would have complimented Gullace's contributions to revealing the fresh, emerging understanding of British citizenship.