‘Delicate duties’: issues of class and respectability in government policy towards the wives and widows of British soldiers in the era of the great war

Lomas, Janis

doi:10.1080/09612020000200233

Cited by 28 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…26 Grieving widows who remained celibate could be portrayed as heroic, honoring their husbands' memory by remaining true to them. 27 Yet cases like this were also used to draw attention to inequalities between different categories of single women, and widows who received war pensions could become objects of envy. 28 An airman's widow described the regret expressed by many of her unmarried contemporaries (and their mothers) that they had not followed her example and married men before they were killed, because "it was like throwing money out of the window."…”

Section: Journal Of Family History / October 2005mentioning

confidence: 99%

Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War

Holden

2005

Journal of Family History

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This article argues that the status of spinster was associated with widowhood in the decades after the First World War in Britain, an association that is still active in our collective memory. Widely publicized census statistics suggesting that a whole generation of young men perished during the war led to the beliefs that an accompanying generation of women had lost lovers and fiancés, would be unable to marry, and were therefore deprived of the chance of leading "normal," happy lives. Drawing upon a range of sources, including census statistics, fiction, poetry, autobiography, and oral history, the author examines the consequences of these beliefs for unmarried women in the context of a society that privileged marriage and nuclear families with male breadwinners and dependent wives over all other family formations.

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Section: Journal Of Family History / October 2005mentioning

confidence: 99%

Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War

Holden

2005

Journal of Family History

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“…The granting of pensions to the widows of officers was a common practice among other European armies and navies during the Early Modern Age, but they were rudimentarily and haphazardly organized (Ailes 2009;Ghosh 2003;Hudson 1994;Lomas 2000). For comparison purposes, one can briefly illustrate the English case.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The SpanishMonte Pío Militar: Institutional protection for the widows and other relatives of naval officers, 1730–1900

Cerro¹

2019

Soc. sci. hist.

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This work examines the creation and development of the Monte Pío Militar, a permanent public pension system that was established for the widows and other relatives of deceased naval officers who had been in the Spanish Navy. This system was not a mutualist experiment, but rather constitutes an innovative example of an institutional protective organization that was based on objective principles and supported by an impersonal agent: the state. The article is divided into three parts. The first section studies the formal organization of the Monte Pío Militar between 1761, when the system was instituted, and 1900, when the welfare state truly began to take shape in Spain. The second part focuses on the rudimentary protection system that the navy had operated during the previous period (c. 1730–61) and the first steps of the Monte Pío Militar (1761–1800); this section is particularly interesting, for it examines how the previous system was superseded by new measures, criteria, and values. The third part examines both how the pension system was applied and its impact on the families that benefited from it during the nineteenth century. This will illustrate how the families soon internalized the idea that pensions were a reflection of the state’s duty to protect them, while the legal principles behind the system and the bureaucratic protocol built around it were progressively consolidated.

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“…She notes that in the Victorian era, the wives of soldiers and sailors 'were thought to be, at worst, "drunken slatterns" and, at best, on a par with servants and therefore in need of "watching"'. 14 While the war made a huge impact on mourning dress, and indeed other aspects of mourning culture, the developments that led to the eventual breakdown started long before 1914. A backlash against ostentatious Victorian mourning practices emerged around 1880 after many decades of extravagant mourning rituals, which had come to be regarded as wasteful and disrespectful.…”

Section: Mourning Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Matter of Individual Opinion and Feeling’: The changing culture of mourning dress in the First World War

Whitmore¹

2017

Women's History Review

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Mourning dress, the typically black costume worn to mark a bereavement was once a well-established part of funeral and mourning culture in Britain. The First World War is generally understood to have caused a major breakdown in mourning practices; the explanations offered for this breakdown include patriotism, practicality, concern for morale, and respect for the war dead. This paper will address the changes that took place within the culture of mourning dress between 1914 and 1918, while simultaneously considering how attitudes towards death and the rituals associated with bereavement were altered by the conflict. This will include an analysis of the developments in fashionable mourning dress during the war, assessing changes both in aesthetics and etiquette, in an attempt to determine the reasons for the breakdown. This paper will also discuss what comfort the ritual of mourning dress offered the war widow, and what constituted 'war appropriate' mourning in wartime.

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‘Delicate duties’: issues of class and respectability in government policy towards the wives and widows of British soldiers in the era of the great war

Cited by 28 publications

References 3 publications

Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War

Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War

The SpanishMonte Pío Militar: Institutional protection for the widows and other relatives of naval officers, 1730–1900

‘A Matter of Individual Opinion and Feeling’: The changing culture of mourning dress in the First World War

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