Universidad Nacional de Catamarca

Facultad de Humanidades
Departamento Inglés
Literatura Inglesa II

Women in Glory of Women

Jorgelina Elizabeth Dulce

M.U.N. º 2145
14/08/09
Women in Glory of Women

Jorgelina Elizabeth Dulce – Literatura Inglesa II – Departamento de Inglés – Unca

jorgelinadu@hotmail.com

Hipótesis
In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem Glory of Women, the author addresses women from the
first verse in a way that reflects how he blames women for their conception of glory, for
their reckless treatment of men who fight, kill and die for their country.
Objetivos
It is my objective to demonstrate through various arguments how Siegfried Sassoon did
have a destructive view of the thoughts, feelings and behavior of the women of his
times, thus reflecting the common belief in his tines that women were trapped in a
world of romantic conception of war, blind to reality.
Metodología
The methodology consisted mainly of investigation through the Internet.
Conclusiones
Though the research and investigation have been done on a number of relevant web
sites, the conclusion and use of the arguments reveal a personal point of view in what
regards the poem and its statements.

Palabras claves
Women – war –– gender
Outlining

A- We are mostly what we live and experience

B- Women in Sassoon’s times and Women from all times
C- A silent revolution
D- Conclusion

.
 Glory of women
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses – blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you’re knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

When reading this poem for the first time, it was almost impossible not to think
about the reasons why the author would place women in this naïve but cruel position
throughout the entire poem. Mothers, sisters, grandmothers, wives, girlfriends, all of
whom we believe nothing but that they are capable of understanding, of stepping, into
their loved ones’ shoes only to exchange their well being for their suffering, in order to
ease the pain of those, whose flesh and bone, or even soul, they once bore; all of them
portrayed by Sassoon in this poem as in a self created and blind complicity.
The contradiction between Sassoon’s women and what we have always thought
about how women act, feel and behave in harsh times, especially during war, called for
a deeper look into the author’s historical context, which explains his attitude towards
women, since the thought of women as incapable of seeing reality as it was, ‘horror’s
last hell’, was shared by mostly everyone during the first decades of the 20th .

We are mostly what we live and experience

Born to a family which soon became split, Sassoon had to suffer not only his
father’s absence in childhood, but also his early death when he was just eight years old.
Having dropped his studies without a degree, he spent his time hunting, playing cricket
and privately publishing a few volumes of not very acclaimed poetry, which exhibit a
dilettantish sweetness. His first real success was The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of
The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield published in 1913 under the pseudonym of
“Saul Klain”. On the same day The United Kingdom declared war (4 August 1914),
Sassoon joined the military. As the horrors of war unfolded in front of his eyes,
Sassoon’s poetry began to show the unpleasant events he witnessed, so to wake up his
audience from the deep trance set up by patriotic propaganda.
www.bbc.co.uk/hhistory/historic_figures/sassoonsiegfried.shtml/

Sassoon’s war poetry showed the most horrid details in its verse, lifting up the
veil off the eyes of those who saw the war as an adventure, which meant only thinking
about the gains for themselves and their country, without considering the true and
devastating results it signified, without regards to the price that had to be paid.
From 1914 to 1917, Sassoon was an outstanding soldier and was thus awarded
the Military Cross for his courage. To his comrades he was ‘Mad Jack’; apparently he
was given that nickname for his unusual manic courage, and because of his near suicidal
exploits.
www.bbc.co.uk/hhistory/historic_figures/sassoonsiegfried.shtml/

Reading about his behaviour in combat, one could assume he was neither
shocked nor afraid by the nasty consequences of combat on men. Maybe it is just there,
in that especial courage or ability to bear the horrors of war, where the explanation to
his ability to write about them lies. His bold description of scenes and his vast imagery
must have been the outcome of all his face to face encounters with death, pain and
desperation, time after time during his stay in the trenches. Certainly, what we have
been given through his poetry is just the tip of the iceberg, only a glance at what a man
experiences in extreme situations.
Hell, gloom, agony, horror, corpses, disgrace, fire, mud, blood are all words
which give Sassoon’s war poetry a steadily strong rhythm and impact.
War not only took his brother’s life, but also that of his very close friend David
Cuthbert Thomas, which left Sassoon devastated with grief. It is this same event what
contributed to his decision of leaving the front. He took a stand against the war and
actually made it public through a letter entitled A Soldier’s Declaration, which instead
of causing his court martial, lead the Under-Secretary for the State of War to declare
Sassoon unfit for war, and to send him to a hospital to be treated for neurasthenia.
There, he met his psychiatrist and friend, Rivers, whose death Sassoon did never fully
recover from.
Surprisingly, Sassoon returned to service, and again, lost his close friend, the
writer Wilfred Owen.
Http//:www.bbc.co.uk/hhistory/historic_figures/sassoonsiegfried.shtml/
Undoubtedly, as it is easily noticeable, all the war events marked Sassoon’s style and
themes in his writing, reasons for writing, but most importantly and specifically in
Glory of Women, we can see how the poet’s writing was greatly influenced by the
conception of women as merely reckless and passive audience of war, trapped in a
romantic world which prevented them from seeing what war was really about.
Generally, people who lived in those times had not yet recognised women as
capable of reasoning on their own, of having lives of their own, and most importantly,
they believed women were not able to live their own lives. Thus, Sassoon’s poem is a
product of his times, of all the misconceptions about women, of the denial of being
considered nothing but an audience which was non- existent once the lights on the stage
were out.
Women in Sassoon’s times and Women from all times
Women have never behaved as blind companions in times of suffering, acting as
if war thrilling tales and decorations could cover disgrace. Women have always been the
ones who stand by their men far across the distance or in the battle field next to them.
But neither the poet nor most of his contemporaries were able to see this. In my view,
the writer was portraying women as insensitive and romantically detached from the
realities of war. Throughout the poem, the author constantly addresses women resorting
to the pronoun ‘you’, which at moments can be felt like an aggressive weapon aiming at
them. Sassoon clearly and implicitly claims throughout the poem that he is able to
know and describe how women feel and react to war and all its consequences. His
attitude reflects the attitude of his times towards women: they had been for a long time
told what to feel and what to say, how to react and when not to react, so that he thinks
he is able to say how a woman exactly feels and react, since for a long time men had
been shaping their women to be, feel and think they way they wanted and needed them
to. This can help us reflect on how dangerous it can be to claim one can know how and
most importantly why someone reacts or feels the way they do. We would not dare do
this with anyone, male or female, that is anticipating what their reasons and most inner
feelings are. Why this should be done of women?
Sassoon divides women’s reactions as responding positively or negatively,
depending on the nature of what they react to. We can separate two lexical sets through
which we can note this. The first set consists of words like heroes, decorations, chivalry.
To this, women in Sassoon’s opinion, react with the worshiping of their men, feeling
fondly thrilled, crowning their ardours while they fight and mourning their men’s
laurelled memories when they are dead. The second set of words referring to men’s
actions in the battle field and to their women’s reactions at home, is mainly summarised
in a set of verbs showing how these romantic blind women portrayed by the poet, react
to their men’s actions when these actions are retiring, running, bleeding, not with the
blood that will take them to an honourable death, but with the blood that is full of
confusion, fear and desperation, for women in Sassoon’s poems are not able to forgive
their men for feeling fear. It is worth noticing how the poem changes when Sassoon
turns to the enemy’s women. Though the message conveyed here is of the same value,
that is to say, German women are also blind and romantically detached from reality, the
poem is different when addressing them. The first verse which refers to the German
female enemy, is introduced by ‘O’, which makes us think of the author as feeling sorry
for them, and the word ‘mother’ leads us to think his attitude is less condemnatory
when referring to the enemy’s women than when referring to the women of his own
country. According to Sassoon, women were the ones who even made the shells for
their men to continue killing and dying, as long as it was an honourable death. In
Sassoon’s poem, women preferred laurelling the memory of a dead son, husband or
father, to welcome back a run away coward.
The fact that the poem is a man’s description of how women feel and an
arbitrary labelling of women as incapable of really understanding war, and their men’s
feelings of fear and even their retiring, shows how terrible life conditions for women
were in general in those times. How silent can a woman be in order to have a man
telling how she feels inside? During WWI, most women were, in fact, silent. But that
does not mean they had no voice or no thought worth telling. It does not mean there
were no voices which were starting to be raised. It means that, women in general
suffered from having their lives, feelings and thoughts shaped and told by men.
However, one must not suppose that these women became what others thought and said
they were. They could still be themselves, and the protagonists of their everyday stories,
even when to other’s eyes (men’s eyes) they were not capable of doing it successfully
just because they did it silently.

A silent revolution.
Different times have always called for different reactions. And women did react
sensibly to what was happening before, during and after WWI, showing they were
indeed able to reason for themselves, to act and decide upon it, and to still feel
sympathy, affection, admiration, to understand their men’s needs, and to take up duties
and works which they had not being properly prepared for. These women were daring,
brave and of course, ahead of their own times, for they were able to understand their
men and country and families needed them, so they did what they had to do, and they
did it well.
In order to admit the fact that these women, though oppressed and marginalized,
were still successful, it is necessary to consider that a practical ideal of autonomy
balances self authorship with the effort to read our lives and those of others in the
context and conditions under which we live, encompassing the changes and fluctuations
in out relationships. Seeking the autonomy that leads to this success is a challenge for
women who confront a history of oppression. There is the negotiation between the
female self personal search for singularity and the social structures of power that
constitute conditions of marginality. The tension between autonomy and vulnerability is
marked by a woman’s unacknowledged ability to resist imposition and a failure to see
her own moral capacities and weaknesses. Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,
Anderson 2003.
There are plenty of arguments to demonstrate that these women lived completely
aware of the horrors of war, and were thus successful in coping with them wherever
they had to be, or whatever they had to do, whether it had been their own choice or they
had been forced by the surrounding conditions. Working in the crowded factories,
helping the wounded at the front line or nursing their children at home, women did open
their eyes and started to feel they were capable of thinking and deciding, just as their
men had done when they were at home.
If we take any history records from newspapers of the time, or from History
textbooks, we find that all of them paid especial attention to what women did while
their men were at front. Mostly, we can speak of three areas to which women directed
their energy. In big and small cities, many women sought employments to economically
sustain their families, as their husbands were in duty abroad. Others, who found the
courage and followed their sense of adventure and their desire to fulfil their need for
freedom and self determination, went straight to the front as nurses, cooks and even
fighting in combat just like a man would. And finally, there were those of no less
importance, who stayed in their homes enduring a situation of uncertainty, confusion
and poverty, which could have overwhelmed the bravest of men.
To talk about the first group of women means to estate that they did something
that perhaps they had never dreamed of. Occupying their men’s place at work,
organising themselves in unions, earning their own money and deciding on how to
spend it, enjoying the up-to-then forbidden pleasures of smoking, drinking and wearing
what they pleased more openly, meant a great deal for them. However, there were many
drawbacks and what was usually first seen and felt as an advantage, was soon
discovered to have a dark side to it. ‘ Employers circumvented wartime equal pay regulations
by employing several women to replace one man, or by dividing skilled tasks into several less
skilled stages. In these ways, women could be employed at a lower wage and not said to be
‘replacing’ a man directly’.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/16816/theroleofwomeninworldwaripgpg4pg4
html?cat=37
Another important issue as regards employed women during the war was that, as
soon as the war was over, they had to go back to their home occupations, leaving their
working places, and thus the independence they had managed to gain. The actual
problem was that many of these women needed to continue working to support
themselves and their families, for their husbands, sons and fathers had died while in
combat. These were the women who, in the after war period were forced to accept the
worst working conditions and pressure, as well as harassment to keep their jobs. They
even went against the married women who were said to have the obligation to give their
jobs to single women and widows. ‘As unemployment levels soared immediately after the
war, anger towards women taking jobs from men exploded .’
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/16816/theroleofwomeninworldwaripgpg4pg4
html?cat=37
The second group I mentioned above deserves our respect and admiration as
well. These women helped nurse the wounded, provided food, served as telephone
operators, entertained the troops, improvising their own tools and actually selecting
themselves for their posts, for they were mainly not called but self selected. Harriot
Stanton Blatch, an American woman who actually had Teddy Roosevelt’s support and
fought as any of the best of men, dared call England ‘a world of women’. Blatch also
said war had made women ‘bright-eyed happy. One woman, when speaking about her
direct participation in war even said that you are given new senses and a new soul.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/16816/theroleofwomeninworldwaripgpg4pg4
html?cat=37
The third group is constituted by all the women who stayed at home, ’knitting
socks’, though not detached from their loved ones’ cry of pain, solitude and suffering.
Perhaps it is them who we first tend to think about when reading Sassoon’s Glory of
women. A woman ‘knitting socks for a dead but brave son’, an unfair statement,
surprisingly written by a man who had definitely lived the catastrophes of war on both
sides, at the front and at home, but who was indeed a man of his times in what regards
the treatment of women as the ones who could listen, but not speak up, who could
watch but no act, who could help but not lead or decide.
War and Gender
War poses men with a real dilemma, for they need to face the overwhelming and
terrible features of war and fight, or run away and forever face the secret humiliation of
their cowardice.
It is said that war shapes gender, dictating what women and men should do,
especially during in a war, and usually during all times. Though war and gender both
imply a variety of forms, their consistency and influence on one another are really
profound when they connect. ‘War shapes gender and gender shapes war’ .
http://www.warandgender-com.
Throughout history, war has always been regarded as male business. And it has
been men who have been raised for war. It has always been men who have been directly
connected with the main what is considered the most important duties of war. During
World War I women apparently had a choice, but in the end, considering the real
situation they lived in, whether at home, in a factory or in the trenches, they had no
choice, had they ever?
In Sassoon’s poems as well as in the rest of the poems of war time, the suffering,
the pain and the horror, even the most terrible features of war seem to be men’s
privilege. Men are fit to fight, they are tough for war, shaped to tolerate and endure, and
women have always come out of the classifying cultural trends associated with
weakness, tears and service, and even these, which are indeed virtues to imitate, have
been connected with vulnerability, and vulnerability has been given the worst
connotation. Even when included in the battle field, women have 99 percent of the times
were sent to perform different duties from those performed by men. Sometimes, those
duties have been actually invented to satisfy the need of including, just including, but
not implying or involving or giving women a share of the merit for being able to fight,
to win, and to die. However, women in Sassoon’s times performed the duties they were
given, many times without a choice, as any of the best combatants, factory worker,
nurses and housewives.

Conclusion
War has always been one of human being’s most feared catastrophes. And every
time a war ends, there comes a time for reflecting and reconsidering, for changing and
tolerating. Unfortunately, there has never been a war or world catastrophe that has lead
to specifically reconsidering, changing or reflecting on how women’s capacity to
reason, to live a life of her own, deciding and standing up for have been neglected and
denied or minimised. Sassoon’s poem shows only a specific moment in time, when
women were regarded as individuals who were not able to see reality for itself.
However, this tendency of men to speak their women’s thoughts and feelings, (even
when these women were not allowed to show or speak their feelings, especially if they
were different than what was expected), has repeated itself in history and we can still
see it nowadays. Perhaps the most important issue here is not the fact that it exists, but
the need to learn how to read this tendency not only in literature, but in the events that
take place in our every day life, for there is the danger of becoming accustomed to such
disregard towards women. We, men and women, or women and men, are human beings
who deserve the recognition of our differences, but also the respect to our individuality.
It may take a lifetime for any human being to read his own thoughts and
feelings, and to express them intelligibly. Why should then one individual dare say what
others think and feel, especially if those individuals are, like every single one in the
universe, different from him?
Reference list

Bibliography:

Glory of Women - Siegfried Sassoon – English Literature II - UNCA 2008

Webgraphy:

Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender, Pamela Sue Anderson. Feminist theory 2003

http: //www.warandgender-com

http:
//www.associatedcontent.com/article16816/theroleofwomeninworlwaripg4pg4html?
cat=37

http: //www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/assoon_siegfried.shtml

http: // www.woldwarposters.com

http: //www.history-world.org/war_one.html

http: //www.historychannel.com

http: //www.firstworldwar.com/