Can we challenge dominant cultural myths through collaboration and conversation beyond the academy? Ingrid Sharp reflects:

Despite the important historiography published in the last thirty years that has transformed our understanding of the ways the First World War simultaneously challenged and shored up gender identities, popular memories of the war in Europe tend still to revolve around a number of key stereotypes common since the war itself: the sensitive and innocent young combatant, the plucky nurse, the stoical mother, the grieving widow, and the psychologically damaged veteran. The enormous interest in the First World War and its legacies during the Centenary years has opened up new opportunities for academics to engage with museum professionals, archivists and activists. To what extent has such collaboration allowed less culturally dominant stories about gender to emerge which challenge these repetitive myths?

The Berkshire Conference in Hofstra University, New York in June 2017 had the theme ‘Difficult Conversations: Thinking and Talking about Women, Genders and Sexualities Inside and Outside the Academy’ and a team of academics from the University of Leeds Legacies of War project Alison Fell, Jessica Meyer and Ingrid Sharp) Lucy Moore, Leeds Museums and Galleries and Jessamy Carlson, The National Archives (UK) put together a panel reflecting on the ways in which collaboration had helped to challenge some of the public narratives about women and war.

This is my contribution, reflecting on my collaboration with Bent Architect in a project in writing women back into the history of the German revolution in November 1918.

Has the WW1 Centenary given me the opportunity to reach new audiences?

The centenary of the war has created enormous public interest in the UK and there is definitely a climate for collaborative working and for including academics in the public debate.  Through media work, funded public-facing projects and networks involving academic and non-academic partners, the scope for working collaboratively and reaching out to new audiences has been huge.  We have had opportunities to present our research in a variety of different and challenging new ways.

In my work how have I challenged dominant gendered myths of WW1?

During the WW1 centenary, my priorities have been:

1. to counter inward-facing nationalism in the UK by including examples of the German experience of war in the centenary story - in particular German opposition to the war and the response of women’s organisations, neither of which are well-known within Germany either.
2. to link the historical narrative to contemporary debates: for example we marked the centenary of The International Women’s Congress at The Hague with a shared platform of academic peace historians and women involved in making policy decisions at International (UN) and national (UK) governmental level. Our aim was to stress the link between historical and contemporary peace activism.
3. I also want to include resistance and gender narratives in the public debate and to make the point that in many ways resistance to the war was highly gendered, with international resistance largely undertaken by organised women. Exploring the role of the revolution in ending the war and women’s role in the revolution was also important.

In March 2016 I gave a talk in Kiel on women’s overlooked role in the German Revolution of November 1918. The symposium had 14 speakers, 12 of whom were men talking about the differentiated experiences of male revolutionaries while the women’s panel of two had first to convince the room that women had played any part at all in the uprising – and I had to talk my way onto that panel because they already had one woman so what could I possibly add?  Both popular and academic history have characterised the revolution as led and carried out exclusively by male actors and there is very little work that challenges this. My paper gave concrete examples of women’s involvement and persuaded the director of Kiel Maritime Museum Dr Doris Tillmann to include female revolutionaries in their year-long exhibition to commemorate the uprising.

This has grown into a Research Council funded project in which I am working over 18 months with two local partners, the Bradford peace museum and a socially engaged theatre company, Bent Architect, to create an exhibition and write a new play that challenges myths about the way the war ended and specifically seeks to write women back into the history of the German revolution.

I have made that sound quite linear, but this is misleading - unpacking it a bit will show the importance of longstanding personal contacts and networks as well as the role played by even small amounts of funding in developing larger projects.  It was leading the resistance strand of legacies of war that brought me into contact with both the director of the peace museum and the theatre group in 2013-14.  I met the theatre group because of the play they had on tour based on the experiences of local Conscientious Objectors and we kept in loose contact. But it wasn’t until 2015 that I saw an opportunity to apply for a small amount of pump priming funding for working with creative industries and met Jude and Mick (Bent Architect) again to explore what project we might bid for. That initial funding of £2000 was intended to explore the possibility of performing the existing play and conducting workshops on German and British war resistance in Berlin, but ended up identifying a far more ambitious project in Kiel, an industrial and naval city in North Germany with a long tradition of socialist and working class activism. In Jude’s frugal hands, the money allowed 3 of us to spend 3 days in Berlin where we met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for commemorating the war beyond 2014 and then another more fruitful 3 days in Kiel where there were enthusiastic plans for commemorating the uprising that had brought about end of the war in November 1918.

Without the Legacies of War community engagement agenda, I would not have known about the theatre company and so would not have been able to respond to the first funding opportunity. Without having to put together a bid, we would probably not have articulated what we wanted to achieve, would not have discovered the Kiel stories and contacts that became the focus of our second funding bid and would not have spent 6 days visiting theatres and museums as well as drinking beer in Berlin and Kiel.  This aspect was vital as it has allowed us to overcome any mystique or misunderstandings about our respective worlds and develop a realistic and honest working relationship.

By Ingrid Sharp