Militant ‘Amazons’, Amateur Soldiering and Institutional Militarisation in Britain and Europe: The Origins of the First World War Women's Corps, 1780s–1914

The paper explores the historical origins of Britain’s First World War logistical Women’s Corps, including both the longer-term and Edwardian roots of these units. Existing literature has identified the regular armed forces as the Corps’ parent organisations. But these explanations are undermined by their narrow focus on the ‘official’, government-sponsored female services created from 1917 and by traditional ‘top-down’ institutional perspectives through which they explored the services’ formation. They thus fail to explain the origins of the independent female volunteer corps, formed between 1914 and 1916, which provided the inspiration and model for the official female services. Nor do they clarify the role of Edwardian women’s martial associations, the militant suffrage, rifle, uniformed youth and voluntary aid societies, in facilitating the establishment of the volunteer units. The paper re-examines the Corps’ organisational lineage through new institutionalist approaches. These illuminate the process of institution formation and change through a comparative analysis of relevant organisations in broader institutional environments re-shaped by historical turning points. Through this method, the discussion traces the ancestry of the Women’s Corps in the ‘long’ pre-1914 century, identifying shifting images of martial femininity, mass warfare and major military reforms as the factors which inspired and enabled women’s organised militarism. This process is explored in interlinked transnational, national and local institutional environments in three consecutive periods. The paper locates the origins of the Corps in new cultural definitions of war and women’s wartime roles created by the French revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts and in the popular expansion and restructuring of national armed forces required by 19th-century warfare. In Britain, such reforms were shaped by the country’s long-standing ‘amateur military tradition’, a distinctly gendered institutional template, rather than conscription. These cultural and structural changes encouraged the formation of women’s military units after further defence reforms following the South African and 1914 war crises.

Krisztina Robert, Roehampton University, has published widely on women’s participation and lived experience in First World War Britain.

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This session is a hybrid session and in-person tickets are limited.