Home, Food & Family in WW1

Home, Food and Family in WWI

Saturday 5 March, 2016

A conference organized by the Women’s History Network, Midlands Region and Voices of War and Peace WWI Engagement Centre

At Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, Stoke Heath, Bromsgrove, Midlands B60 4JR.
For location and travel directions see http://www.avoncroft.org.uk

This conference explores how housewives, children and the home played a part in producing, preserving and preparing food during World War One.
The Dig for Victory campaigns of the Second World War have a firm place within popular consciousness – yet the similar activities engaged in by people on Britain’s Home Front in World War One, when food became a weapon of war, have received little attention.

We aim to address this during our event by bringing together academics, teachers, students and those working or and volunteering in heritage organisations or on community projects, to share their ideas, discoveries, interests and research.  Our programme of talks will be complemented by displays and exhibitions from community history groups.

Registration and exhibitions from 10:30am, talks from 11-3pm.

Visitors to the conference will also gain free entry to the delightful Avoncroft Museum and have plenty of chance to explore the site and its wonderful historic buildings.

Conference Fee £15.  There are free places for students, those working on HLF funded community projects or in museums, archives and heritage organisations.
For further details and to book your place and pay online via EVENTBRITE 

Or to pay by cheque/post contact Dr Janis Lomas directly j.lomas96@btinternet.com

Programme
10:30  Registration  –  Coffee available from the Edwardian Tea Room
11:00 Welcome and introduction to the day

11:10 ‘The Kitchen is the Key to Victory’: Women, Food and the Great War
Professor Karen Hunt  – University of Keele

The First World War saw new kinds of warfare on an unprecedented scale. One of its novel features was that food was used as a weapon of war against civilian populations of entire countries. In everyday Britain, this meant a cost of living crisis as prices rocketed, with food shortages, unequal distribution of food and fuel and long food queues. This particularly affected women as they had the principal responsibility in most households for translating the family’s income into meals on the table. This talk takes the famous First World War poster that urged ‘The Kitchen is the Key to Victory’ and explores the different ways in which women on the home front responded to this escalating crisis. Local examples will be used to show how diverse experiences were across the country and the extent to which the food crisis not only challenged but also empowered some women

11:55 Everybody’s talking about food: food and women’s magazines in the First World War
Jennifer Doyle – Kings College, University of London

On 15 June 1917, several days after a particularly devastating U-Boat campaign on British shipping, disrupting food imports, a deputation of the newspaper trade complained to a meeting a the Treasury, that the Government was not utilising the medium of women’s magazines in the dissemination of advice and information about food. This particular reference shows how contemporaries view women’s magazines as a source of mass information distribution. This paper will present an overview of the methods employed by contemporary print media to encourage women to engage with the war. For a significant portion of British women, household and childcare responsibilities prevented them from engaging with the war in a paid capacity, such as working in factories, the land or the many new roles made available by the conditions of war. Women who remained out of the paid workforce/war effort, were asked to think of the Home as a War Front, and were encouraged to view the Kitchen as their theatre of war.  This paper will analyse the homogenised picture of the Home Front drawn by the media, and using the medium of food, it will show how food economy and dietary sacrifice were equated with national safety.

12:30 Introduction to exhibitions

12:40 Lunchtime – coffee/tea and a sandwich lunch is included in conference fee alongside a chance to see the exhibitions and view Avoncroft’s collection of historic buildings.

1:40 Everybody’s Business: Film, Food and Victory in the First World War
Dr Stella Hockenhull- University of Wolverhampton

One month after the outbreak of the Second World War, the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign was introduced in Britain in an attempt to grow more food to feed a nation in conflict. This not only concerned the need to educate, but also provided the impetus for community and patriotism. That this plan was mobilised at such short notice owes a debt to the First World War, a period which witnessed the birth of film as official propaganda. However, the main disparity between the two film campaigns lies in their strategies for dealing with the populace. The Second World War, deemed ‘the People’s War’, used the working class as central protagonists with the aim of demonstrating a disregard for class difference. On the other hand, the First World War deployed upper and middle class characters in order to educate despite the fact that the cinema audience during this period was predominantly comprised of those fighting starvation, and indeed those actually ‘digging for victory’. This paper analyses the strategies inaugurated in the cinematic food campaign in World War One in both newsreels and fiction film.

2:25 Home front and food supply: the role of Slovenian women in Austro-Hungary
Urška Strle, Petra Testen

The paper addresses the issue of food supply, considered one of the crucial domains upon which the WW1 outcome depended. The s.c. Hungerblockade (1914-19), imposed by the Allied Powers to restrict the maritime goods to the Central Powers, and growing economic and political antagonisms between Austria and Hungary (the latter also known as “the granary of the monarchy”) gravely affected both the armed forces and the civil population. The food crisis, which clearly demonstrates an overlap between military and home front, contributed decisively to the Austro-Hungarian’s military, economic and political breakdown in 1918.

By concentrating on the Slovenian lands we try to elucidate the survival strategies of civil population from below, particularly the role of women in reorganizing the domestic economy and sustaining their families following the mobilization of men. The production and distribution of food in the area of self-sufficient, traditionally extensive agriculture considerably deteriorated not only due to the war economy but also due to the immediate vicinity of the Isonzo front. Historical evidence indicates a great engagement of women in various activities stimulated by the food crisis. Similarly, women, often compelled to provide aliments for their own families, found employment in the (growing food-) industrial sector. Also the rate of women’s delinquency raised particularly due to the lack of supplies during the war.

The contribution is based on a combination of various historical perspectives, stressing the difference between rural and urban areas regarding the food supply in particular. Includes the analysis of diverse archival material, periodicals, parochial annals, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, photographs etc. It takes into account the findings of international studies in the field, but remains sensitive to the regional and local specifics.

3:00 Conference end