Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950

Abstract

T First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies. Debate has focused on trench warfare in particular, and how far it contributed to a reassessment of Edwardian concepts of manliness. The question of whether or not heroic ideals were buried in the mud of Flanders figures in histories of public schools and youth organizations; in literary studies of interwar imaginative writing; as well as in research directly inspired by gender history, on topics as diverse as men’s bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Shell shock, and its effect on medical and military ideas of manliness, has been at the forefront of the discussion. Despite this relatively developed historiography, there is little agreement. During the 1980s, building on the work of authors such as Paul Fussell, who had argued that the chivalric language of the prewar was found hopelessly wanting in the trenches, scholars pointed to the impact of the war in the reassessment of heroic ideals. In a still-influential essay published in 1987, Elaine Showalter argued that shell shock was nothing less than “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of ‘manliness’ itself.” Young subaltern officers, socialized through their public school education

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