MenWomenCare

Conflict and care; a complex relationship

The First World War left many ex-servicemen with serious disabilities, for which they required long-term medical and social care. New formal and informal structures developed during the interwar period as a result, which affected traditional perceptions of gender roles in the provision of care, as Dr Jessica Meyer of the MenWomenCare project explains

Many of the men returning from the front after the end of the First World War had suffered serious disabilities, so required long-term medical and social care. While in a military context care was often provided by men, once the conflict had ended new formal and informal structures developed, an area of great interest to Dr Jessica Meyer, the Principal Investigator of the MenWomenCare project. “We’re looking at domestic circumstances, and how they relate to the state and charitable institutions. What is the nature of these relationships? How are they structured by gender?” she outlines. In many cases women took on a lot of care-giving work in the home, while doctors and other staff in charities and state institutions tended to be male. “What does this say about how medicine was practised, about how those with disabilities were cared for, and about our perception of care-giving as a gendered practice?” asks Dr Meyer.

National Archives

Researchers are looking at files from the National Archives on First World War Pensions awards to investigate these and other questions. These files often contain a

Men, Women and Care: The gendering of formal and informal care-giving in interwar Britain

Objectives: To develop a database of material contained in the 22,756 personal pension files from the First World War held by the National Archives, London. This will be used to explore how formal and informal structures of care for disabled ex-servicemen developed in the interwar years, and how these structures were both themselves gendered and helped to gender caregiving practices.

Dr Jessica Meyer Legacies of War University of Leeds T: +44 0113 343 4194 E: j.k.meyer@leeds.ac.uk W: http://menwomenandcare. leeds.ac.uk/

Jessica Meyer is Associate Professor of Modern British History in Legacies of War at the University of Leeds, specialising in histories of masculinity, disability, and popular fiction in the era of the First World War in Britain. She is currently completing a monograph on the experiences of Royal Army Medical Corps rankers during the war. Personal pension file for Denis Cavanagh created by the Ministry of Pensions.

variety of different documents, including official documents, medical reports, and letters from the pensioners themselves, from which Dr Meyer and her colleagues in the project hope to gain new insights.

“We’re creating a database which pulls out a lot of the demographic information and will include things like the nature of the pensionable disability, how much money men received in a pension, and whether or not they were living at home or in institutional settings,” she explains. “It will also tell us whether they were receiving care in institutional settings or in other forms of non-state institutions. We’ll then use that to do some quantitative analysis. So for example, how many men in Bradford were being pensioned for the loss of a limb? How many lived at home?” The project’s database will enable social historians to investigate these kinds of questions more efficiently, while this research also holds relevance today in terms of the state’s responsibilities towards those it sends into harms way. The huge numbers of disabled men returning from the First World War ushered in an era of greater state intervention in medical care, and in some ways could be seen as the precursor of the welfare state. “It’s also the precursor to the idea of the miltary covenant, which structures how the disabled from current conflicts are dealt with,” says Dr Meyer. The introduction of conscription in 1916 was an important event in these terms. “If you’re going to require citizens to serve in the military, to put themselves in harms way, then you have a responsibility to support their dependents if they suffer a disability as a result,” continues Dr Meyer. “This introduces the idea of state responsibility for servicemen.”

This continues to shape the contemporary military covenant and the treatment of veterans of current conflicts. The University of Leeds has recently established a threeyear partnership with History & Policy, an organisation which aims to inform current policy. “They train historians and put them

We’re creating a database which pulls out a lot of the demographic

information and will include things like the nature of the pensionable disability, how much money men received in a pension, and whether

or not they were living at home or in institutional settings

in contact with policy-makers, both at local and national level, around questions where the historical background might hold relevance,” explains Dr Meyer. This allows policy-makers to draw on the knowledge of researchers around historical events, giving greater perspective and depth to their decisions. “The analysis we’re doing will add that depth and knowledge, and will enable policy-makers – as they work with charities – to think about what aspects of care for the disabled need to be funded,” says Dr Meyer. “This might initially be around disabled people returning from current conflicts, but then there are also wider questions about the disabled in society.”