In memoriam: Women, war and communal lament
Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
Hecate Press
Place of Publication
Australia
Faculty
Faculty of Education and Arts
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
20322
Abstract
[...]an order to be silent was issued by Australian authorities under the provisions of the Act to prevent Adela Pankhurst, Cecilia John and like-minded women from singing in public "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier / I brought him up to be my pride and joy, / Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder / To shoot some other mother's darling boy" (Shute 29). In this paper, I investigate a site of memory and mourning outside Winter's purview-Australian newspaper In Memoriam notices-for here, in a written medium that was highly masculinised and focussed on the commerce of men, women situated far from the conflict found a place to grieve their losses in public.1 I have selected for focus the story of one mourner whose In Memoriam verses were published by the Argus, a Melbourne-based daily, though it is likely that among the major combatants "every family was in mourning: most for a relative ... others for a friend, a colleague, a lover, a companion" (Winter 2).
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Comments
Murphy, F. (2015). In memoriam: Women, war and communal lament. Hecate: An interdisciplinary journal of women's liberation, 40(2), 103-122. Available here.