Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf and testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Barring women from the very kind of education required of citizens in a democracy , denying them the traits and capacities thought to be the mark of a moral individual , he ensures their second-class status both at home and in the world . Good education could help women to enter international organizations and create a powerful anti-war movement

Both authors suppose that the feminist pacifists should be grappled as individuals and in relation to one another with the polarized wartime gender system . Objectors sought to move away from the warrior ideal , the particular

form of manliness favored by the state in the context of war while the feminist-pacifist civil libertarians attempted to distance themselves from the contradictory ideal of the wartime woman as an actively loyal patriotic mother-citizen as well as a passive and defenseless creature in need of male (warrior ) protection . More than ever today women have the opportunity to build a new and better world but in this slavish imitation of men they are wasting their chance (Woolf 2003 . Woolf and Brittain struggle to invent new identities for themselves as they resisted societal pressures to conform . This project to deconstruct and then reconstruct gender identity outside of the wartime norm was not always (or perhaps even usually ) a fully self-conscious act on the part of objectors and feminist pacifists Brittain underlines the role of a nurse stating : Perhaps , too , the warm and profoundly surprising comfort that I derived from their presence produced a tenderness which was able to communicate back to them , in turn , something of their own rich consolation (Brittain 1989 br

. 47 . However , out of the conflicts and tensions involved in the attempt to become more self-directed people emerge some fresh understandings of the personal dimension of war resistance

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