caa a22 4500 388100893 CHVBK 20180307125320.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199910 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S095679330000176X doi S095679330000176X pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S095679330000176X Grayzel Susan R. Nostalgia, Gender, and the Countryside: Placing the ‘Land Girl' in First World War Britain [Elektronische Daten] [Susan R. Grayzel] In December 1917, an article in the Daily Chronicle, entitled ‘The New Land Lady', stated that: One of the good things which may issue from this war is a revival of the old English countryside. The happy village may be born again. If this reformation should come, it will be the work of the women. The nostalgia evident in this call for women's wartime ‘return' to the land to restore a lost, pastoral idyll during an event more usually associated with modernity raises several questions. What meanings can be attached to the ways in which women agricultural workers were seen as the key to a ‘rural revival' and thus as crucial to a revitalized nation during the First World War? And what are we to make of the seemingly contradictory appeal to women radically to leave their presumably urban and suburban homes and conservatively to restore the countryside? As Raymond Williams pointed out, this emblematic English countryside has always been placed in a more ideal past, and the desires to return to or to preserve the allegedly unchanging patterns of land and the lives attached to it are integral to the problem of modernization itself. More recently, Alun Howkins has argued that the ideology and ‘ideal' of England and Englishness have remained essentially ‘rural,' and that in 1914 this was the vision of Englishness that ‘went into battle'. However, one might certainly be forgiven for assuming that the creation of the Women's Land Army and the resulting appearance of urban women in trousers, breeches and puttees in villages throughout Britain would herald something more like a ‘transformation' than a ‘revival'. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999 Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/2(1999-10), 155-170 0956-7933 10:2<155 1999 10 RUH https://doi.org/10.1017/S095679330000176X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S095679330000176X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Grayzel Susan R. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/2(1999-10), 155-170 0956-7933 10:2<155 1999 10 RUH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge