Discussion
The body of work focusing on the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service (SWH) during the Great War and beyond has a strong hagiographic streak. There remains an understandable appetite for the stories of personal bravery and the transgression of gender norms contained within their appearance in Serbia after the Austria
strafexpedition in 1914, the typhus epidemic that followed, and the second, successful invasion by the combined forces of Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany in the winter of 1915. In contrast, their more problematic attitudes towards the Serbs in their care that are commonplace in archival sources, and their workaday activities “on the home front” (fundraising, political agitation, etc) have received comparatively little historiographical attention. This, in spite of the potential it offers for understanding the suffrage movement, Anglo-Serbian (and later Anglo-Yugoslav) relations, and British racial, Balkanist, and social attitudes more generally.
Of the attention paid to these charities activities outside of Serbia, Jane McDermid’s 2007 article on the internal politics of the SWH and the debates over its suffragist character and political work provide important depth to the discussion and refocuses the attention on the individuals that made up the organisation as political actors with clear (and clearly expressed) political goals. When paired with critical appraisals of the exclusionary class politics of the suffrage movement (Laura Schwartz in Purvis, J. and Hannam, J., 2020), a more fulsome picture forms of a movement as capable of the reactionary as the revolutionary.
It is in this critical context that this paper re-examines the place of Serbs in the campaigning narratives of the SWH in Britain. This is part of a broader attempt to address their conspicuous absence from histories produced by contemporary suffragist historians (Balfour, 1918), and those produced more recently. While these more recent works have undoubtedly added much of value about the British women’s emotional lives and motivations (Angela K. Smith, 2016), this paper seeks to complicate the understanding of these women’s activities. By leveraging extensive archival research (currently in progress) this paper will offer insights into the changes in the public perception of Serbs throughout the war in Britain, how the inherently unequal charitable dynamic of aid-giver and recipient was operationalised in these early days of the foreign-aid charity, and to what extent it can be understood as a racialised, and potentially exploitative, relationship.
