Pat Barkers Regeneration Essay -- Pat Barker Regeneration Essays

Pat bow-wows RegenerationPat Barkers Regeneration focuses on the troubled soldiers mental status during World War One. Barker introduces the feelings soldiers had about the war and militarys involvement with the war effort. While Regeneration mainly looks at the male perspective, Barker includes a small but important pistillate presence. While Second Lieutenant Billy Prior breaks away from Craiglockhart War Hospital for an evening, he finds women at a cafe in the Edinburgh district (Barker 86). He comes to the understanding that the women are munitions workers. Womens involvement in war work in Regeneration shows the potential growth in womens independence, but at the expense of restrictions place on men while they were on the front lines of battle.Munition-ettes during World War One took the places of their husbands, fathers, and brothers in order for the men to take up positions in the fortify services (Braybon 45). Women working in munitions factories were mainly of the lower c lass yet, roughly 9 percent of women working in the factories came from the middle to upper classes (Robb 45). Munition-ettes held responsibilities for making and filling shells and cartridges along with other basic cleaning duties, driving, and intense labor (Twentieth Century). They acquired some engineering skills that helped them in producing various weapons (Twentieth Century). Munition-ettes took the deployed soldiers places in the factories as a way to show their patriotism as well as to earn a better living than in domestic jobs.Munition-ettes suffered the flaws in the system of gender bias when looking at equal pay many women left low-skill, low-wage jobs, especially in domestic service, for better paying versatile labor in ... ...atriots or strictly worked to increase their economic status, all these women were a testimonial to the home front effort as well as the effort to further their independence.Works CitedBarker, Pat. Regeneration. modernistic York Plume, 1993.Br aybon, Gail. Women Workers in the First World War. Totowa, New Jersey Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.Robb, George. British Culture and the First World War. New York Palgrave, 2002.Twentieth Century Military The First World War 1914-18. Dartford Town Archive. 13 April 2003 <http//www.dartfordarchive.org.uk/20th_century/military_ww1.shtml.Home By Category By Page Number designation Last update 30 April 2003Site Editor Karin E. Westman, Assistant Professor of English, Kansas State UniversityContact Site EditorKarin Westmans Homepage Department of English Kansas State University