The Impact of Gender Roles on war Experience as represented in D.H Lawrence’s '“Tickets, Please”' Summer Jade Dolan College

World War I, argues Susan Grayzel, acted as a ‘catalyst for enormous changes in all aspects of life, including ideas about gender and the behavior of women and men.’[1] More women than ever before challenged contemporary ‘spheres of interest’ gender roles, expectations, and stereotypes through not only working, but working in traditionally male-dominated professions,[2] and this is explored in the content of both D.H Lawrence’s Tickets, Please (1919) and Mary Borden’s Blind (1929). However, as will be argued in this essay, whilst Lawrence’s work explores and contrasts both traditional gender politics and the looser gender politics brought on by the war, in order to suggest that such societal ‘progress’ is both harmful and unnatural, Borden’s work instead minimizes the distinctions made between men and women, highlighting the socially-constructed reality of early twentieth century notions of femininity and masculinity.

The argument that Tickets, Please functions essentially as a piece of anti-feminist propaganda, aiming to demonstrate perceived detriments caused by the societal progress made in terms of gender roles within the war, has contextual precedent. Writing in a letter discussing women and the war in 1917, Lawrence...