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Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester) ‘Refugees, gender and war in modern European history’ Talk given to a conference at the University of Newcastle, July 2013, on Gender, refugees and displacement, 1900-1950’ Notes: Please do not cite without permission. I have omitted the images that formed part of my presentation Introduction As a historian I deplore the absence of refugees from the historiographical mainstream. The time has surely come for historians to speak of refugees in the same way that a previous generation of scholars discovered the social history of working-class and enslaved men and women, bringing them out of the shadows and into the limelight. The exclusion of refugees from the historiography is difficult to justify, not least because population displacement has been closely entwined with momentous processes such as war, revolutionary upheaval and state formation. To consign them to the margins is to offer a partial reading of such epoch-changing events. Here I want to address one aspect of what Joan Scott called (in relation to women’s history) ‘the production of neglect’ by juxtaposing the categories of refugee and gender. The first point to make is that the figure of ‘the refugee’ is – like gender – socio-historically constructed. In other words, to speak in the same breath of refugees and gender is to confront categories that are not ‘natural’ or self-evident. Instead, they can be regarded as having acquired, over time and in different contexts, social significance, cultural meaning and legal-bureaucratic force. How these categories originated, were deployed and reproduced, and came to be taken for granted, is a worthwhile task for historians. People may be forcibly displaced for all sorts of reasons, but the circumstances, motives and outcomes of displacement are regularly lumped together in the de-historicised category of ‘refugee’ (Malkki, 1996). The category is specified formally in international law under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention; other categorisations have emerged in regional refugee regimes. But categorisation goes beyond issues of legal definition. The word ‘refugee’ resonates with ideas of loss and humiliation: having suffered violent trauma, refugees are portrayed as terrified and helpless victims of war, and thereby turned into an object of ‘concern’. This, too, is a form of categorisation. Likewise, gender, as we have learned from Joan Scott, Denise Riley and other scholars is a socially constructed category, not a state of nature [Image 1]. But to talk of ‘social construction’ is to embark upon a conversation rather bring it to an end. Social expectations and norms have a history. Furthermore, women and men have challenged assumptions about ascribed gender roles and expectations. This observation applies no less to refugees than to non-refugees. Ideas about what constitutes conventional or acceptable behaviour emerge in different contexts, affecting refugees’ conduct not just at a time of great upheaval but also in more tranquil moments when they narrate their flight and resettlement. I am reminded of the scope that exists for the appropriation of refugees’ ‘experience’, as in the case of a young Palestinian man who loftily told his interviewer that ‘my mother told us about Palestine, but she didn’t know the plots’. Here the son advanced his claims to authority and distanced himself from his mother by depriving her of credibility in respect of the ongoing political struggle (Sayigh, 1998: 42 [Image 2]). His patronising stance reminds us that gender relations are bound up with other kinds of marginalisation, including age.

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The second general point I wish to make comes in the form of a related question, which is to ask whether refugees have a gender and, if so, what is it? Feminist scholars opened up a rich field of study by challenging the assumption that the figure of the industrial worker is inherently masculine. But what issues arise in respect of refugees – are they gendered as masculine or feminine? While international law operates with the concept of a universal refugee subject, academic studies and humanitarian relief agencies from the 1980s onwards considered the specific circumstances that affected female refugees, including their exposure to humiliation and sexual violence but also the possibility that refugee women might be empowered as a result of an upheaval in social relations (Callamard, 1997; Hajdukowski-Ahmed et al, 2008). The corollary is that the first two-thirds of the twentieth century witnessed no attempts to devise gender-sensitive programmes of refugee relief and development. Whether this earlier era constituted the ‘dark ages’ for women refugees is a point to which I shall return. As we examine issues of displacement and gender in twentieth-century Europe, where else might we look for inspiration? We have to cast the net widely in the social sciences and the humanities. Ethnographic fieldwork helps us to understand how the experiences of refugees can challenge the assumptions that operate both in respect of displacement and relief efforts. A social anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in parts of sub-Saharan Africa inform us of a Somali woman who worked for ten years in Somalia on behalf of CARE International, before being forced in 1991 to leave for Dadaab (in Kenya) where her husband had a job with UNHCR. By drawing attention to a nomadic past that was characterised by economic insecurity, she and others mobilised (as been aptly said) images of being adventurous, tough and independent, rather than marginalised, displaced and helpless’. In similar vein, a study of the Uduk people of the Blue Nile suggests that ‘the bland language’ of humanitarian intervention, with its talk of ‘survival’ and ‘coping’, does scant justice to the depth of their cultural imagination and practices, or the intensity of the adventures that constituted the refugees’ trek across difficult terrain, something that is applicable to adolescent Ethiopian Jewish boys who fled Ethiopia and endured a difficult time in Sudan before being airlifted to Israel (Kleist, 2004: 11; James, 2007: xv, 120; Ben-Ezer, 2002).

Coming closer to the history of modern Europe, also germane to my purposes is the idea of war as a moment of rupture in established gender relations. An important collection of essays edited by Higonnet et al from a conference on ‘women and war’ (sic) that took place in 1984 was subsequently published as Behind the Lines, sub-headed ‘gender and the two world wars’ (Higonnet et al, 1987 [Image 3]). The contributors reflected on the disruption of time and space and what this implied for gender roles. Sandra Gilbert shows how British writers alluded to the Great War as a moment of release – ‘a festival of misrule’, that overturned convention. The notion of misrule seems to me an apt way of characterising the dramatic appearance that refugees made on the scene during both world wars, challenging and subverting established norms by being (as Mary Douglas famously put it) ‘out of place’, that is difficult to locate in the conventional social order. The contributors to Behind the Lines engaged productively with the notion of ‘no man’s land’; and here I would want to insist on refugees as inhabiting another kind of nowhere-land. Re-reading this collection, I was also struck by the fictional utopias that were being devised during the Great War, such as ‘Herland’, opening up the prospect of a new world founded on a revolution in gender relations, which reminded me that at the same time a young boy in England (Chad Varah, later the founder of the Samaritans) imagined the possibility of a ‘Refugia’ or land where refugees might be allowed to live in safety. I recall Joan Scott’s invitation to think about the assumptions that inform categories:

How are those who cross the thresholds received? If they belong to a group different from one already ‘inside’, what are the terms of their incorporation? How do the new arrivals understand their relationship to the place they have entered? What are the terms of identity they establish? (Scott, 1988: 178) [Image 4]

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Placing war, population displacement and gender in a single frame provides a valuable opportunity to think about thresholds and identities. In this paper I explore the juxtaposition in relation to the cultural history of modern war. The reasons for so doing are, first, that mass population displacement was closely connected to state practices in wartime, as with the conscription of soldiers and the targeting of minorities, both of which served as instruments of wartime mobilisation. This is now quite well established in the literature. Less obvious in the historiography is the issue of return and repatriation. What happened to gender relations when men in uniform (including prisoners of war) returned home, and does this connect with the voluntary or enforced repatriation of refugees? More broadly still, modern warfare posed questions about the state’s treatment of women in relation to its treatment of men. One outcome was the crystallisation of paternalist and welfarist programmes designed to sustain the war effort and subsequently to repair some of the damage inflicted by warfare. Can we take some of these findings and ask questions about the state’s attitude towards refugees, particularly those who were internally displaced during the two world wars? What responsibility, if any, did the state assume; did it devolve the relief and ‘rehabilitation’ of refugees on to non-state authorities, and if so, with what consequences for gender roles? I begin with violence and its consequences for mass population displacement in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus during the First World War, before considering the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. These violent conflicts were marked by sexual humiliation, abduction and atrocity. Refugee crises resulted from pre-emptive flight to avoid being exposed to these and other risks, as well as from deliberate, state-led projects of deportation and expulsion. In a broader sense, these episodes also reshaped gendered responsibilities, including as a consequence of humanitarian relief efforts.

xxxxx The suddenness and scale of the refugee crisis (the number of internally displaced refugees in Russia may have reached as many as seven million) raised the stakes enormously as liberal and progressive critics of the Tsarist state pointed to its military and political failings. Only in part was this about the atrocities perpetrated on both sides, namely on Slav women by German troops and by Cossack forces on female civilians in East Prussia. Much of the conversation inside Russia concerned civilians who fled ‘spontaneously’, and whose self-control correspondingly came into question. It was also about liberal Russia staking a claim to the relief of suffering through a range of new civic organisations, semi-official charities (such as the Tatiana Committee, named after the Tsar’s daughter) and national committees that served specific constituencies of the multinational Russian Empire, such as Latvians, Poles and Jews. These organisations built upon civic activism, although it is important to register the fact that political decision-making remained highly restrictive for men and women (Gatrell, 1999; Bradley, 2009). Adult males made up only just over one-fifth of the total number of internally displaced refugees in Russia, a reversal of pre-war trends that saw adult men dominate the migration statistics. Partly this was about the threat to the perceived security and disciplinary regime of the household. There were reports of desperate men who ‘starve, run around naked, and live in appalling conditions and in such destitution that they drive their wives and daughters on to the street to join the ranks of prostitutes’ (E.M.Rozenblium, 1916, cited in Gatrell, 1999), and of male traffickers who searched the railway stations for unsuspecting girls. The threat of sexual danger (or, worse still, unbridled sexual appetite) was one common theme. Other recurrent images – and a familiar twentieth-century trope – portrayed the refugee mother as responsible for young and elderly dependents, struggling to cope in adverse circumstances [Image 5]. Here, as in other belligerent societies, a key part of the relief effort was a focus on

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the family, as if its re-assemblage was a necessary if not sufficient condition of restoring equilibrium. There are plentiful examples from other sites of displacement in Europe [Image 6]. Relief organisations made it their business to find work for refugees – domestic chores for women, jobs outside the home for men – but these suggestions met with little approval from working-class women, who expressed a preference for paid work in factories producing confectionery, matches or tobacco that gave them the opportunity to socialize more freely. There is an important general point here about the fracturing of relations between refugees and non-refugees, including between refugees and relief workers, and within the refugee population itself. In other words, class mattered. Mass population displacement during the First World War thus disclosed social anxieties but also possibilities for political action, even laying the foundations for newly independent states such as the Baltic States and Poland which could claim returning refugees as their own. After the war, the presence of refugees from Eastern Europe was invested with fears about the spread of infectious disease as well as politically unreliable fugitives, and hence with the need for close scrutiny of prospective entrants. Jews came off particularly badly in the scramble for a place of safety. In the Far East, where Russian Orthodox refugees congregated in large numbers, stories of ‘white’ slavery gained particular credence. Referring to 30,000 White Russians in Harbin, the Conference of Missionary Societies in GB and Ireland described Russian girls who ‘are faced with the grim choice either of starvation or becoming dancing partner prostitutes or concubines to Chinese farmers. This has led to the development of a centre of traffic in White Russian girls in Harbin’.1 Here the emphasis on their vulnerability justified external intervention to protect women and girls from organised vice. One outcome was the League of Nations Advisory Commission on Traffic in Women in Children, which provided a platform for a number of leading internationalists such as Kathleen Courtney and Rachel Crowdy and other well-placed women who spoke with authority on this and other causes (Storr, 2010: 262-9; Sluga, 2013: 71). The situation in Ottoman-administered Armenia during the First World War likewise draws attention to the gendering of population displacement and refugee relief. Armenians of all ages and occupations were targeted as untrustworthy elements, a kind of Christian fifth column capable of undermining the Turkish war effort. The consequences are well known. But the Armenian genocide offered a graphic illustration of the risks posed by survivors, who were more likely to be women and girls. The survivors of deportation and massacre told tales of sexual humiliation and violence, including being assigned to Muslim Turkish households. Western Armenophiles and the Armenian diaspora disseminated graphic evidence of rape and abduction. The whole story is more complex, however.2 The classic instance of the diaspora publicity machine was the ordeal of a young survivor of the massacres, Aurora Mardiganian, who found sanctuary in California, only to be required to retell her experiences on celluloid for the benefit of Armenian relief organisations that claimed her as a prize witness (Torchin, 2006) [Images 7 & 8]. Meanwhile key figures in the field such as the Danish missionary Karen Jeppe combined an attempt to locate and rescue Armenian women and children throughout the Near East with an equally energetic publicity drive among delegates to the League of Nations in order to keep the cause in the public domain (Watenpaugh, 2010).

1 K. MacLennan to the Secretary General of the League of Nations, 8 July 1935, Doc 13321, Fonds Nansen, Box R5638, UNOG, Geneva. 2 As has recently been pointed out, Armenian organisations claimed as Armenian the babies born to Armenian mothers as a result of rape, privileging maternity over paternity. But this did not equate to a change in fundamental patriarchal norms and hierarchies (Ekmekcioglu, 2013; see also Üngör, 2012).

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An upbeat portrait of Armenian women survivors emerged in the letters written by the leading American Quaker Marshall Fox to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen. Fox recorded a visit to one sanctuary in Salonika: ‘I doubt if I shall ever think of triumphing over difficulties without remembering one young woman we met here. A dainty little person, she would have graced any home, but all the home she had was a tiny and temporary wooden one-room shack put up on a site which will be wanted shortly. The mother had been left a widow at the age of 21 with four children, three girls and a boy of whom our friend was the eldest. In precarious situations, e.g. near a camp at Damascus she had kept undesirable folk at bay, worked for the support of the family, and their trekking as refugees had covered a considerable part of the Near East. It is impossible not to admire such a heroic effort, nor to overestimate her influence upon others of her race’.3 Thus did the post-1918 world learn to become familiar with Armenian refugees as gendered subjects who were the embodiment of a Christian heritage and the guardians of an Armenian culture that was configured as timeless and fundamentally ineradicable. Their efforts to preserve bibles and religious objects, and their cultivation of Armenian crafts such as lace work, marked them out not just as victims of persecution but as tenacious survivors of unspeakable violence, who undertook the preservation of family heirlooms and perpetuation of culture out of duty to a submerged state. In other words, the gendering of displacement and relief needs to be linked to broader questions of politics and geo-politics. As in the case of Russia during the First World War, the issue was one of a politicised martyrdom in which population displacement drew attention to a concerted attack upon the ‘nation’. Refugee women and men had a shared responsibility for its (re)constitution (Pattie, 1997; Mandel, 2003). I want to turn next to the circumstances of Displaced Persons in post-1945 Europe, where attempts by Allied governments and relief workers to manage the crisis demonstrated a more purposeful intervention, taking into account new geo-political realities (the division of Europe) and ideas about post-totalitarian citizenship. We can trace the crystallisation of this sense of purpose through the extensive remit of major new international organisations such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor organisations, including the International Refugee Organisation, and through the rapid, unchecked growth of NGOs and faith-based organisations. By purposeful intervention I have in mind their endorsement and promotion of ‘durable solutions’, namely repatriation, local integration and organised resettlement, we see the attempt to articulate a more orchestrated refugee regime.

Particularly important here was the link made between Nazism (and, by extension, other variants of ‘totalitarianism’, notably Stalinism) on the one hand, and the civic upbringing of the next generation on the other. Consider for example the stance taken by a ‘Help the Children Committee’ whose members feared ‘contagion’ spreading to US from Europe and urged vigilance among American families as well as the need for steps ‘to retard the sinister transformation that is taking place in the character of the children of Europe … who group together in bands’ to steal in order to survive. ‘It is the spirit of love and decency in the family that alone can prepare youth for good citizenship, for a strong and free united nation, and for the reconstruction of a peaceful world’).4 Others too expressed concern about the impact of the war just ended on the moral conduct of displaced persons: the well-placed UNRRA relief

3 Marshall N. Fox to Fridtjof Nansen, 7 January 1930, Doc 17729, Fonds Nansen, Box C1586, UNOG, Geneva. 4 Statement by H.J. Heinz II, Vice-president of Help the Children Committee, June 1943, in Records of the Department of State Relating to the Problems of Relief and Refugees in Europe Arising from World War II and its Aftermath, 1938-1949, microfilm, Roll 12.

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officer Craig McGeachy argued that rehabilitation includes the formulation of ‘a constructive approach to the problem of rehabilitation into normal life [of] the women and girls whom the enemy has condemned to forced labour or prostitution’. McGeachy connected these anxieties to a vision of international collaboration, explicitly drawing attention to the ‘positive approach’ adopted before the war by the League of Nations, including its commissions in which women played an important part.5 Here, then, was an expression of the ways in which gender operated as a way of thinking about social problems and about sustaining supra-national, not just national projects. In this uncertain post-war era, it was no less troubling to detect a retreat from social and political engagement amongst Displaced Persons, particularly Eastern European men who were incarcerated in DP camps for months or even years. Initial complaints about their unorthodox and disruptive behaviour gave way to a more insistent notion of DPs’ helplessness and apathy – a ‘psychosis which expresses itself in reluctance to face the responsibilities of a normal community life’ (UNHCR, 1958: 31). This diagnosis connected displacement to alienation. A UNESCO-sponsored study of DP psychology suggested that:

On arrival at some place of safety the individual refugee becomes submerged in a sea of his fellows ... once submerged, the refugee’s individuality tends to get forgotten, and when conditions get easier he has become merely one segment of an ever-reforming queue (Murphy, 1955: photo section, p. III. See also Sluga, 2013: 107, on Edward Shils and UNESCO’s Social Sciences Department’s ‘tensions’ project).

Another striking passage accompanied a photograph of Baltic men and women, which the authors described and glossed as follows:

DP Apathy or depression is well illustrated in this picture of a group of Estonians singing a national song as they see their compatriots set out for settlement. The occasion is naturally a melancholy one, probably meaning the splitting of families, but the general impression of sadness is one which was to be found in any Baltic DP camp in 1946 and 1947 (Murphy, 1955: photo section XII) [Images 9 & 10]

This was a bizarre remark to make about a photograph that shows a group of women to the fore, whose stance could just as well be described as one of defiance and affirmation rather than ‘melancholy’. The caption also overlooked a sense of solidarity that can be detected. It takes a heroic stretch of the imagination to interpret this as ‘depression’.6 [Image 11] What, to coin a phrase, was to be done (Zahra, 2011)? Among the durable solutions proposed by the International Refugee Organisation between 1947 and 1951, and thereafter by the successor organisation UNHCR, was organised resettlement. Organised resettlement was of course another name for displacement. It connected with arguments around ‘over-population’ in parts of continental Europe, and thus the potential for social and political instability, and with plans for post-war reconstruction in the midst of labour shortages including in countries such as Australia. Resettlement had particular implications for female DPs who were recruited as European Volunteer Workers. One British scheme entitled ‘Balt Cygnets’ made specific provision for Baltic DPs to be employed on domestic duties in hospitals and sanatoria. As Linda McDowell

5 Memorandum on social welfare, 24 April 1945, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Agnes McGeachy and Erwin Schuller Papers, Fonds R9369, Vol. 3, file 2, UNRRA-Welfare Division-McGeachy’s reports, 1945-46. Mention should also be made of the International Migration Service, established by the World YWCA in 1925 in response to the issues raised by post-war international migration, including the reunification of families and the need to track government immigration laws. 6 The caption to the photo on the adjacent page describes a group of men as ‘psychologically ready for resettlement … they do not show here any of the stigmata of the typical refugee’.

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has written, some 20,000 young female Latvian workers arrived in Yorkshire and Lancashire between 1946 and 1950 to take jobs in domestic service or in the textiles trade [Image 12]. Importantly, they regarded themselves, at least to begin with, not as economic migrants (the official category) but as refugees, erstwhile citizens of a vanished state that might yet be reconstituted. Their self-perception was constructed around a ‘conservative and static notion of an essentialised Latvian identity’. McDowell notes that because they ‘experienced the loss of home, family and … their very country, the desire to rebuild a secure home and family life were extremely strong’, and this constituted an important element in their resourcefulness, which extended to regular participation in choral and dance activities, sustaining a sense of Latvianness that mixed fervent anti-Soviet sentiment with a desire to be self-reliant (McDowell, 2005: 19, 139; Salvatici, 2008). This is a potent reminder of the significance of economic and geo-political conjunctures, and of ethnicity as a marker of identity – something to which British officials attached no less importance than their gender, in so far as they carefully discriminated between Baltic and Ukrainian workers. Latvian women too distinguished themselves from other migrant workers, whether black or white.7 Here as with Armenian survivors of genocide, the idea of ‘rescue’ came to the fore in public discourse. In the case of Europe’s DPs, the issue was complicated by the politics of the Cold War during the 1950s, since it became clear that many DPs refused to repatriate but were excluded from resettlement programmes by virtue of there being doubts as to their health or because there was a question mark about their criminal record or their conduct. This so-called ‘hard core’ struggled on as best they could in one or other of the DP camps in Germany, Austria or Italy. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, a group of young Conservative politicians made the case for a ‘World Refugee Year’ that held out the possibility of ‘solving’ refugee problems in Europe, but also in the Middle East and the Far East. A graphic and troubling image launched the campaign [Image 13]. World Refugee Year offered a kind of redemption for comfortably-off citizens in Western Europe (and their governments) who had left refugees high and dry. In a blaze of publicity, the UN adopted World Refugee Year, making much of the efforts to ‘clear the camps’ and provide employment opportunities in a third country or else re-house the DPs in more modern accommodation (Gatrell, 2011) [Image 14, life ‘before and after’]. I have concentrated on the experiences of mass population displacement in Europe and how those experiences were mediated. But as the above remarks imply, external assistance provided to refugees in different sites of displacement was itself invested with cultural assumptions. To make an obvious point, relief work entailed displacement, often on a global scale. Relief workers attached great significance to personal adventure, to being placed in situations of danger as well as in positions of responsibility. Their accounts, like the fragments that come down to us of refugees’ experiences, speak to great fatigue, but also describe something akin to an odyssey of self-realisation. Women who wished to travel independently before and after the First World War defied convention, took advantage of new institutional arrangements, and in some cases developed a kind of cosmopolitan sensibility (Sluga, 2000; Cohen, 2012). Some women operated from a relatively privileged position, such as Alice Masaryková, daughter of Tomáš Masaryk, who was appointed director of the Czech Red Cross in 1919, having spent time with Jane Addams in Chicago and then jailed by the Austrian authorities during the First World War. Masaryková juxtaposed memories of pastoral with her encounter with poor citizens of the new state. She networked with social workers and prominent international figures such as Rachel Crowdy, Eglantyne Jebb and Muriel Paget, as well as

7 Not to mention official attitudes towards prospective immigrants from Ireland and the Caribbean.

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with potential donors and key international organisations such as the American Relief Administration (a crucial source of material aid to Czechoslovakia), and thus became part of the fledgling ‘humanitarian international’. Masaryková was also instrumental in securing relief supplies to refugees from the Russian Civil War, including displaced children. She idealised rural society and contrasted it with the ‘enslaved’ lives of urban dwellers, but hoped to use the Red Cross as a platform for inculcating a sense of civic duty by securing volunteers from among the citizens of the new Czech state (Berglund, 2011). Again, the challenge of confronting displacement and its aftermath was bound up with questions around citizenship and the formation of a new state. The appeal to a sense of adventure figures prominently in the diary of Lucia Creighton who assisted refugees in Salonika and subsequently Monastir on behalf of the Serbian Relief Fund. She writes of ‘my camp’ and ‘polishing off refugees’, ‘mainly women and children and old men’, some of whom went out of their way to express their gratitude, whereas others said nothing. Her diary ends in October 1917 with an entry recording that her boat reached England on time allowing her to ‘arrive at Hampton Court just in time to accompany mother out to lunch at Wimbledon …’ This affirmed and restored what was to her a normal life after an adventure that was at times tedious but also exciting, and that gave her a critical grasp of the work being done in Serbia by other agencies such as the British Red Cross.8 Take the case of Elspeth Buist, who sent to Serbia immediately after the war to assist in the repatriation of Serb refugees. Buist wrote that she was ‘taught a new jazz or something – fancy having to come to Serbia to learn to jazz’. In addition to recording the pleasures of dancing and bathing, she was brought up short by what she sees of the remnants of war and the stories she is told. One day in late spring she ventured out for a walk – ‘you find trenches dug and the marks of old gun emplacements – time and again you come across trenches and all that sort of thing, now all grass grown with the sun shining and the flowers blowing and everything looking so peaceful that it’s difficult to imagine there ever could have been such a thing as a war’. But ‘in one village a woman had had her children hanged one by one in front of her but still she wouldn’t tell [the Bulgarian troops]’.9 Here, the evocation of pastoral joy is attached to an expression of feminine courage with which the female eye-witness to atrocity and the adventurous relief worker are simultaneously associated. Adventures of the kind I have described were connected to ideas about internationalism. This can be illustrated with reference to the life story of a refugee called Maria Cleugh who lived through both world wars in Europe. By the 1950s Maria was working as a warden for refugees at Gerston House, Storrington, Sussex. She fled Hungary to escape from the communist revolution launched by Bela Kun in 1919, and moved to Yugoslavia, thence to Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Poland, before arriving in England in 1934. She was fluent in five languages ‘and uses them all every day: ‘It was all wonderful experience, moving around like that. The finest thing for understanding other countries is to go and live with the people. At my school in Switzerland there were girls of 28 different nationalities in my class. Well, we just had to learn to get along together and understand one another’. This stood her in good stead for her current work: ‘She has learned to handle people who have become suspicious and resentful after years in forgotten camps’, with a particular interest in Hungarian refugees who arrived in Britain following the revolution of 1956. Whether she thought these new refugees found ‘moving around [a] wonderful experience’ is not recorded.10

8 Diary of Miss Lucia Creighton, entry for 19 October 1917, Imperial War Museum (IWM), 92/22/1. 9 Diary of Elspeth Buist, entries for 23 March and 30 May 1919, IWM, 84/1/1. 10 Her life was briefly reported in the Worthing Herald, 12 February 1960, from the Joan Strange scrapbooks, Add. Mss. 51957.

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Women relief workers were heard and seen within a framework that offered subversive possibilities. This was not immediately apparent. Public recognition of their contribution to the cause of refugee relief invariably mentioned their feminine attributes. Thus the appointment of Agnes (‘Craig’) McGeachy as UNRRA’s Director of Welfare in 1944 noted her professional qualifications but insisted on her modesty and courtesy – a ‘completely feminine woman with a man’s grasp of international affairs, she loves to make a home … she is firmly built, with a good, wide forehead, candid eyes, a pretty smile’. Yet this sugary and determinedly gendered encomium was amplified by the statement that she was ‘a deeply cultivated person and a good European … a citizen of the world’, who set a good example to men and women alike.11 Likewise a newspaper sketch of Mollie Rule, who served as a senior resettlement officer for the World Council of Churches in Greece in 1960, praised her for having ‘has dealt with more refugees than any other woman, anywhere’. Her work took her from Rhodesia to Tanganyika and then the Philippines, where she assisted victims of tornadoes’. In 1956 the WCC sent her to Yugoslavia to support Hungarian refugees. In the course of the interview she lamented the recurrent flow of refugees (‘I see no end to it’) but affirmed the benefit of long years of experience in resettling refugees: ‘You can’t learn it all from books’. At the end of the profile, Mollie’s busy life was reaffirmed, along with her ability to maintain a peripatetic existence, drawing upon her knowledge of several foreign languages. While ‘home is still Central Africa’, she enjoyed holidaying in London where she was able to buy her favourite shoes.12 These profiles encapsulated a number of points: about the life of the dedicated, adventurous and qualified relief worker, whose effectiveness was believed to have something to do with a ‘feminine touch’ that in Mollie’s case found expression in the pleasures of consumption. Equally, however, these odysseys and the deployment of professional expertise went hand in hand with an exemplary cosmopolitan consciousness that was manifested not only in new sites of population displacement but also in new institutional forums such as inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations. Concluding remarks I have spoken about some key sites of crisis in order to see how gender and displacement were connected – how ‘being refugee’ opened up debates, anxieties and expectations concerning men and women, the stability and instability of households, and the responsibilities of relief workers including the configuration of international networks of relief. I have said very little about incarceration, about the refugee camp as a place of danger, subjection, but also as a site of possibilities for self-expression and cultural and political mobilisation. Certainly the findings of feminist geographers such as Jennifer Hyndman are relevant to some of the camps for Armenian refugees in the 1920s and for DPs after 1945 (Hyndman, 2000), but the refugee camp only really came into its own in the second half of the twentieth century, in sites in and beyond Europe. I don’t want to be misunderstood: population displacement could and did have catastrophic consequences. The extensive literature in refugee studies discusses the articulation of ‘women at risk’, now a familiar term in the corridors of UNHCR. We know that UNHCR staffers now expect women asylum seekers to present themselves for interview with this in mind (Kneebone, 2005; Sandvik, 2009). The idea of victimhood retains considerable power. But it is one-dimensional. Hyndman rightly points out that we should allow for contingent factors in displacement rather than presume a fixed set of motives and outcomes. This

11 Undated interview by Joan Stockwood, LAC, Agnes McGeachy and Erwin Schuller Papers, Fonds R9369, Vol. 3, file 2, UNRRA-Welfare Division. 12 Newspaper cutting dated 4 April 1960, from the Joan Strange scrapbooks, as above, Add. Mss. 51959.

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requires us to challenge both the category and the popular presumption of refugees’ incapacity – as uprooted flotsam and jetsam, at the mercy of unstoppable forces, in which refugee women in particular are portrayed as incapacitated and vulnerable. The consequence has been to advertise the hallmarks of failure, the inability of refugees to prevent their displacement and to care for themselves, along with the narrative of rescue. This failure is gendered in various ways, and by no means always as feminine incapacity. Think of the portrayal of masculine weakness in failing to prevent violence and displacement. So we need to register ideas of loss without losing sight of its multiple implications for a gendered history of displacement and relief. To focus entirely on the havoc wrought by population displacement is thus to overlook other issues, including the resourcefulness of refugee women and of relief workers. Displacement was about negotiation and re-negotiation in specific contexts. I have said something about contemporary ideas of resolving the crisis of wartime displacement, such as holding out the possibility that the gendered refugee belonged to ‘the nation’. When we think of the powerful expressions of patriotism in the imploding Russian Empire, for example, it is apparent that gender yielded to ethnicity as a device for mobilising refugees. Among Armenian refugees, the situation was somewhat different: here, gender, ethnicity, age and religion were closely intertwined in representations of suffering and rescue, turning them into hyper-historicised figures. In the post-1945 refugee crisis, the imperatives of Cold War tended to crystallise the male refugee or DP, a victim of Nazi terror and a potential victim of Soviet totalitarianism. But this masculine figure was only obliquely connected in the official and the public mind with the classic exile of nineteenth-century imagination. To be sure, some refugees and DPs were construed as heroic escapees, but others were depicted as shocked and apathetic, more akin to the feminised refugee victim familiar to the inter-war generation. So there is neither a single dynamic nor a monochrome image. As Avtar Brah notes, ‘discourse about gender … will not exist in isolation from others, such as those signifying class, ‘race’, religion or generation’ (Brah, 1996: 185), to which I would add that these discourses should in turn be construed as claims that are embedded in concrete political struggles. Who speaks for ‘the refugee’? And who is this ‘refugee’ of whom ‘we’ speak? As a historian I approach these questions with a keen eye for context, fully expecting the answers to differ according to time and place. The project that I am proposing engages critically with the category of the refugee. Deploying the label is fraught with difficulties. Instead we need to problematize and historicize it, in ways that challenge prevailing assumptions and representation [Image 15]. Although refugees are never wholly invisible, their visibility emerges in particular ways. Throughout the twentieth century it is not necessary to dig very deep below the surface to see layers of disquiet about the impact of displacement on gender relations, and to find instances in which women in particular negotiated prejudice and affirmed a sense of self-worth. We need to connect the history of displacement with key processes – revolution, war, and state formation, as well as emerging histories of humanitarian relief work and of human rights. In doing so, questions of gender categorisation and configuration belong at the forefront of our enquiries about the thresholds of which Joan Scott spoke so eloquently, and how these thresholds are crossed.

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