Private loss, public mourning: motherhood, memory and grief in Australia during the inter-war years.

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which mothers who lost their sons in the First World War attempted to articulate a language of grief. This was being done when the distinctiveness of mothers' losses was being erased, when women were being marginalized in public commemoration and when notions of 'sacrifice' were being reworked to mean the sacrifice of men alone. At the heart of their campaign for recognition lay the paradox that while they upheld and sustained the memory of war, mothers' campaigns for remuneration revealed attempts by them to shape a politics of grief which the mythologies of war denied.