World War I had a profound impact on concepts of citizenship. Not only did hosts of people find themselves under new sovereignty at the end of the war, but many individuals had to contend with the experience of statelessness or redefinition as “enemy aliens” in countries where they had lived for decades. Patriotism, however, opened up new ways for previously disenfranchised groups to lay claim to the rights of citizenship and British women, as the following article shows, were particularly adept at drawing attention to their own war service to make a more general claim for that elusive signifier of liberal citizenship – the vote.
