Making Spectaculars: Museums and How We Remember Gender in Wartime

[The author suggests] that we should be very careful to avoid the anachronism of ignoring the conscious process of making a spectacle of the war in the museum, the gallery or the exhibition, and how this might have influenced how we remember the participants later, when only the objects, not the living remain. The ‘Great War’, as it was already being called during the first atrocities of late 1914, was presented to the public using material objects from very early on, and these objects are often preserved in museum displays which have themselves become objects of academic study. War was primarily seen as men’s work during 1914–1918, and men’s activity. [Author]