Role in World War I Propaganda
In the months and years following Cavell's death, countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, images, and books publicised her story. She became an iconic propaganda figure for military recruitment in Britain to help increase favourable sentiment towards the Allies in the United States. She was a popular icon because of her sex, her nursing profession, and her apparently heroic approach to death. Her execution was represented as an act of German barbarism and moral depravity.
News reports shortly following Cavell's execution were found to be only true in part. Even the American Journal of Nursing repeated the fictional account of Cavell's execution in which she fainted and fell because of her refusal to wear a blindfold in front of the firing squad. Allegedly, while she lay unconscious, the German commanding officer shot her dead with a revolver. Numerous accounts like these stimulated international outrage and general anti-German sentiments.
Along with the invasion of Belgium, and the sinking of the Lusitania, Cavell's execution was widely publicised in both Britain and North America by Wellington House, the British War Propaganda Bureau.
Because of the British government's decision to use Cavell's story as propaganda, she became the most prominent British female casualty of World War I. The combination of heroic appeal and a resonant atrocity-story narrative made Cavell's case one of the most effective in British propaganda of World War I, as well as a factor in enduring post-war anti-German sentiment.
Read more about this topic: Edith Cavell
Famous quotes containing the words role, world, war and/or propaganda:
“The role of the stepmother is the most difficult of all, because you can’t ever just be. You’re constantly being tested—by the children, the neighbors, your husband, the relatives, old friends who knew the children’s parents in their first marriage, and by yourself.”
—Anonymous Stepparent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)
“What time has been wasted during man’s destiny in the struggle to decide what man’s next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
“Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)