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Okay, this is what I've just blogged:
I personally found it a bit disappointing, but I think that's my prejudices coming to the fore. They've certainly got a lot of stuff on display, though a costume belonging to Catherine the Great hadn't yet arrived. Included in the price of the exhibition is one of those phone things which you dial and hear short tracks about some of the exhibits, such as pictures of women who ran off to fight in the American Civil War, a copy of the only surviving wax cylinder recording of Florence Nightingale as a very old woman, war recollections from all sides and more up-to-date things too.
I suppose that as it is the Imperial War Museum it's to be expected that the exhibition would concentrate on WW1 and 2, most of the space was given to two large rooms full of exhibitions, posters, dummys wearing clothes from those periods. I was personally more interested in everything else, the small cabinet in which Florence Nightingale's uniform fought for space with exhibits to do with Mary Seacole, a black nurse who, when turned down by Nightingale went closer to the frontline of the Crimean war to give what medical aid she could to the injured and dying, or the exhibits of the suffragettes. Irritatingly the room after the end of WW2, the liberation of the concetration camps and the bombing of Hiroshima was for everything else since, all conflict up to the Falklands represented by a handful of photo's on the bare wall, then we had a female war reporters kit from that campaign, and the letter Ronald Reagan sent Maggie Thatcher when he left office, thanking her for her help. There seemed to be a shortage of material for the post WW2 era, so we had a cabinet of dummies wearing camoflage crop tops, showing how fashion has been influenced by war chic, then some mention given to anti-war demonstrations and womens groups such as the one at Greenham Common. It all looked as if it was thrown together in a rather haphazard manner, there was a photo of Leila Khaled on a wall, but on dialing the number next to it I heard a BBC report of the first female suicide bombing in Israel from a short time ago.
The only continuity was that of the calender, the American civil war girls were next to a large portrait of Queen Victoria, who was there it seemed only because she was wearing a military uniform in her portrait. Next to her nurses Nightingale and Seacole, then the suffragettes, then Mata Hari and the first war. Perhaps a themed approach along the lines of direct involvement in war and supporting industries might have helped cover the shortages in the collection, though that itself might have introduced different incoherences in the collection.
If you don't mind the concentration on the Great Wars or you have a misconception that wars until recently were just for the boys then this exhibition will be an eye-opener. |
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