Gender and the First World War

Kenneth A. Loparo,O. Überegger,B. Bader-Zaar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137302205
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The First World War cannot be sufficiently documented and understood without considering the analytical category of gender. This exciting volume examines key issues in this area, including the 'home front' and battlefront, violence, pacifism, citizenship and emphasizes the relevance of gender within the expanding field of First World War Studies.

1

Introduction: Women’s and Gender History of the First World War – Topics, Concepts, Perspectives

Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader Zaar

The starting point of this volume was the observation that the upcoming centenary of 2014 has already evoked a wide range of memorial activities, book projects, conferences, and so on, so that a historiographical revisiting, re-discussing, and rewriting of the First World War can be expected in the near future. With this in mind, we are convinced that it is essential to incorporate gender issues from the very outset. Neither the societies of the belligerent nations between 1914 and 1918 nor the consequences of the First World War can be sufficiently documented and understood without considering the analytical category of gender. Historians of women and gender have impressively revealed this fact over the last decades,¹ albeit quite disparately for different European countries and national historiographies. Nevertheless, mainstream history of the First World War all too often still ignores a gender perspective, which seems to be especially true for the context of Eastern and south-eastern Europe. Motivated by international imbalances of current gender approaches to the history of the First World War and the consequential difficulty of taking up a transnational perspective, we organized a conference on ‘The First World War in a Gender Context – Topics and Perspectives’, held in Vienna from 29 September to 1 October 2011. This volume presents some of the revised and extended papers of that conference.

In most European countries, the total war of 1914–18 led to extensive support by women not only at the so-called ‘home front’ – which was mainly conceived as a woman’s sphere – but also in the battle zones. In addition and always corresponding to war-related constructions of womanhood, soldierly masculinity was idealized in a far more powerful way than ever before. This had implications for the hegemonic gender order and the structure of society in all belligerent nations. What is more, it also hampered pacifist efforts and activities, which were carried out by only a minority in those years. The transformation of the nation into a collective body of warriors in combat and the associated war mongering and ideological blindness were in fact international phenomena, as was the experience of bellicose violence which varied between different types including gender-differentiated forms.

Nevertheless, the question remains to what extent and under which representations those phenomena shaped the warring European societies, which themselves were fractured and riven by numerous divisions, high levels of inequalities, and conflicts. Furthermore, it can be asked what role the concepts of masculinities and femininities, as well as related subjectivities, played for mass mobilization, perseverance, protest, and resistance. And following on from this, in what way did the idea of citizenship, which was strongly embedded in the war discourses of the time, change? Which current research topics and theorizations can be outlined in these contexts? Is it possible to detect general phenomena and experiences transgressing the framework of national history? And finally, which are the main research desiderata; that is to say, which are the key topics and aspects worthwhile examining, in particular against the background of mainstream First World War history?

Far from answering all these questions, the chapters in this volume lead us towards a broader comparative perspective which will hopefully be fleshed out in the future. Their topics are of paramount significance for a women’s and gender history of the First World War: gender concepts of the relationship between front-line and ‘home front’, violence, pacifism, contemporary peace movements, and the issue of citizenship. These aspects are examined not only in regard to well-researched fields such as the Western Front and the war societies of Britain, France, and Germany, but also for Lithuania, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia – the latter two being part of the Habsburg Monarchy during the war – which are less familiar in the international context and far more marginalized.

‘Home front’ and front lines – femininities and masculinities

At an earlier stage of interest, historians primarily focused on those places where the presence of women became more apparent during the First World War; that is, at the so-called ‘home front’ (a term invented at the outbreak of war in 1914). The higher public visibility of women was a result of the fact that they joined the labour market to an unprecedented extent and took on previously more or less exclusively male professions and jobs. In addition, many of them, led by feminists and pre-war women’s associations, also entered the public sphere supporting their warring home nations. The state not only fostered these activities including a broad range of public relief and pro-war work, but also developed new paternalistic political concepts towards women and families in order to substitute for the fighting male breadwinner. For that purpose, some European states such as Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Britain, introduced allowances for soldiers’ wives and families and, at the same time, used them as disciplinary measures in order to control women.² In tension with these benefits, a new form of social policy aimed at supporting female employment, be it in the munitions industry, where working conditions and self-conceptions of women seem to have been quite different throughout Europe,³ albeit in offices and shops, public service, and so on. In this process, the war-related extension of female work had always been considered merely temporary. This was accompanied by a dense discursive ‘mobilization of femininity’, developed and propagated both by the women involved and by male-dominated politics and (visual) media. Therefore, despite the obvious contradictions to reality, discourses on motherhood and allegedly natural female roles and tasks such as devotion, self-abandonment, love, and care for others prevailed or were even reaffirmed during wartime, as research has revealed in detailed studies.⁴

On the other hand, historians’ attention has also been attracted by women who, more obviously, seem to have transgressed traditional gender roles and spaces in the opposite direction – towards the front lines. At least for the Western Front and the warring countries engaged here, namely France, Britain, Germany, and the United States, much has been written about mobilization, organization, and experiences of wartime nurses and the few female doctors, who very often were deployed directly in or just behind front areas. We also have a number of accounts of women who became well known in their own countries as car-drivers, spies, or resisters against occupation due to specific heroic events.⁵ In addition, there are some detailed studies on those women who, in a very concrete sense, were militarized by wearing uniforms and being integrated into military contexts. For instance, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps), which was founded by the British government in 1917, or its less known equivalents, the German ‘Etappenhelferinnen’ and the Austrian ‘weibliche Hilfskräfte der Armee im Felde’, established in the same year, supported combatant soldiers and released men for the trenches.⁶ Some women were even active soldiers, either officially acknowledged as in the case of Polish and Ukrainian women’s units in the Habsburg Army and the Russian Women’s ‘Battalion of Death’⁷ or in some individual cases when women cross-dressed and/or their presence at their husband’s or lover’s side was as well accepted as their fighting at the front lines.

To be sure, these are only a few examples of the complex relevance and dimensions of substantial female involvement in the war. However, they indicate that researchers inevitably had to address the contested issue of women’s ‘emancipation’ as a consequence of the war, not least because military history has successfully supported this view for a long time. Historians had to acknowledge that women’s war efforts did not cause a profound change of the hegemonic gender order or long-term improvements of the status of women, even though they might have been of great importance for the contemporaries themselves. Also, dichotomous and hierarchically constructed concepts of femininity and masculinity prevailed in the public sphere of the ‘home front’ and the theatres of war, where women faced being denounced and sexualized. These insights led historians to believe that the war did not, in fact, have any long-term implications on political gender transformations. On the contrary, its impact in this respect was, as Françoise Thébaud has argued, deeply conservative.⁸ By comparing both World Wars and their aftermath, other scholars developed the theory of the ‘double helix’. It combines more explicitly research findings on women’s commitment and advanced status in wartime societies with the category of masculinity, stating that soldierly masculinities were valued far more than women’s partially expanded roles. Thus, women always remained subordinated within the gender system. In the words of Margaret R. and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet, who proposed the concept of the ‘double helix’ with its intertwined strands in the late 1980s: ‘The female strand on the helix is opposed to the male strand, and position on the female strand is subordinate to position on the male strand. The image of the double helix allows us to see that, although the roles of men and women vary greatly from culture to culture, their relationship is in some sense constant.’⁹

Since then, research has often referred to this influential model. Many scholars have confirmed the permanent tendency of social and ideological reproductions of the ‘double helix’ in times of total war. The model seems to be particularly valid in regard to the contemporary construction of the front/‘home front’ dichotomy that was strongly advocated by state authorities and (male as well as female) agents of war propaganda by using – or rather misusing – a polarized set of gender concepts for the purpose of maintaining order. Here, gender was a weapon of modern warfare, putting immense moral pressure on men and women. However, this is only one side of the coin: These polarized gender concepts had their limitations, ambiguities, and disruptions, and ultimately led to the dissolution of the dichotomizing power system – not least because of the chaos of war. Following such insights, the model of the ‘double helix’ has also been criticized, above all for being too mechanistic and focusing exclusively on the discursive structure of the hegemonic gender order, thus underestimating experiences or agencies on the one hand, and ambivalences or ambiguities, as well as war-related ‘gender troubles’, on the other.

As this volume shows, these discussions are still ongoing and taking on more and more dimensions. They have particularly developed in recent years due to approaches based on personal narratives, such as war correspondence or diaries,¹⁰ and the by now dense work on the history of masculinities, which has emphasized an immense variety and fluidity in the category of masculinity.¹¹ In this respect, R. W. Connell’s ground-breaking work on masculinity needs to be mentioned. Connell has coined the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, which is defined as the most influential, most accepted, or most idealized variation of masculinity permanently re/constructed by the ruling alliance of economy, military, and politics. In contrast, other forms of masculinity are subordinated and marginalized (as well as all forms of femininity). Until today, Connell’s theoretical concept has been discussed, criticized, and further developed in a stimulating way – also regarding topics such as military and war.¹² As a consequence, and closely related to feminist theories of gender in general such as in Joan W. Scott’s influential approach, our view of gender as a category of power which establishes differences and hierarchies (also between men) has been sharpened.¹³ Similarly, and again rather implicitly than explicitly, current research on the ‘home front’ and the battle zones as well as on the dissolution of these spheres, also applies to the concept of gender performativity. This theoretical approach, introduced by J. Butler, focuses on the permanent – and therefore always shifting – re/construction of various forms of masculinity and femininity in given contexts, transgressing sexes and causing permanent ‘gender trouble’.¹⁴

Thus, by examining different aspects of the complex relationship between front line and ‘home front’, current research clearly demonstrates that these spheres were closely linked and intertwined in many ways. The chapters in this volume confirm such a view most strikingly. Matteo Ermacora, for instance, in Chapter 2 offers a micro-study of Italian women from the rural Friuli region near the Austrian–Italian front. These women were mobilized for work in factories, on farms, for relief activities, and as so-called portatrici who brought fresh supplies to the soldiers in the Alpine trenches. While we have evidence that many were proud of their support, local authorities and the Church also feared their potential ‘masculinization’ due to their war experience, and tried to control them in moral terms. Susan R. Grayzel, in Chapter 8 deconstructs the myth of a dichotomy between battle zone and ‘home front’ by using a different angle. She explains the dramatic dissolution of both spheres by pointing out the effects of modern war technology such as air raids and gas attacks against soldiers and civilians ‘at home’ alike. Grayzel analyses British and French gendered rhetoric on this issue by focusing on the widespread use of the shocking image of the ‘Baby in the Gas Mask’ and related representations of the maternal body.

The involvement of children as part of the mobilized ‘home front’ is emphasized in Manon Pignot’s chapter on girls and boys in wartime France. In Chapter 10, she describes how they were guided by teachers and parents to support both the soldiers in battle and their families at home. Propaganda discourse addressed these children in a clearly gendered fashion. However, their experiences were not exclusively shaped by gender, but also by categories such as family constellation, social background, and location as Pignot can show, particularly in regard to the children’s strained situation in the occupied territories. Claudia Siebrecht’s Chapter 9, on the figure of the female mourner in Germany, focuses on women who perceived the brutality of war in a different way. In her approach to this elusive topic, which again transgresses the front line/‘home front’ divide, Siebrecht not only draws on letters exchanged between soldiers and their families, but also on female art and literature. She shows that the propagated ideal of the proud mourner as part of a moral economy indeed prevailed in contemporary discourses and was often adopted. Yet hegemonic gender models for bereavement were, in fact, also undermined in various and more complex ways than the male–female dichotomy of the ‘double helix’ suggests.

Three further chapters of the volume give illuminating insights into gender shifts at the battle front. They furthermore underline the important fact that the front line cannot be equated with masculinity or with men in general. As Julia Köhne maintains in Chapter 5, the image of the soldier as a masculine hero and the concept of soldiering as a hegemonic ideal were fragile. She examines the visualizations of shell-shocked and mentally wounded men, the so called ‘war hysterics’, in scientific films produced by medical officers. Alison S. Fell, on the contrary, in Chapter 7 offers a case study of female war heroines who were active at or near the Western Front, namely Emilienne Moreau, Elsie Knocker, and Mairi Chisholm. Comparing the highly patriotic function of their wartime glorification in France and Britain with their post-war autobiographies, Fell reveals a more complex story. She points out that in general, the heroines’ status as war veteran...