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Author: Sam Skow
Course: "Women in Modern European Societies"
Course Number: 80511
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Mona Siegel
1 Sexual Distortions and the First Modern War:
In 1914 modern industrial warfare exploded in Europe. Realized by a perfect storm of
Western industrialism, imperialism, militarism, and nationalism, the "Great War" rallied the
major powers of Europe to fight the first modern war. A devastating war of attrition, World War
I demanded total commitment from all its combatants. All men of fighting age were encouraged
and ultimately drafted to defend their mother countries. Women at home were likewise urged to
"do their bit" to keep their respective nations running. As men left their jobs at home to endure,
and inflict upon others, the horrors of industrial warfare, women supported the men at the front
and moved into the jobs these men had left behind. Because women worked a variety of new
jobs and enjoyed a social freedom unknown during peacetime, the war appeared to upend
Europe's patriarchal sexual order, emancipating women and emasculating men. But, however
divergent sexual divisions may have appeared during World War I, wartime divisions were
actually elaborations on traditional domestic spheres. Reshaped by nationalists for militaristic
purposes, male and female domestic roles, with men serving as protectors and women as
sustainers, were reconceived and reapplied to the nations at war.
World War I was set in motion by a combination of imperial, martial, economic, and
political factors. By 1914, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, England, Ottoman
Turkey, and Italy had negotiated Europe into its latest configuration of national boundaries.
These boundaries constituted triumphs for some, and tragic losses for others still. Most notably
between France and Germany, where open hostilities had barely cooled since the FrancoPrussian War less than five decades earlier, France's loss and Germany's gain of Alsace-Lorraine
resulted in mounting tension between these contiguous rivals. Tension in Europe was
exacerbated by colonialism abroad. Brutal colonial operations required a steady supply of ever
2 deadlier military technology. Over time, these steady supplies grew into mountainous stockpiles.
Committed to their own imperial expansion and suspicious of their expansionistic neighbors, the
imperial powers of Europe developed a system of alliances. The Triple Alliance, formed in 1882,
aligned Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; the Triple Entente, formed in 1906, united France,
Great Britain, and Russia. Following this crude geopolitical matrix, any conflict between any two
actors from opposing sides could quickly embroil all of Europe. The war's immediate catalyst—
the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on
June 28, 1914 by a Serbian nationalist—demonstrated the precariousness of pre-war peace in
Europe. Exactly one month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, igniting a chain
reaction of declarations from Russia, Germany, France, England, and, leaving the Alliance and
joining Entente Forces in May 1915, Italy. By August 1914, with Turkey signing the GermanOttoman Alliance, most of Europe was at war.
At the war's outset, European men and women largely rallied to the flag. Conceptually,
historian Françoise Thébaud notes, "People did not reject . . . war, because they were mentally
prepared for it."1 In disproportionate numbers to women, men favored the war and wrongly, but
persuasively, predicted its quick conclusion. Across Europe, most women, including many
feminists, patriotically applauded the gallant young men in uniform parading through their
nation's major cities. As this naive multinational first wave of men proudly marched off to the
front, women volunteered to support them and sustain the national economy at home. After
decades of internal political discord concerning the "woman question," the men and women of
industrial Europe had finally found a cause the majority could agree upon: the war. As Thébaud
explains, "It was a strange summer . . . that radically segregated the sexes while restoring . . . a
1
Françoise Thébaud, "The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division," In A History of Women in the
West, Volume V, edited by Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25. 3 modicum of sexual harmony."2
The sexual division of labor required to wage total warfare has produced historical
questions concerning men's emasculation and women's emancipation. During World War I,
millions of men were trapped in filthy, disease-ridden trenches, and massacred by their enemy's
ever-deadlier weaponry. Historians wonder if, as the war's punishing realities obliterated all
fantasies of chivalric warfare, men's masculinity was likewise assaulted. Objectified as warriors
and used as fodder, did men feel their sexual identities diminish? Conversely, compelled by
convention, necessity, and patriotism to replace men in the workforce, did women expand their
social identities?
Women mobilized to support men's efforts at the front and to fill labor absences at home.
Even in the war's earliest days during harvest season, when men left their work in the fields for
the front, women assumed these typically masculine jobs. As the war dragged on, nations had a
growing list of needs to be filled. In addition to continuing what declining work was left in light
industry, domestic service, and retail, women took up new jobs in munitions and other heavy
manufacturing, in heavy metal mining, and in clerical work. Moreover, as drivers, streetcar
conductors, and mechanics, women also assumed traditionally masculine roles in society. At the
front, women worked in auxiliary capacities, as transport drivers, cooks, and secretaries. Tending
to the constant influx of dead and dying men, they also served by the thousands as nurses and
ambulance drivers. Dramatized in Helen Zenna Smith's novel, Not So Quiet . . ., young, British
female ambulance drivers struggled under the harsh working conditions, cruel discipline, and
nightmarish carnage of war to "do their bit" for the nation.3 Women were critical, dynamic, and
visible participants in World War I.
1989).
2
3
Thébaud, 26. Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War (1930; repr., New York: The Feminist Press,
4 Women also helped raise pivotal public support for the war. Having excelled in decades
past at political organization, many feminists championed the new cause. Actively rallying
women to serve at the front, former suffragette firebrands, like Englishwoman Emmeline
Pankhurst, committed all their political energies to the pro-war campaign. Many feminists
understood the war as a means to attain suffrage, so they tied their political aspirations to
patriotic exuberance. An ideological schism between feminists, for and against the war, soon
arose. The split within the Pankhurst family poignantly represents this division. As Emmeline
and her daughter Christabel enlisted volunteers, her other daughter Sylvia agitated against the
war. The disobedient Pankhurst also worked to help the poor, a group most heavily taxed by the
fighting.4 A majority of women actively promoted the war, and, along with men in power,
ostracized a vocal minority for their dissent.
Pacifist dissent was a compelling illustration of women's emancipation. A vocal minority
of feminist pacifists decried the war for its senseless destruction. In April 1915, the Women's
Peace Congress met at The Hague to outline a plan to speed the war's end. In 1919, the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom convened in Zurich to map the postwar peace and
its provisions for women's rights. More radical feminists also criticized the war for its destructive
gender designations. Referring to the anonymous English pamphlet Militarism Versus Feminism,
historian Sandi E. Cooper succinctly states the feminist pacifists' position, that "[War] reified
domestic . . . [and] . . . international violence and perpetuated a brute male in dominant social
positions. Women become permanently subjected, forced to reproduce the species to make
war."5 Ironically, a compelling example of women's emancipation during World War I came
from this small minority of feminists who argued that war would always have the opposite
4
Sandi E. Cooper, "Women in War and Peace, "In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed.
Renate Bridenthal, et al (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 442. 5
Ibid., 444. 5 effect: the subjugation of women to violent male dominance.
Historians often identify men tortured by wartime violence and degradation as proof of
men's emasculation. Trench warfare—which juxtaposed intense scenes of efficient butchery with
excruciating periods of tense inactivity—physically and mentally shattered many men. Many
veterans left the battlefields physically disfigured to face social and economic rejection at home.
Many receiving countrymen were repulsed by returning soldiers' physical deformities. Viewed
through a militarist's lens, these walking testaments to war's miseries were bad for the war effort.
Society also regarded "shell shocked" veterans as less than men. Historian Joanna Bourke finds
in her research of British and Irish shell-shock victims that "Despite the unique frightfulness
associated with modern . . . warfare, it was widely accepted that the 'abnormal' men were those . .
. repelled by wartime violence. These men had to be cured: that is, they had to rediscover their
'natural', masculine bellicosity."6 Shell-shocked veterans were disproportionately composed of
soldiers who had failed to kill anyone, a failure as men in war's imposed sexual order.7 Though
these victims of war likely felt emasculated as they were subjected to "treatment" by government
doctors who regarded them as cowards and lunatics, Bourke reminds her readers, "The emphasis
on emotional breakdown and psychiatric illness has obscured the fact that most men coped
remarkably well with the demands being made upon them in wartime."8 This tragic minority of
emasculated men does not prove men's overall emasculation.
Concurring with pacifist feminists, war is the ultimate expression of patriarchy. Though
World War I was no exception, the ways in which combatants reassembled gender designations
to successfully wage it were exceptional. Nations drew upon earlier conceptions of separate
sexual domestic spheres, with women responsible for the health and productivity of the
6
Joanna Bourke, "Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of 'Shell-shocked' Men in
Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39," Journal of Contemporary History vol. 35, no. 1 (2000): 59. 7
Ibid., 58. 8
Ibid., 57. 6 household and men responsible for its strength and defense. Compelled by the military and
economic necessities of total warfare, they expanded the concept of the home to the nation and
committed their men and women accordingly to new, but similar, sexual responsibilities. At war,
men fought and women worked. Françoise Thébaud notes that, during "the Great War," "Gender
. . . emerge[d] as an organizing principle of wartime policy, . . . a veritable weapon of war. . . ."
but, like any weapon of war, this sexual arrangement was not intended for peacetime.9
Even during the so-called emancipating years of wartime, women's subjugation was
never far from view. Economically, women were still paid far less than men. In Italy, women
earned a third of what their male countrymen did, and in Germany, lacking workplace
protections, women worked longer hours for less pay.10 Even women's historical advances into
the military were of questionable benefit. Women in the military—serving in the British
Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the Russian "Women's Death Battalion," the Serbian
army, and, eventually, in French military-related posts—often faced suspicious, even outraged,
societies. They were criticized, as Thébaud notes, of "denying their sex by 'aping' men in a
tasteless parody," and suspected of "immoral if not homosexual proclivities."11 In fact, the
Russian Women's Death Battalion's acknowledged military function was to shame deserting
men. Whether working at the front or at home, women, Cooper notes, "were exhorted never to
forget their primary obligation—the replacement of the population, even if it might mean bearing
a child out of wedlock or . . . from rape."12 Whether working at the front or at home, despite their
advances, women essentially remained subordinate to men during and after the war.
Europeans envisioned the post-war peace as a "return to normalcy." For women this
meant relinquishing their jobs to men and resuming their domestic roles. As veterans returned
9
Thébaud, 24. Cooper, 445. 11
Thébaud, 34. 12
Cooper, 441. 10
7 from the front seeking employment, they quickly displaced female workers. Some unfortunate
women became targets of veterans' violence. Post-war nations urged women to return to their
homes and have more children. In pro-natalist France, the French government declared forms of
contraception illegal, outlawed abortions, and incentivized families to reproduce in greater
numbers. Similar movements arose in other former-warring nations as they all grimly assessed
their populations' massive reductions. Outnumbered, pacifist feminists nonetheless vocally
identified pro-natalist policies as a threat to women and peace, and, as Swedish activist Ellen
Key warned, women must "resolutely resist mass production of children" for future military
ends.13 All across post-war Europe, societies worked feverishly to impose conventional gender
norms, restore their populations, and promote an image of traditional womanhood.
Europeans during World War I and its immediate aftermath employed various competing
female symbols. In addition to women as mothers to their nations, women at war were also
glorified as nurses to war-ravaged men. Additionally, feminist and English professor Jane
Marcus notes, "Like a company of Wagnerian Valkyries . . . the ambulance drivers resembled
Amazon goddesses, carrying slain soldiers from the battlefield to glory in Valhalla or to hospitals
where they could recover to fight again. . . ."14 The goddess Victory was also regularly portrayed
in recruitment posters. But, after years of conventional female symbols, the 1920s saw the rise of
the symbolic "New Woman." Primarily a cosmopolitan phenomenon among urban women, the
flapper trend, depicted in magazines and movies, both thrilled and concerned societies. The
short-haired outspoken young woman who smoked cigarettes and fornicated freely was one more
worrisome change brought on by war. Exploiting their war-torn nations' weariness of social flux
and perceived disorder, ultranationalist politicians like Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito
13
Ellen Key, qtd. in Cooper, 446. 14
Jane Marcus, "Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War," Afterword in Not So Quiet . . .
Stepdaughters of War, by Helen Zenna Smith (1930; repr., New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), 244. 8 Mussolini in Italy used this symbolic New Woman to stoke fear and anger towards Western
culture and to promote their own anti-democratic agendas.
The years between the first and second World Wars saw some political advancements but
more setbacks for women. World War I also compelled the destruction of the German Reich, the
Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, the Russian Romanov Dynasty, and the Ottoman Empire.
Tellingly, the decision to grant women suffrage in the postwar states was not made along
Alliance-Entente lines. Interwar European nations that passed women's suffrage measures
included: Scandinavia, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, England, and the
Soviet Union. Elsewhere in Europe, in France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland, men continued
to deny women political rights. While some may rightly argue that some suffrage granted is
some progress made, others may credit these granted political rights to political necessity. Made
anxious by the Soviet Revolution, western capitalist nations tapped a previously unrealized
source of conservative votes to help defend against the spread of communism: women. As with
any issue of historical complexity, historians continue to debate the myriad causes, effects, and
meanings of postwar European women's suffrage.
But historians all agree that World War I cost more human lives than any war before it.
Statistics vary, but the total number killed in action lies at around ten million. An additional
twenty million veterans returned home disabled, and nine million more returned "seriously
disabled."15 The nations that mobilized their young came to refer to the survivors as the "Lost
Generation." Many men and women, disillusioned by the war, likewise grew disillusioned with
the cultures that waged it. Men, for whom the war had effectively destroyed all other realities,
and women, for many of whom it created newly expanded ones, recognized that return to pre 15
Mona Siegel, "Did World War I Emancipate Women (and Emasculate Men)?," lecture, CSUS,
Sacramento, CA, October 25, 2012. 9 war normalcy was impossible and even undesirable. The question of whether or not World War I
emancipated women and emasculated men is an open-ended one. Numerous examples illustrated
both these phenomena. War-ravaged men likely felt their manhood crushed beneath the
behemoth of industrial warfare, and competent working women likely felt somewhat freed by
sustaining their national-industrial war machines. But this sexual juxtaposition was a necessity of
war, one of many wartime trends Europeans would rather forget. Post-war nations sought a prewar reality, one which rebuilt the conventional social order. In Europe's interwar period, societies
largely restored the size and scope of men and women's traditional spheres, and a new emphasis
on women's reproduction took hold. Though presciently warned by pacifist feminists, Europe,
composed of nations harboring deeper animosities, deadlier weaponry, and more extreme
nationalism, propelled itself towards an even more destructive war. The "war to end all wars"
was only modern warfare's illustrious beginning.
10 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourke, Joanna. "Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: the Sufferings of 'Shell-shocked'
Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39." Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1
(2000): 57-69.
Cooper, Sandi E. "Women in War and Peace." In Becoming Visible: Women in European
History. Edited by Renate Bridenthal, et al., 439-460. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Marcus, Jane. "Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War." Afterword in Not So Quiet . .
. Stepdaughters of War, by Helen Zenna Smith. 1930. Reprint, New York: Feminist
Press, 1989.
Siegel, Mona. "Did World War I Emancipate Women (and Emasculate Men)?" Class Lecture.
CSUS. Sacramento, California. October 25, 2012.
Smith, Helen Zenna. Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War. 1930. Reprint, New York: Feminist
Press, 1989.
Thébaud, Françoise. "The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division." In A History of
Women in the West. Volume V, edited by Françoise Thébaud. 21-75. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994.
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