Melissa Martinez
HST 202
Dr. Yang
Section 03
Women and World War One
Over the past century the roles and expectations of women has changed drastically nationwide. It was the event of the Great War that sparked the change in the roles of women across the world. Before World War one woman were judged by their beauty rather than by their abilities and expected to perform the usual domestic duties that are still stereo-typical expectations of women today. These duties included cooking, cleaning, producing children, taking care of the children, mending clothing for the whole family and taking care of the husband when he came home from work.
When it came to the relationship between a husband and wife in the early 1900’s, a woman was always expected to be submissive and obedient of her husband. He would be the only one working while the wife had no job and was at home all day. When the man came home from work his wife was expected the have the house clean with dinner on the table, if these duties were not fulfilled the women was said to be lazy or giving a poor reputation to her family. Before the out break of the Great War many women would never even consider fighting in a war, this was because a woman that did any sort of work that was considered “manly” or “men’s work” was considered by her peers to be unfeminine.
After the War began and wave after wave of male troops were sent into battle, the women were left to the duties that men left behind. If a family lived on a farm she was expected the pick up the labor that her husband left, women were also expected to go work in the factories their husbands had worked in. When the Great War broke out, not only did female numbers increase in common lines of work, but as one newspaper stated, “There has been a sudden influx of women into such unusual occupations”. Certain jobs became more in demand at the time of war, and women had to fill the positions; an example is the time between 1917 and 1918 when telegraphers were in high demand, every potential telegrapher had to learn the different codes, it was said that the women were better than the men when it came to memorizing the different codes. Many jobs during the period of time requested female workers specifically because they felt women were better workers and more dependable when it came certain occupations rather than men. About 1 million mostly lower-class women worked in munitions jobs. They were called “munitionettes” or “Tommy’s sister.” Unlike nurses, the munitions workers could not be antiwar since their work directly contributed to the fighting. In 1918, women in Scotland began working at a shell factory raised money and bought a warplane for the air force. However, their main motivation was financial, contrary to the popular belief that it was patriotic. The women found the wages “at first livable and later lucrative.” Compared with domestic work, war work “offered escape from jobs of badly paid drudgery.” However, although they earned more than they would have doing women’s work, the women received nowhere near the fortunes they had been led to expect when deciding to take war work. But those women who were patriotic enough kept their jobs to continue supporting the men fighting in the war. As far as actually fighting in the battle field, women enlisted in the US Navy, mostly doing clerical work and were the first women in US history to be admitted to full military rank and status. The Army hired women nurses and telephone operators to work overseas, but as civilian employees in uniform. Plans for women’s auxiliary corps was not successful, plans for commissioning women doctors in the Medical Corps was also unsuccessful. The end of the war brought an end to proposals to enlist women in the Army
Even though many women were in high demand for industries where previously men were dominant, long-established “feminine” jobs were still common during the war. If there was a women who did not want to perform a “masculine job” there was always large listings in local newspapers for even more of the traditional women’s jobs, ads for these jobs would have criteria such as “very good appearance, whose only support has gone to war and would like some light work to help out” or “Reliable neat school girl to assist general housework, nice home”. Whether a woman preferred to think outside of the typical housewife mentality, or if she decided to stick to what she already knew and was used to, all the women in the United States at the time had in common was that they were trying to compensate for the absence of their male family members and keep the country running smoothly.
Though it seems the women of the Great War Era had a lot to compensate for, organizations were formed to aid the women in their time of need. Organizations such as the Red Cross, Patriotic League, and YWCA made efforts in supporting wartime hardships that the nation might face. The Red Cross organized non-professional women’s program to aid in relief work. To help the war effort, many women joined the Red Cross as nurses. While they were in the Red Cross, they rolled bandages, knitted socks, and worked in military hospitals. Most of the women were wives and mothers of soldiers of all classes. The Red Cross war council also created a women’s bureau, which appointed a national advisory committee of women that made an effort to recruit every available woman in the campaign to make adequate funds and supplies. In addition to performing medical duties, women helped the war by trying to recruit men who had not yet joined the war; the women would do this by almost taunting the men by calling them cowards and making public speeches saying that they are being unpatriotic by not supporting their country in the war by fighting. The Patriotic League also organized girls for wartime activities, a branch of the Patriotic League, the National Organization for Girls, which was active in social service work and war services. Its purpose was to organize the group of girls which wanted to support their country during its time at war; although they were not equipped with guns and ammunition they had their “patriotic sprit”. Then there was The Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), which believed it was absolutely necessary to begin training young women to take the place of men during the war time. Which lead to further advancement in the development of women’s work and was strengthened by the withdrawal of millions of men from the American industry.
Before the Great War women had made numerous attempts to gain the right to vote. However, due to the usual outlook of women being weak and unable to handle things like men did, they were not given suffrage until the Great War ended. Because women had to take over so much of the men’s responsibilities during the war, they proved to society that they could do more than just be an attentive housewife that never left the home. The Women’s Suffrage movement was very popular, Women’s Suffrage is the right of a woman to share on equal terms with men the same political privileges afforded by representative government and more specifically the right to vote in political elections and referendums. Middle-class women were becoming increasingly well educated and in touch with current events, they found it absurd that they could not vote, particularly when newly arrived immigrant men, often less well educated than themselves, enjoyed this right. The women’s suffrage movement’s shining moment was on January 10, 1918, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution was passed into law, which granted “The Right of Women Citizens to Vote.” This amendment was only the very beginning of the improvement of the social status of women all over the world.
However there was a negative effect on the treatment of women as a direct result of the Great War. Due to the long periods of time that the men were away from their wives or other female partners, some men of some armies decided to rape women. Mostly the women that were aiding the military either as nurses, seamstresses, clothing washers, or any other female duty were the targets of the men. Up until recently, wartime rape often was seen as either merely accidental or and incidental. Either the act by an individual soldier committed in the heat of the moment or, on the other hand, as so common as to make it almost universal. The explanations were limited: the urge to rape was assumed to be of a sexual nature (soldiers have to "do without" for prolonged periods of time and have "urges") or to be a form of "life affirmation" in the face of death. Unfortunately women did not seriously address this crime until the late 1970’s. However when women did finally step up to put an end to this crime feminists proposed a new kind of analysis of rape as a violent crime by men that exerts power over women, wartime rape became less easy to dismiss as either too innocuous or too historically universal to warrant further inquiry. Since the 1990s in particular, in the wake of mass rapes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, great strides have been made in having the scale and severity of rape during wartime acknowledged as a unique and separate crime in war, in defining the harm done by wartime rape in terms of gender violence, and in finding ways to prosecute this act as a war crime, as a form of genocide, or as both. Some women interpreted wartime rape as a crime done through hatred either towards the female gender, race of the woman, or ethnicity of the woman; a man from one side of the war would rape a woman from the opposing side in order to feel he has done a wrong against the opposing side. Although there were different opinions on the subject of wartime rape, most women could agree it was a violation to women everywhere; the most important opinions were those of feminist law scholars and female activists who heavily influenced the fight against this defamation to women all over the world.
When the war ended it seemed that the reign of independent women had come to an end, most of the women were fired from their non-traditional jobs and picked up their domestic duties right where they left off. There were positive and negative affects on women as a result of world war one. The different points of view that developed among the female community divided women into groups, women that considered themselves feminists were the ones that took the place of the “men’s” jobs, and then there were the anti-feminists conservative women who stayed at home and maintained the housewife stereo-type. Another result of the war time was the numerous raping of women by soldiers. However many might argue that all the work exerted and struggle that the women of the Great War Era endured was well worth it, because women won one of the most important battles of all, the right to vote as stated by the 19th Amendment. The women who lived during the Great War will forever be remembered in history as the trailblazers for the women of today, where we have equal rights and equal opportunities.
