Epilogue

The epilogue explores the aftermath of war in the 1920s. Emphasizing the diversity of American women, the epilogue notes the inability of white women to find common cause with black women activists as well as the growing strength of right wing conservative women who challenged reformers and feminists whom they viewed as Bolshevist sympathizers. The Epilogue also explores the continuing debate over the “new woman” as it emerged in the 1920s by examining women in the context of politics, work, and family. The contested new woman offers a clue to the limits to change as a result of World War I. However much some women staked a claim to political, social, and economic equality, they faced deeply rooted ideas about women’s primary role in the home as a talisman of social order. Both continuity and change, with modern and traditional notions of womanhood co-existing uneasily, mark the post-war decade.

Visual Representations of Women in Popular Culture

This chapter on popular culture visual representations of women focuses on posters and photographs, but primarily on film images of American women. Representations of traditional womanhood were quite evident in the war years, but so too were images of modern women, who while feminine, were also independent and resourceful. They appear in photographs in the workplace doing men’s work or in uniform marching in patriotic parades. In films, they spurred men to enlist and foiled the plots of enemy agents by extraordinary feats of physical daring and courage. Their agency offers a striking contrast to the notion of women as objects in need of masculine protection. These images stimulated the roiling debate in pre-war American over the “new woman” and contributed to a popular sense of the war being a dividing line that heralded the new woman of the postwar era.

Channeling Womanpower

This chapter examines women's voluntary associations' role in mobilization. It examining the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Association of Colored Women, and the American Red Cross, it analyzes the way in which women activists conjoined the war emergency to their own goals of staking their claim to full citizenship, and continuing their reform agendas begun in the Progressive reform era. As they did so, white women invoked “maternalism” and emphasized the instrumental role that women played in protecting the family. African American activists similarly focused on the centrality of women citizens, but did so in the specific context of racial uplift. Their engagement in meaningful war work encouraged them to view the war – over optimistically as it turned out – as an opportunity to achieve both long-standing reform goals and an enhanced role for women in public life.

Over There

Chapter three explores the experiences of the 25,000 American women who went to Europe during World War I. It illuminates important aspects of war mobilization, but also informs our understanding of the war years as a culmination of expanding freedoms for an emerging “new woman.” Women who went abroad included Red Cross workers and the Smith College Relief Unit, groups that focused on addressing the crisis faced by the displaced population of France. A second category - employees of the federal government - was comprised of U.S. Signal Corps telephone operators, clerical workers, and nurses. A third group included the Young Men's Christian Association women, who staffed “canteens” designed to improve soldier morale and deflect them from patronizing prostitutes. This group was the only one that included African American women. A final contingent consisted of the reporters and writers who were eager to see the war, as well as the Russian Revolution.

Women, Politics, and Protest

This chapter on American women and politics during World War I explores African American women’s wartime activism and efforts of such women as Nannie Burroughs, Madame C. J. Walker, and Ida Wells-Barnett to transcend barriers of race and gender. It examines pacifist (such as Jane Addams) and radical (such as Emma Goldman) women who resisted war as well as those who called for war "preparedness." Finally it compares the approach of the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Carrie Chapman Catt with that of Alice Paul's National Woman's Party in using the war effort to further the suffrage cause and women's equality.

Introduction

This introduction sets out the way in which the book explores women's wartime experiences in the context of politics and protest, home-front mobilization, service abroad, blue-collar and white-collar work, and popular culture representations. Challenging the notion that war brought transformative changes, it nonetheless emphasizes the way in which diverse women used the war for their own agendas of expanding their economic, political, and personal opportunities. In addition to assessing war's impact on the "new woman," the introduction addresses the impact of women's service and labor on mobilizing for a modern global war.

The Second Line of Defense

This chapter explores the extent to which sex segregated labor patterns broke down during the war, especially in the railroads and munitions sectors. It also discusses the Great Migration of African Americans and the opportunities – albeit limited – that factory war work provided African Americans who had customarily been relegated to domestic and farm labor work. World War I saw the first enlistment of women in the military where they served stateside in clerical work. Even women doing traditional women’s work during World War I– clerical work or the already feminized profession of social work – found expanded opportunities with government agencies such as the Woman's Branch of the Industrial Section of the Ordnance Department and the Railroad Administration's Women's Service Section. Despite these opportunities, the permanent gains for women’s occupational advance were limited and patterns of sex segregation re-emerged as men returned from war.