Active Citizenship: The Wartime "New Woman"

Abstract

Active Citizenship:The Wartime "New Woman" Sarah Parry Myers (bio) Elizabeth Cobbs. The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 370 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Lynn Dumenil. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 340 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. As wars inevitably disrupt cultures, landscapes, and societies, they leave gender roles in a state of fluidity and redefinition, leading scholars to debate the long-term consequences. Historians Lynn Dumenil and Elizabeth Cobbs have complicated the prior historiographical narrative of continuity versus change in women's wartime lives in different and intriguing ways. For Cobbs, women and African Americans who served during World War I "added momentum to the forward movement" of activism and change (p. 304), while Dumenil contends that the war did not change women's lives extensively or permanently. Building on works including Susan R. Grayzel's Women and the First World War (2016) and Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), as well as Kimberly Jensen's Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (2008), Dumenil and Cobbs argue that women joined the military and war efforts to achieve personal goals and full citizenship. They fulfill historian Andrew J. Huebner's 2017 call for more studies of "how the war affected ideas about gender roles among ordinary people from different classes, regions, races, and ethnicities."1 Together, they explore themes of activism, reform, and citizenship, while unveiling the juxtaposition of women's roles as protectors and the media's image of them as the protected. In both studies, women actively exercise their own citizenship, although full equality is not achieved by the war's conclusion. Extensive in scope, Dumenil's The Second Line of Defense is a deeply researched and comprehensive examination of women's history during World War I, while Cobbs offers an in-depth case study of the female Signal Corps officers briefly mentioned in Dumenil's book. The Hello Girls reads almost like a novel, which is unsurprising given Cobbs's background as a prolific author [End Page 417] of both academic and popular press books. Her work is accessible to a broad audience—from undergraduate courses to general readers—and it immerses its audience in the atmosphere of the war and life for those in Pershing's Services of Supply overseas. By contrast, The Second Line of Defense is ideal for academic audiences and will engage historians of gender and war as well as serious scholars of the early decades of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Cobbs places the first women soldiers in the historical context of World War I, giving a sense of the experience of the Signal Corps operators overseas and as military women and veterans, as well as the technological advancements, wartime mobilization, women's suffrage movement, and the overall trajectory of the war from Pershing's perspective. While the U.S. Navy enlisted women as yeomenettes, this story of the Signal Corps is largely forgotten in the popular memory of the war. Her study of the Hello Girls (a title Stars and Stripes gave the operators) has ramifications for historians of military, diplomatic, and gender history. For example, she incorporates the ways the Hello Girls were instrumental in battles of the Marne and the Meuse-Argonne Offense. Cobbs contends that the experience of the female operators is "a microcosm of the ways that governments resisted sex-role change" in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (p. 4). Her work is also significant for its contribution to the emerging academic field of Veterans Studies in her analysis of the women's quest for veterans' status in the decades after the war. Dumenil disrupts previous traditional military and political history in its gendered approach to war. This has important implications for historians of war as Dumenil illuminates the First World War's impact on women, but also the effect American women had on the war. Asking why women support a war in response to traditional historians' research question of why soldiers fight, she argues that...