Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill, N.C. and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 384 pp. $55.00 cloth; $24.95 paper; Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War. Chapel Hill, N.C. and London: University of

Abstract

The term “home front,” as distinct from “war front,” is so familiar today that we tend to forget that the concept is less than a century old, a coinage of the First World War. Ironically, it was the very collapse of the familiar boundaries between military and civil sectors of society that prompted the invention of a term that purported to differentiate clearly between the “battle front” and the “domestic front.” In a war in which all sectors of society were directly or indirectly affected by the military conflict, the distinction between the actual combatants on the front lines and their fellow citizens in the factories, on the farms, and in the shops becomes, at times, difficult to determine. The novelty of appending the modifier “home” or “domestic” to the military term “front” captures the essence of “total war.” The First World War was fought not only in the trenches of northeastern France, but in the urban bread lines and the munitions factories, and in every town subjected to the aerial bombardments that literally demolished any real distinction between military and civilian life.