'Khaki Fever' and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War

Abstract

In late 1914 an epidemic of khaki fever broke out across Britain. Young women, it seemed, were so attracted to men in military uniform that they behaved in immodest and even dangerous ways. The excitement which reportedly gripped young women at the sight of troops in towns, cities and near army camps was identified as sexual, and named 'khaki fever'. The discourse on khaki fever conducted by military and police authorities, feminists, other reformers and social commentators showed the first world war as a climactic time of concern about young women's social and sexual behaviour. Protests over young women's behaviour echoed previous concerns but were exacerbated by the excited atmosphere of the war and, in turn, sparked a movement to control the sexual behaviour of young women which became a feature of life on the homefront. The measures taken to control khaki fever outlived the epidemic itself, which subsided as the war dragged grimly on and women's direct involvement in the war effort increased. An analysis of the discourse surrounding khaki fever reveals both continuities and disjunctions with the public debates on workingclass women and sexuality in preceding decades. As a body of historical scholarship demonstrates, the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries witnessed movements and legislation to control the sexuality of the poor in order to inculcate a middle-class moral order, to improve health and fitness, and to control VD and prostitution. Very young women had often been the special focus of these discussions, particularly in the storm over 'white slavery', the believed abduction of English girls into continental prostitution, from the 1880s (the 'Maiden Tribute' scandal) through to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912.' In