Lynn Dumenil. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I; Elizabeth Cobbs. The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers.

Abstract

The United States may have been actively engaged in World War I for only nineteen months, but the conflict had an outsized effect on American life. When the nation entered the war in April 1917, industry partially converted to wartime production, stimulating demand for labor at the same time that immigration plummeted, and the American military increased the number of troops from less than two hundred thousand to almost three million. The demands of mobilization invigorated new and existing institutions that often linked support or opposition to the war effort to their own agendas. When President Woodrow Wilson framed the war as an effort to make the world safe for democracy, many others appropriated that language to demand a measure of democracy in their workplaces, ballot boxes, homes, and beyond. It is in this tumultuous and contingent moment that Lynn Dumenil and Elizabeth Cobbs deliberate not just on what American women did during the war, but on how their actions in this critical period shaped their own lives and society in the years and decades after the war.