The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Dorothea Browder The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 340. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3121-9.) Lynn Dumenil has written an indispensable study of U.S. women's experiences and efforts during World War I based on extensive secondary literature and primary sources. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I covers political activism, home front mobilization, war service abroad, wage earners, and visual representations in popular culture. Skillfully interweaving social, political, and cultural histories, this study is likely to find a place on scholars' shelves and widespread use in their syllabi. Dumenil explores how the war and women activists shaped one another, arguing that the war both accelerated the development of the "new woman" of the 1910s and limited the extent of her liberation (p. 6). In an era when military service defined citizenship, activists invoked women's role as the "'second line of defense'" to support a range of goals (p. 1). The book explores the wartime experiences, activities, and rhetoric of activists and radical figures involved in movements for women's reform, racial justice, suffrage, labor, peace, child welfare, socialism, anarchism, civil defense, civil liberties, and more, along with government volunteers and bureaucrats, preparedness advocates, doctors and nurses, college students, social workers, war reporters, factory, clerical, railroad, and telephone workers, and movie stars, among others. The fascinating final chapter on visual representations concludes not only that "government propaganda portrayed white women's war contributions primarily as extensions of maternal and domestic duties" but also that popular culture as a whole, despite portrayals of ambitious, strong women, reflected the period's ambivalence (p. 254). It is an extraordinary accomplishment to be able to discuss all these subjects within the same book in a coherent and lively narrative. Dumenil explains that [End Page 500] middle-class and elite white women's groups "dominated the volunteer effort" and left the most extensive records, but she also focuses, to a lesser but substantial extent, on African American women's accomplishments (p. 59). The extraordinary level of detail and great number of groups discussed here justify this focus. Immigrant women and women of other ethnicities appear mostly as subjects for reform and occasionally in war work auxiliaries but rarely as political actors. Same-sex relationships are little covered, despite great shifts that were underway in that period. The book's coverage is impressive, though. A number of groups took advantage of wartime opportunities to advance prewar agendas, though their success was limited by male hostility, racist resistance, persistently gendered notions of citizenship, and reformers' own ambivalence about wage-earning women's physical abilities and family roles. Attuned to women's roles in the changing relationship between individual and state, the book includes not only white new women seeking rights and freedoms and black women seeking racial justice but also women participating in hypernationalism, vigilantism, and what historian Chris Capazzola has termed "the duty of hatred" (Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen [New York, 2007], 185). Information about such women is woven throughout several parts of the book and extends into the epilogue, forging links to the recent upsurge in scholarship on right-wing and white supremacist women in the Ku Klux Klan and other 1920s movements. The book's well-chosen illustrations include Half-Century Magazine's striking March 1917 cover of an elegant black woman draped in the American flag as Lady Liberty. The illustration's caption, "Maid in America," simultaneously drew attention to black women's occupational segregation even during a wartime labor crisis, defended their sexual virtue, and emphasized African Americans' citizenship. Black women led responses to racial violence and discrimination, lobbied for war work resources for black communities, publicized black women's economic contributions, and advanced civil rights arguments based on wartime service and democratic ideals. "Though black women hoped that war service might prove a path to equal citizenship," Dumenil observes, "they were repeatedly denied opportunities to demonstrate their patriotism...