The unquiet homefront

Abstract

Catholic women and children experienced both positive and negative changes in their traditional roles during the war. Massive historiographical shifts in social and cultural histories of the First World War have demonstrated women's fundamental importance during the conflict. The process of total war was already dramatically reordering pre-war conceptions of gender roles, creating a fundamental tension between traditional images and new expectations for both men and women in Central Europe. The war saw attempts both to challenge gender roles and to restore order. Even in progressive nations like Weimar Germany and the United States where women gained the right to vote comparatively early as a direct result of the war, there was often a wide gap between the rhetoric and the practical reality of women's roles in the new social orders. As Erika Kuhlman has argued in a path-breaking transnational study, new public focus on human rights and equality did not correct unequal imbalances in gender relations. Through discourses on motherhood and female virtue, women were active agents in a process whereby “nations reinforced traditional, patriarchal relationships among men and women (in which masculinity remained privileged and femininity continued to be valued) by shunting women back to traditional female employment and honoring women as mothers (and fallen soldiers as heroes).” While new generations of scholarship have blurred boundaries between home front and battlefront, women's religious experience of the war, especially in defeated Central Europe, remains a comparatively unexplored aspect of the cultural history of the war. The historiography of gender in the Habsburg monarchy during the war, long neglected in comparison to other combatant states, has seen recent advances. As Christa Hoammerle has recently argued, multifaceted conceptions of gender reflect the all-encompassing social relations of the drive toward total war, thus illuminating changing identities during periods of immense upheaval and reform.