Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Anita Anthony Vanorsdal (bio) The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 340. $39.95 cloth; $38.99 ebook) [End Page 272] As Americans observe the centennial of the Great War, historians are exposing more about the lives of various actors in wartime mobilization and participation. Lynn Dumenil's history of American women's experiences during World War I provides both field experts and an interested general public an engaging narrative that encapsulates the political and cultural contexts, working lives, and national service opportunities that shaped women's abilities to contribute to the war effort. Dumenil weaves a carefully crafted synthesis of secondary sources on women's progressivism, wartime opportunities, political motivations, and personal desires to underscore her new avenues of research on what the war meant for American women in particular. While her focus is on "the way in which diverse women used the war for their own agendas of expanding their opportunities, sometimes economic ones, sometimes political, sometimes personal," she arranges her chapters to expose how women sought opportunities while encountering challenges from employers and unions, military and government policies, and cultural components that hindered their activism (p. 4). Dumenil does an exemplary job at weaving her new research and theories with a wide variety of secondary sources and reveals the nuances in women's lives that both helped and hindered their wartime participation. She employs a variety of contemporaneous accounts from newspapers, magazines, personal correspondence, films, photographs, and wartime posters alongside official government documents and war committees' reports to reveal that women's hopes for substantial long-term changes in politics, military service, professional advancement, and work opportunities would not last long after the armistice in November 1918. Dumenil does emphasize, however, that although long-term advancement in women's opportunities was not accomplished, the war did help to accelerate changes for women that would impact later generations during the New Deal and in the women's movement of the 1970s. While Dumenil's epilogue does provide an excellent explanation of the First World War's short-term impact on American women, [End Page 273] she does not offer much information on the state and local laws passed during the war, such as mothers' pensions, food benefits, state-supported health care for women and children, which shaped many women's daily lives into the 1920s and 1930s. She does a careful job of delineating the differences among women by class and race (concentrating on white and black women's different experiences), but leaves this reader desiring more information on how age, regional location, access to technological improvements, and club membership may have also segregated women and altered their wartime opportunities. Dumenil does underscore, however, that class and race shaped women's wartime experiences and activism, and she presents a careful analysis of the different ways gender dynamics complicated class and race. While focusing her analysis on racial and class divisions during the war, she also explores some of the subcategories that splintered politically active women in the 1920s and uses these experiences to highlight the lack of long-term change. Dumenil does an excellent job of providing a nuanced understanding of women's wartime experiences, including the political divisions among women, traditional gender role issues that were under siege during the war, economic concerns and the expansion of women's work opportunities, women who served overseas as nurses and aid workers for Allied soldiers, and the depictions of wartime women in popular culture. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of wartime experiences of American women, Dumenil offers a more complete, and more complex, view of women's war experiences that also offers potential for further research by scholars who seek to understand the Great War's impact on Americans, especially American women. [End Page 274] Anita Anthony Vanorsdal ANITA ANTHONY VANORSDAL recently completed her PhD at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on the Woman's Committee for the Council of National Defense and women's social welfare activism during the Great War...
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Jun 29, 2018
Sharon Hubbs Wright 
Open Access