Women's Wartime Research Articles

The Unsung Propagandists

As the nation rallied its resources for wartime in 1942, the Office of War Information (OWI) assumed a pivotal role in disseminating information related to the war and aimed at mobilizing the American populace. Within the organizational framework of the OWI, a small cohort of pioneering women ascended to leadership positions, challenging prevailing gender norms and reconfiguring the narrative surrounding women's wartime engagement. Classified after the war’s end, their records are now part of the 7,112 boxes that encompass the totality of the OWI’s records, now housed in the National Archives. An exploration of the documents of these women, including correspondence, published work, and other internal records, paints the picture of their continuous participation and influence which resulted in some of the most visible domestic propaganda campaigns of the Second World War. Previous scholarship, while plentiful in the exploration of the domestic roles of women during the war, fails to acknowledge the directorship of these women in their efforts to rally national support for not just female recruitment, but other facets of wartime activity. Through an in-depth examination of archival materials collected from the OWI, this research seeks to contribute to a nuanced understanding of female contributions on the American home front.

“Not the mother type”: Exploding the Myth of Maternal Devotion in Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music

Second World War propaganda targeted women in conflicting ways, expecting them to contribute to the war effort while also upholding an idealized view of motherhood as essential to women's identities. This essay examines a fictional challenge to the wartime myth of maternal devotion, Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music (1946), in dialogue with historical discourse and documents, to argue for the power of fiction to highlight and challenge expectations surrounding women's private lives in times of national crisis. Laski dissects her protagonist's conflicted motivations and exposes her manipulations of wartime propaganda for her own gain. This dissection reveals a central paradox at the core of women's wartime experience: whether it be through motherhood, marriage, or adultery, women remain trapped by men's assumptions and expectations. Laski's complex characterization develops a critique of wartime rhetoric by invoking sympathy for an anti-heroine who passes judgment on her society's limited choices and prophetically points toward a potentially freer future for women.

The Global White Snake by Liang Luo

Reviewed by: The Global White Snake by Liang Luo An-Ru Chu THE GLOBAL WHITE SNAKE. By Liang Luo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 402 pp. Hardcover, $85.00; paperback, $39.95. Liang Luo's new book, The Global White Snake, examines the migration and transformation of the White Snake legends in Mainland China, Japan, Korea, the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. Luo asks: "How should we understand the seemingly endless regenerative powers of the White Snake legends? What does their pervasive and long-lasting popularity suggest?" (p. 6). Interweaving historical contexts and textual analyses in chronological order, Luo scrutinizes and compares artistic oeuvres of the legends in various forms, such as xiqu, plays, opera, feature-length films, animations, novels, and fashion videos. This book makes a valuable contribution to exploring the global genealogy of the White Snake legends, especially when there is a stark contrast between the wide popularity of the legends in East Asia and the scarcity of relevant scholarly studies in English. Chapter one introduces the main themes of the White Snake and the earliest versions of the legends in China. Luo deciphers the multi-directional transmigrations and reincarnations of the narrative, mainly through the lenses of gender and species, as well as media and politics. Luo traces the origin of the White Snake legends back to the ninth-century short story "Li Huang," and recognized the 1624 collection, Stories to Caution the World, compiled by Feng Menglong, as a fully established White Snake story. A summary of the White Snake framework is as follows: the male protagonist, Xu Xuan, comes across two beauties at West Lake: one dressed in white (Madame White), and one in green (Little Green). Xu is married to Madame White soon, but then Abbot Fahai discovers that the two women are transformed from a white snake and a green snake. After a series of chaotic incidents, Madame White is incarcerated under the Thunder Peak Pagoda by Fahai, and Xu becomes a monk. Taking the social, political, and cultural factors into account, Luo's book delves into the significant twists and turns this prototype has experienced. Chapters two and three describe the developments of the White Snake legends in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Chapter two begins with two Anglophone versions adapted by Woodbridge, and Cloud. Though not the primary focus, these two versions transformed the legends into a love story by adding details of the characters' motives and values in each of their translations. [End Page 414] The legends were central to the popular culture in Shanghai. Focusing on "newness," the Shanghai entertainment industry reimagined the legends through technical innovations on stage, the emergence of female performers on the male-dominated stage, and intellectual debates about the legends' superstitious narratives and vulgarizing trends. Chapter three investigates how the 1924 collapse of the Thunder Peak Pagoda, a real-life incident, prompted modern reinterpretations of this iconic landscape and thus popularized a paradigm shift of the legends from a male to a female-oriented perspective. Lu Xun's 1924 essay, viewing the pagoda as a feudal oppressive symbol and thus celebrating the liberation of the White Snake, was especially influential for the PRC government. Part two, including chapters four and five, probes into the retelling of the legends in an inter-Asian context during the Cold War. Chapter four analyzes three Japanese feature-length films. Ugetsu, a black-and-white film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1953, epitomizes Japanese aesthetic traditions while expressing concerns for women's wartime trauma. Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yoren), directed by Toyoda Shiro in 1956, was a color film adapted from Hayashi Fusao's 1948 novel. The Tale of the White Serpent (Hokujaden) in 1958, recognized as Asia's first full-length color animation, targeted children and families in Japan and other Asian regions, as the production company Toei Animation was deeply influenced by Disney. As Luo points out, these three films "reveal the importance of a mediacentered approach in examining the White Snake legends in postwar Japanese cinema" (p. 20). Chapter five covers the Korean director Shin Sang-ok...

Establishing Zion in the Heat of Battle

Establishing Zion in the Heat of Battle

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge

Reviewed by: Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 242 pp. $85 (cloth). In this fascinating and important work, Sara Egge recaptures the story of the upper midwestern fight over suffrage in the five decades prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Drawing on newspapers, archival sources, voluntary association records, and other materials, Egge takes readers on a deep dive into three counties that, over the period between 1870 and 1920, weighed the question of whether women should vote. She uses the histories of the suffrage debate in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota, to analyze midwestern political discourse surrounding not just suffrage but citizenship. In five succinct and well-argued chapters, Egge traces the five-decade trajectory of conversation surrounding suffrage. Her first chapter lays out the early histories of White settlement (at the expense of the Indigenous populations, she notes) and the meanings of community to settlers in the upper Midwest. Egge then describes, essentially, how women started behaving as citizens and participating in these communities in the decades prior to 1920. On the surface, Clay, Lyon, and Yankton women adhered to gender conventions while quietly defying them as they planned bazaars, worked in Ladies Aid Societies, and joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Egge argues that through such work as planning a bazaar, women were "recognized as loyal citizens intent on making their communities better" (52). That the women understood their work as actively subversive is not always clear, though Egge makes it very apparent that they knew better than to use such terms as "feminism." Even with this cautious approach, the story she tells is not one of linear progression towards the vote, but rather one of stops and starts, as voters defeated suffrage multiple times in the 1890s. In South Dakota, woman suffrage was defeated three times alone, leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to [End Page 79] denigrate the Midwest and leading Carrie Chapman Catt (herself Iowaborn) to blacklist the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. In part, Egge's book intends to rescue the region's reputation and restore the Midwest, especially its rural parts, to its proper place in the history of suffrage activism. Her third chapter in particular offers great comparisons of the counties, where enfranchisement efforts failed for varied reasons, as well as discussion of the lessons suffragists in each place learned from the losses. Two important takeaways were realizations that local leadership needed to disentangle discussion and debate over temperance and suffrage and that they needed to shed their more radical language of individual liberty in favor of a language of civic responsibility. Suffrage advocates worked on both, combining Progressive Era ideals of civic participation with their own desire to vote. World War I was a watershed, as women's wartime efforts and the rampant "anti-German hysteria" convinced Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota voters to reverse course and confirm suffrage for White, native-born women (151). Egge argues that success came, in perhaps large part, because of a narrowing of the definition of citizen to one focused on loyalty to community rather than on individual rights. This, coupled with nativist sentiment and the historical context of WWI (which "shattered the tolerance of ethnic diversity in the Midwest"), allowed White native-born women to secure the franchise (155). The idea that racism and nativism shaped both suffrage activism and passage is of course not new, but Egge adds nuance to discussion of nativist and anti-German sentiment as well as to the divisions between NAWSA and upper midwestern groups. In particular, she reminds readers that in the early days of German, Norwegian, and Swedish immigration to the upper Midwest, Yankee settlers were "grateful" as well as "wary"—and dependent upon the immigrants in their community. Importantly, Egge interrogates citizenship as much as suffrage, looking closely at "the complex political identities women built," their evolution over five decades, and the broader interaction between geographical and regional identity (2). Throughout her work, she reminds us that...

Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Nigerian Civil War Novels

Enajite E. Ojaruega discusses in her “Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Nigerian Civil War Novels” the agential roles women played during the Nigeria-Biafra war as reflected in selected fictional narratives. Female characters are generally impacted negatively by their individual and collective war-time experiences. However, there is another important aspect of women's war-time experiences that has largely been underplayed in most historical or literary accounts on war. Female agency recognizes this gender’s participatory roles during the conflict as they reconstruct their subjectivity in more beneficial ways in the unfolding circumstances of war. Women are depicted as being able to explore their womanhood and other available resources within diverse social, political and economic spheres to make a difference during the extremely traumatic period.

Gendered Identities in British Regions in Wartime: Women in Reserved Occupations in Glasgow and Clydeside in the Second World War

This article focuses on women working in reserved occupations in Glasgow and Clydeside during the Second World War, including their feelings of contribution to the war effort, self-fulfilment in work and, in some cases, dislike of work and lack of attachment to the war effort. The article also examines the extent to which wartime work represented continuity in the lives of working women in the region, and discusses the relationships of such women with men in their local communities, where social and cultural discourse was inextricably intertwined with the realities and discourses of day-to-day existence. One argument presented is that women's wartime work in Clydeside was representative of renegotiated relationships with the men in their communities rather than destabilising masculinity. The argument is put forward that, as well as the changes represented by war, the day-to-day life of women's immediate local vicinities and the uniquely industrial and working class background of Clydeside were enduring influences on their subjectivities and everyday behaviour. The article therefore adds to the historiography relating to life on the home front in the Second World War by exploring the subjectivities of reserved women in the context of the communities where they lived and worked.

How Men Valued Women's Work: Labour In and Outside the Home in Post-War Britain

AbstractThis article examines men's valuing of women's work in the post-1945 period. It considers men's perspectives on female labour in and outside the home in the context of women's wartime work, the increase in married women working and the greater involvement of men in family life. I argue that men saw their wives’ and partners’ work as of lesser value than their own, in various ways, even if the money women's paid work brought in could significantly improve living standards. This was true even in the most caring, loving relationships. The article employs a broad definition of value, considering the social and cultural value of work alongside its economic outcomes. It places subjective accounts from interviews within a wider cultural and political context and contributes a new perspective to post-war British historiography by focusing on both paid labour and domestic work, and the negotiation of value between men and women.

Active Citizenship: The Wartime "New Woman"

Active Citizenship:The Wartime "New Woman" Sarah Parry Myers (bio) Elizabeth Cobbs. The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 370 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Lynn Dumenil. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 340 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. As wars inevitably disrupt cultures, landscapes, and societies, they leave gender roles in a state of fluidity and redefinition, leading scholars to debate the long-term consequences. Historians Lynn Dumenil and Elizabeth Cobbs have complicated the prior historiographical narrative of continuity versus change in women's wartime lives in different and intriguing ways. For Cobbs, women and African Americans who served during World War I "added momentum to the forward movement" of activism and change (p. 304), while Dumenil contends that the war did not change women's lives extensively or permanently. Building on works including Susan R. Grayzel's Women and the First World War (2016) and Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), as well as Kimberly Jensen's Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (2008), Dumenil and Cobbs argue that women joined the military and war efforts to achieve personal goals and full citizenship. They fulfill historian Andrew J. Huebner's 2017 call for more studies of "how the war affected ideas about gender roles among ordinary people from different classes, regions, races, and ethnicities."1 Together, they explore themes of activism, reform, and citizenship, while unveiling the juxtaposition of women's roles as protectors and the media's image of them as the protected. In both studies, women actively exercise their own citizenship, although full equality is not achieved by the war's conclusion. Extensive in scope, Dumenil's The Second Line of Defense is a deeply researched and comprehensive examination of women's history during World War I, while Cobbs offers an in-depth case study of the female Signal Corps officers briefly mentioned in Dumenil's book. The Hello Girls reads almost like a novel, which is unsurprising given Cobbs's background as a prolific author [End Page 417] of both academic and popular press books. Her work is accessible to a broad audience—from undergraduate courses to general readers—and it immerses its audience in the atmosphere of the war and life for those in Pershing's Services of Supply overseas. By contrast, The Second Line of Defense is ideal for academic audiences and will engage historians of gender and war as well as serious scholars of the early decades of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Cobbs places the first women soldiers in the historical context of World War I, giving a sense of the experience of the Signal Corps operators overseas and as military women and veterans, as well as the technological advancements, wartime mobilization, women's suffrage movement, and the overall trajectory of the war from Pershing's perspective. While the U.S. Navy enlisted women as yeomenettes, this story of the Signal Corps is largely forgotten in the popular memory of the war. Her study of the Hello Girls (a title Stars and Stripes gave the operators) has ramifications for historians of military, diplomatic, and gender history. For example, she incorporates the ways the Hello Girls were instrumental in battles of the Marne and the Meuse-Argonne Offense. Cobbs contends that the experience of the female operators is "a microcosm of the ways that governments resisted sex-role change" in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (p. 4). Her work is also significant for its contribution to the emerging academic field of Veterans Studies in her analysis of the women's quest for veterans' status in the decades after the war. Dumenil disrupts previous traditional military and political history in its gendered approach to war. This has important implications for historians of war as Dumenil illuminates the First World War's impact on women, but also the effect American women had on the war. Asking why women support a war in response to traditional historians' research question of why soldiers fight, she argues that...

Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition by Aisling Swaine

Reviewed by: Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition by Aisling Swaine Jennifer Moore (bio) Aisling Swaine, Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition ( Cambridge University Press, 2018), ISBN 9781107514195, 321 Pages. In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on the subject of women, peace and security, calling "on all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict."1 The phenomenon of the mass rape of women in wartime has become a subject of increasingly intensified concern over the past two decades, expressed in diplomatic initiatives and judicial developments, notably war crimes and crimes against humanity convictions for rape and forced marriage handed down by international criminal tribunals.2 The [End Page 763] understanding that the systematic rape of women is a core methodology of contemporary armed conflict has become part of the popular imagination, reflected in journalistic portrayals of sexual violence in wartime, reinforced in reporting by humanitarian organizations, and buttressed in academic analysis.3 Acknowledging that rape is sometimes utilized as a "weapon of war"—where one militant organization seeks to terrorize an ethnic or sociopolitical community associated with another warring faction through a pattern of sexual violations of numerous women of that community—represents an important development in humanitarian action and scholarly inquiry. The phenomenon of mass rape in conflict has been witnessed, analyzed, investigated, and prosecuted in recent conflicts from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Colombia, among others.4 However, as Aisling Swaine instructs in her important book Conflict-Related Violence Against Women,5 "tactical" or "strategic rape" is but one important facet of the range of harms women experience in time of war, not to mention in peacetime. She cautions that the international community's concerted efforts to profile, prevent, and punish "conflict-time tactical sexualized violence"6 has had the unintended consequence of constructing a "monolithic rape identity"7 for women in wartime, with the result that "systemic public rape has been given more attention and credence than the violence that appears in women's everyday lives."8 Alongside her rejection of an impoverished encapsulation of women's wartime [End Page 764] identity as rape victims, Swaine points out a worrisome tendency among academics, the media, and others to promote "the 'othering' of violence in cultures which are perceived to have 'worse' or extraordinary violence," particularly in African countries, and including Liberia, a country she studies.9 Swaine points out that "the perception that one war is more barbaric than another may … have more to do with how wars are reported on and labeled than is readily admitted."10 With reference to her field research into recent conflicts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, Swaine highlights the connections between patriarchy, misogyny, the fear of women's power, and the multiple forms of violence that women experience across a great variety of cultures and societies. It is important, she notes, to address the more insidious forms of gender subordination that operate in a society, so that "despite the veneer of equality in a western democratic setting such as Northern Ireland, its patriarchy too is acknowledged."11 Swaine's treatment of "conflict-related violence against women" represents an important contribution to the canon of feminist scholarship on gender-based violence. Her insights emerge from qualitative research she conducted in three post-conflict countries encompassing Northern Ireland, Liberia, and TimorLeste. Wading into the fierce analytic currents of "public" versus "private" harms, she emphasizes the amorphous nature of the public and private realms through insights shared by the women she interviewed in her three field settings. Most significantly, she rejects the notion that so-called public violence against women in wartime should be our exclusive concern. Her research highlights that not all women who were sexually or otherwise assaulted in the conflicts she studies were attacked by unknown militants who used their vulnerable bodies as convenient mediums through which to repress their communities. Many women she interviewed were individually targeted and brutalized in intimate spaces by people they were related...

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

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...

The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs

Reviewed by: The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs Jill Frahm (bio) The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers. By Elizabeth Cobbs. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 370. $29.95 cloth) Elizabeth Cobbs's book, The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers, is a welcome addition to the literature on women's overseas service during World War I. Although other books, including Susan Zeiger's In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider's Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I, Lettie Gavin's Women in World War I: They Also Served and Lynn Dumenil's The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I include sections about the American telephone operators, The Hello Girls is the first book to devote a significant part of its narrative to their experiences. This is a very well-written, long overdue accounting of America's first women in combat. As Cobbs states in her introduction, "The Hello Girls explores how Americans mobilized for World War I, telephones transformed the United States, females joined the armed forces, suffragists fought for the vote, and women and men fought together for justice" (p. 7). In 1914, when the war began in Europe, the idea of women's suffrage was not widely accepted by political leaders in the United States, including President Woodrow Wilson. Among the objections to giving women the vote was their inability to serve their country in time of war. However, dependence on the telephone made the employment of American, bilingual female operators by the U.S. Army a necessity. Once in Europe, these women proved of immense value to Army operations; one group even served near the front at General Pershing's headquarters. At all levels, the operators impressed officers and men with their skill and professionalism. [End Page 552] Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Wilson shifted from being against woman suffrage to a supporter. Cobbs credits, in part, the heroic performance of American women in Europe for his transformation: "Wilson emphasize[d] two … reasons for his change of heart: international opinion and women's wartime service" (p. 119). Although the women's suffrage bill was defeated in 1918, with increasing support across the nation it finally made it through both houses of Congress and was ratified in 1920. Back in France, the operators received universal praise for their service, with many officers declaring them indispensable "uniformed women [who] performed beyond the call of duty" (p. 266). The operators began returning home shortly after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, with the last discharged on January 20, 1920. However, despite their excellent service, the operators were denied veteran's status and benefits. Led by Merle Egan Anderson and supported by almost all the officers with whom they had served, the operators fought for nearly 60 years until gaining recognition as veterans in 1977. Cobbs' very readable book draws on a variety of sources including previously unknown diaries that operators kept during their months overseas. Her use of the operators as a case study to illustrate how American women's wartime service influenced the suffrage movement is excellent. Although she might have used other American women to make her case, the operators are a great choice because they were the first women to serve in an official combat role with the U.S. Army. One point Cobbs might have been expanded upon is how the operators' role evolved during their time in France. When the operators first arrived, the Army envisioned them only handling routine calls, leaving higher-priority calls to men. As the women proved more efficient than the men, their responsibilities expanded until they connected all calls. This point would have bolstered Cobbs's argument of how the operators in France proved their value to both army operations and skeptical men. However, this criticism should not take away from my sincere [End Page 553] admiration for The Hello Girls. Cobbs's book is excellent and proves that fact can be far more interesting than fiction. The adventures of the Hello Girls and their connections to the...

Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell Adrienne Caughfield Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell. ( Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 297. $29.95, ISBN 978–1-57441–651-0.) Texas differs from much of the Confederacy in regard to the Civil War's impact on the state. Separated by distance and, eventually, Union-held territory, Texans did not experience the same amount of difficulty or loss of property as those in Confederate states that were strafed by Federal troops. Similarly, women in Texas wrangled with the effects of war in different ways. Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell's edited volume on the lives of women in Texas during the Civil War examines the variety of experiences faced by a diverse population. Each essay in Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi emphasizes a distinct perspective by discussing women who were white and black, German and Tejana, and Unionists or enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy. The authors culled much of their information not only from diaries and letters where women disclosed their opinions in a more private venue but also from newspapers of the time wherein editors discussed women's actions and lauded their feminine efforts to contribute to the war by boosting morale. Despite an inability to vote or serve in battle, women placed themselves in the thick of the war. The volume begins with Vicki Betts's discussion of early enthusiasm for the war, which demonstrates women's fervent support for what many assumed would be a limited engagement. As the war continued, however, women pressed on with the drudgery of managing everyday life. In chapter 2, Dorothy Ewing describes the life of Caroline Sedberry, a politician's wife who found herself in wartime taking on unfamiliar tasks. In the same way, Beverly Rowe compares men's and women's wartime experiences through their letters, and both she and Ewing explore the [End Page 164] nature of battle, the meaning of the "glorious cause," and the frustrations of scarcity and other difficulties (p. 60). As Brittany Bounds suggests, while Texans struggled, women redoubled their efforts to encourage themselves and others by creating and joining aid societies, participating in social events and holidays, and relying on their faith to carry them through. Women in Civil War Texas also explores the experiences of non-Anglo Texans. Two essays, one by Bruce A. Glasrud and the other by Linda S. Hudson, describe how black women, both enslaved and free, dealt with what Glasrud describes as a "Freedom War" (p. 100). Hudson uses records from civil and criminal court cases to illustrate how the Texas Supreme Court viewed black women as well as how black women responded to these cases. In their essay, Jerry Thompson and Elizabeth Mata focus on Tejana women and recognize that not all Tejanos were in favor of the Confederacy. The realities of anti-Tejano racism and keen poverty exacerbated the problems that Tejanas faced. In her essay, Judith Dykes-Hoffman demonstrates that German women who lived in Unionist households dealt with similar persecution and, in some cases, the murders of their Unionist husbands. Discussions of both race and ethnicity provide new dimensions to understanding the war. Like German Texans, other women, including many in North Texas, came from Unionist families as well. Rebecca Sharpless tells the stories of Unionist women who tried to maintain their homes after their husbands had fled or were hanged. Their political opinions set them apart from the main population, leaving them isolated in many ways. One did not, however, have to be a Unionist to feel isolated. Candice N. Shockley describes how white southern women from other states became refugees in Texas, where distance protected them from the ravages of war. Some refugees, whose land had been destroyed, were welcomed; others, often members of the southern elite, were scorned as cowards fleeing their martial duties as good Confederates. Finally, Deborah M. Liles notes in her essay that Texas was not just a southern state...

Assessment of a Revised Wartime Experiences Scale for Vietnam-Era Women: The Health of Vietnam-Era Women's Study (HealthViEWS)

PurposeFew wartime experiences scales capture unique issues related to women's service, address their military roles, or have been validated with women. The Women's Wartime Stressor Scale was developed for use with women who served during the Vietnam era, primarily as nurses in Vietnam. We revised this measure by modifying existing items, adding new items, and revising response formats to create a scale less nursing specific and nondeployment specific, and conducted a preliminary assessment of the revised scale. MethodsThe Women's Wartime Exposure Scale-Revised (WWES-R) was included in a mail survey as part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Health of Vietnam-Era Women's Study (HealthViEWS) study. Construct and criterion validity, and internal consistency, were assessed with a sample of 4,839 women veterans using exploratory factor analysis, analysis of variance, and multiple linear regression. ResultsSix wartime experience factors consistent with previous research were identified and scales were created based on salient item loadings. Compared with women serving in the United States, women serving in Vietnam had higher mean scores on all scales, and nurses had significantly higher scores on three scales than non-nurses. ConclusionsEvaluation of the WWES-R suggests service and/or deployment location and service in a military health care versus a non-health care role may predict women veterans' reports of certain wartime experiences. Further psychometric evaluation of the WWES-R is recommended with later era veterans and through comparisons to other wartime exposure measures.

Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory by Karen Hagemann

Reviewed by: Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory by Karen Hagemann Amir Minsky Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory. By Karen Hagemann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 483. Paper $34.99. ISBN 978-0521152303. Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon contributes to a growing literature reassessing the so-called "anti-Napoleonic Wars" of 1806–1807 and 1813–1815, by offering an interdisciplinary interpretation of the role of the campaigns in shaping Prussian (and more broadly German) history and collective memory during the long nineteenth century. Karen Hagemann combines military, political, and cultural history to describe the rise and consolidation of German nationhood in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent appropriation of their commemorative practices for shifting political and cultural climates. This identity politics was driven by a dual process: on the one hand the construction of collective memory as an amalgamation of communicative memory (generational, temporal) and cultural memory (national, institutional); and on the other the history of suppression of gender from that collective memory. While this marginalization was often ascribed to men's and women's divergent experiences of war situations in the public and private spheres, Hagemann demonstrates how the link between late Enlightenment anthropological perceptions about national descent, identity, and character, and assumptions about "natural" gender hierarchies was instrumental in the efforts to collectively forget or "redomesticate" women's wartime participation, which pushed postwar Prussian political culture toward a cult of martial masculinity. The struggle over definitions of gender identities and relations thus provides the prism through which Hagemann reexamines the wars' lasting significance and various legacies. This interpretative rationale undergirds the book's five parts: from the military and political history of the wars, their representation in a variety of media, commemorative practices, and circulation in the literary market, to their eventual deployment in both remembered and reconstructed German pasts. In contrast to Thomas Nipperdey's famous claim that "in the beginning was Napoleon" as the prime mover of modern German history (32), Hagemann's approach charts the internal experiences of military defeat, emotional crisis, and their catalyzing effect on Germany's subsequent transformation from Kulturnation to Staatsnation. That the campaigns of 1813–1815 came to be known as either "Wars of Liberation" or "Wars of Liberty"—in conservative or liberal interpretations, respectively—underscores their different legacies as either "wars of princes" launched against the external French threat or "people's wars" additionally encompassing internal emancipation struggles along class and gender lines. As Hagemann shows, such legacies were borne by a public sphere that enabled female authors to express themselves politically and wrest a modicum of control over the production of collective memory from professional historians. The book's in-depth analysis of a vast collection of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets, and poems, and [End Page 638] their uses of "national pathos formulas" (64) as emotional catalysts in support of the war effort, attests to such media's success in entrenching ideas about national unity, gender order, and cultural and historical identity for generating a new sense of "Germanness." Although this assessment of the spread of nationhood via print culture and an "invention of tradition" of shared cultural heritage is not necessarily new, Hagemann points out the conceptual malleability of gendered thinking in both exclusive and inclusive iterations of nationalism: while Francophobia, antisemitism, and German chauvinism were staples of both liberal and conservative national discourses, the virtuous bourgeois family model informed the paternalistic "Volk family" (60) ideology of the nation, espousing the Prussian monarch as father of his people, as well as the more radically democratic (and French-influenced) visions of fraternal civic patriotism. More broadly, the book raises important questions about the politics of national memory in modern German history. By focusing on autobiographical and memory literature that transmitted the experiences of violence, devastation, and death of combatants and civilians alike, Hagemann's book goes against the grain of the triumphalist war narratives of canonical Prussian and Wilhelmine historiography, which embraced the dominant monarchic-conservative version of German nationalism in the post-1848 era. Although the so-called "nationalist machinery" driving a cult of self-sacrifice and heroic death for the fatherland held...

A Woman's Place Is in the News

Through a comparative content analysis, this article examines coverage of women's labor—domestic, volunteer and wage—in commercial and alternative newspapers in Canada during the Second World War. While scholars have written on media representations of women during the war, the lack of a systematic, longitudinal analysis of Canadian newspapers creates methodological and knowledge gaps. Using a feminist media studies framework, this article offers empirical evidence to demonstrate that despite the magnitude and significance of women's wartime labor, the subject received limited news coverage and, moreover, coverage reinforced gendered ideals within and across commercial and labor newspapers. This challenges the idea that either the women's pages or the alternative labor press offered a “space” for more progressive coverage than the gendered representations traditionally found in the mainstream news and, in the process, this article offers ways of thinking about women's labor inclusively, but beyond the historical gendered division of labor.

Antigone ‘Resurrected’: The Appropriation of Sophocles's Heroine in Interwar France

This article argues the potency and ambivalence of Sophocles's heroine Antigone, as ‘resurrected’ in public and private debates in France immediately after the First World War. It shows that her myth was most significantly evoked in a polemic concerning not only the burial of the war dead, but also the responsibilities and individualism of those left behind to mourn. Existing analyses of women's wartime roles in France have tended to emphasize ‘new’ models of heroism or exemplary conduct created by ideological agendas in the exceptional circumstances of modern war. However, this article explores a less popularly analysed concept, that being the ways in which a traditionally and previous re-interpreted heroic female icon, Antigone, was appropriated after the war as a ‘mouthpiece’ for grieving women's lived experience. It sheds light on a significant gap in the scholarship of classical receptions in wartime France, providing a fuller and more contextualized discussion of interwar evocations of Antigone. It also considers the complexities associated with the study of an ancient subject ‘transplanted’ into modern contexts.

Wearing Black, Wearing Bows: Union women and the politics of dress in the US fashion press, 1861–1865

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how leading US fashion periodicals Peterson's Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book discussed women's fashions on the Northern home front during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Primarily defining fashion magazines and clothing as pleasurable refuges from the horrors of war, Godey's and Peterson's nonetheless indicated that women's fashion choices were important to the broader war effort, arguing that women's sartorial decisions helped to demonstrate the virtue of their nation. Godey's and Peterson's thus operated as complex, contradictory spaces for middle-class female readers. In some respects serving as a welcome respite from direct discussions of war, these periodicals also placed considerable pressure on Northern women to live up to high standards of fashionable femininity as part of their patriotic duty to the nation. The fashion media thus at once served as a potential source of, even as it was a release from, Northern women's wartime anxieties.

Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-century China

In her article Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to the perception that early twentieth-century Chinese women's military activism was facilitated through assimilation into male identities, Xie's, Hu's, and Bai's texts show that women celebrated their womanhood through mass mobilization and dedicated services at the front as soldiers, activists, and reporters.

American Women's Wartime Dress: Sociocultural Ambiguity Regarding Women's Roles During World War II

IntroductionUnited States history of the 1930s and 40s is framed by the Great Depression and World War II. With the Wall Street crash of 1929, many Americans were left poor and unemployed. The reality of a depressed economy affected everyone, from those families who lost to those who lost entire fortunes. With rising tensions in Europe and extensive drought impacting Midwestern farms, the social dynamics of the 1930s often center on the massive unemployment and economic decline experienced by millions of Americans.However, there are some scholars and historians who assert that the historical narrative tends to revolve around the lives of men (Dubois and Dumenil 537). The experiences and social history of men have shaped the public consciousness of the 1930s and 1940s culture. According to Dubois and Dumenil social instability felt during the Great Depression caused a cultural shift, with security and reassurance being sought in the domestic sphere (537). Women as caregivers became the American cultural archetype of femininity.Traditional Gender Roles and DressThe normative role of women in the American society in the 1930s was exemplified by the traditional gender constructions of men as producers and providers and women as wives and mothers (Gourley 12). Womanhood, as such, was equated with domestic life. The cultural perception was a woman's ultimate goal was to be married and to have children, to have her life revolve around domesticity (Gluck 4).Media pressure on women exacerbated the issue, and in one case literally defined women's role and stressing its maintenance (see Figure 1). Ladies Home Journal, a leading women's magazine at this time, coined a new term in 1930, homemaker - noun. Feminine: one who makes a home, who manages a household, cares for her children, and promotes happiness and well-being for her (Ladies Home Journal 142). Women, as homemakers, were portrayed as vital to the successful socio-economic status of the family unit, and subsequently to an improved American economy. According to contemporary media, it was through creative use of meager food stuffs and household supplies, as well as leaving public sector employment to men, that women could ensure an end to the Depression.Women's fashion during the early-to-mid thirties reflected the American culture and this ideology of femininity. The silhouette for women's fashion during this period was a slim, more body-conscious silhouette than in the previous decade. Dresses were often cut on the bias, creating a narrow although fluid shape, which highlighted women's bodies. Trendsetters in women's fashion included the romantic looks designed by Jeanne Lanvin, the neoclassical gowns by Madame Gres, and sensual eveningwear inspired by Hollywood film actresses, all which further expressed a traditional face of femininity.Despite the cultural expectation of women to primarily be homemakers, some women, usually of those of lower socio-economic status, continued to work outside the home out of financial necessity. These women held various jobs, from service to manufacturing. However, middle class and/or married women working outside the home were publically criticized in the media and perceived as taking away from unemployed men (Anderson 10). In fact, during the Great Depression, many employers would not hire married women, with some states making efforts to bar them from paid work completely (Weatherford xi). This sentiment resonated with contemporary society: a 1936 Gallup poll revealed that 82% of respondents felt that wives should not work if their husbands had jobs (Yellin 39). With the depressed economy, job scarcity forced many working women out of the public sphere and back into the home. Women who had to work outside the home were often able to secure in stereotypically feminine employment, such as domestic service, clerking, secretarial work, and teaching (Cardinale 22). Job placement only became problematic with work that was considered masculine. …