Gender And The First World War

The First World War cannot be sufficiently documented and understood without considering the analytical category of gender. This exciting volume examines key issues in this area, including the 'home front' and battlefront, violence, pacifism, citizenship and emphasizes the relevance of gender within the expanding field of First World War Studies.

Essays analyze the two world wars in respect to gender politics and reassesses the differences between men and women in relation to war

The First World War was the first modern, total war, one requiring the mobilisation of both civilians and combatants. Particularly in Europe, the main theatre of the conflict, this war demanded the active participation of both men and women. Women and the First World War provides an introduction to the experiences and contributions of women during this important turning point in history. In addition to exploring women’s relationship to the war in each of the main protagonist states, the book also looks at the wide-ranging effects of the war on women in Africa Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Topical in its approach, the book highlights: the heated public debates about women’s social, cultural and political roles that the war inspired their varied experiences of war women’s representation in propaganda their roles in peace movements and revolutionary activity that grew out of the war the consequences of the war for women in its immediate aftermath Containing a document section providing a wide range of sources from first-hand accounts, a Chronology and Glossary, Women and the First World War is an ideal text for students studying the First World War or the role of women in the twentieth century.

A brief but thorough collection, Susan Grayzel’s new revision of The First World War document reader allows students to experience this historical turning point through various sources from the period and the scholarship tied to them.

Gender and the Great War provides a global, thematic approach to a century of scholarship on the war, masculinity and femininity, and it constitutes the most up-to-date survey of the topic by well-known scholars in the field.

How did WWI affect the love lives of ordinary citizens and their interactions as couples? This book focuses on how dramatic changes in living conditions affected key parts of the life course of ordinary citizens: marriage and divorce. Innovative in bringing together demographic and gender perspectives, contributions in this comparative volume draw on newly available micro-level data, as well as qualitative sources such as war diaries. In a first exploration intended to incite further research, it asks how patterns of marriage and divorce were affected by the war across Europe, and what the role of enduring change - or lack thereof - in gender relations was in shaping these patterns.

There are few moments in history when the division between the sexes seems as "natural" as during wartime: men go off to the "war front," while women stay behind on the "home front." But the very notion of the home front was an invention of the First World War, when, for the first time, "home" and "domestic" became adjectives that modified the military term "front." Such an innovation acknowledged the significant and presumably new contributions of civilians, especially women, to the war effort. Yet, as Susan Grayzel argues, throughout the war, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity survived, primarily through the maintenance of--and indeed reemphasis on--soldiering and mothering as the core of gender and national identities. Drawing on sources that range from popular fiction and war memorials to newspapers and legislative debates, Grayzel analyzes the effects of World War I on ideas about civic participation, national service, morality, sexuality, and identity in wartime Britain and France. Despite the appearance of enormous challenges to gender roles due to the upheavals of war, the forces of stability prevailed, she says, demonstrating the Western European gender system's remarkable resilience.

An examination of German women's art produced during the First World War that places the artists' visual responses within the civilian war experience. Traces the thematic evolution of women's art from visual expressions of support for the national war effort to more nuanced and distraught representations of grief over wartime death.