History 281--Handout for Second Essay Assignment Answer one of the questions below in a typed, double-spaced, 3-4 page essay. Be sure to build your answer using evidence (material from the lectures an
The Great War and the Renegotiation of Masculinity
The last few units, we’ve been looking at domesticity and the polarized gender roles that emerged alongside industrialization, and examining the work that this set of stereotypes about masculinity and femininity did in the 19th century. And let’s face it: this whole package of gender roles and concepts did a LOT of work (in terms of being the foundation for the organization of social roles, work assignments, values and norms, etc). As we’ve seen, it helped to set up a new sexual division of labor that went with industrialization; it influenced the development of class identities and lifestyles and what was “respectable”; it underwrote a world view that justified imperialism; it determined family roles and the legal position of men vs. women in the family, along with many other social relationships.
But WWI presented this package of gender roles with an almost insurmountable challenge–it threw them into question completely, and by 1918, gender was really “in play,” up for grabs throughout Europe. The impact of WWI on the gender roles of the 19th century, and particularly on established notions of masculinity, is the subject of this course unit.
Because one of the most important foundations for these gender roles (maybe THE most important–only religion was more influential in this regard) was a strict sexual division of labor, with women assigned to the home, or to jobs like sewing, food production, etc. that were associated with domestic work, even if they took place in a factory. And WWI undercut this sexual division of labor entirely. The men went off to war, and women had to step across the lines that had circumscribed and defined gender, and go into roles and places that were clearly masculine. But that’s only part of the story. The war also opened up the can of worms with regard to masculinity, since it exposed men to circumstances and stresses that they had never been trained or prepared for.
WWI was proceeded by the formation of blocks of diplomatic alliances--Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one side formed a diplomatic alliance that was opposed by an alliance consisting of. Britain, France, and Russia--and these blocs represented the fusion of economic, military, and imperialist rivalries.
These alliances, once made, were frozen into place by the new imperatives of military planning and the industrialization of war. Industrialization meant that there were now railroads to transport much larger armies to battlefields more quickly than ever before, and also that there were new ,more accurate, and more destructive forms of firepower—the prewar period saw the rise of artillery and machine gun fire. Thanks to industrialization, the technology of killing had thus advanced dramatically by the end of the 19th century, thanks not only to the virtual revolution in the speed and firepower of small arms and artillery, but also by the transformation of warships by means of new and far more efficient turbine engines, combined with more effective protective armor for ships and the capacity to carry far more guns on ships.
In addition, factory system made it possible to produce all these new weapons, esp. small firearms and hand grenades for infantry on mass scale, and thus arose for the first time to possibility of equipping for truly massive armies. And since it was now possible to equip a mass army, the prewar period saw the introduction of mass conscription among all European nations which would be involved in WWI except Britain.
During the prewar period, there was constant unrest in Balkans, both the part which belonged to Austria-Hungary and the independent nation of Serbia. Serbia was encouraged by Russia, which sought to convert Balkans into Russian sphere of influence.
The Balkans were thus the most important geographic region where these two diplomatic alliances collided. The climax of these diplomatic tensions came in July 1914, when heir to Austria-Hungarian throne was assassinated during a state visit to Serbia. Austria-Hungary made demands on Serbia, and was backed up in making these demands by Germany-Serbia resisted, and was backed up in her resistance by Russia. The statesmen of Europe thought that probably would blow over like other earlier diplomatic crises, but if it did not blow over, most leaders also saw now as most opportune time for a war which everyone was convinced was inevitable. As a result, none of the government leaders tried too hard to defuse the situation. War was officially declared and initiated in August, 1914.
Europeans went into it not knowing what they were getting into. Everyone assumed that war would be as it had been much earlier in the 19th century--rapid and decided by a single battle, as for example the Franco-Prussian war of 1870had been. It was thought that the new killing technology was simply too destructive and dreadful for war to last more than a few weeks, and millions of young men rushed to enlist to get into that decisive battle before it was all over, and millions of women encouraged them to go and saw them off at the train stations. Europeans had no idea what war involved, because for several generations, peace had been the normal and expected framework of European lives.
Since 1815, the fall of Napoleon, there had been no war involving all the European powers, and those few wars which had occurred between 1815 and 1871 had been fought by 2 or 3 nations, and had ended quickly. Since 1871, no European power had ordered its armed men to fire on those men of any other European power. The great powers had chosen their opponents, their victims for 2 generations from among the weak, the unarmed nations of the non-Western world during the period of imperialism, and they were unable to envision what the scale and duration of a war with one of their own kind would be like.
So, Europeans, including Germans, went lightheartedly off to slaughter and to be slaughtered--almost all of the social groups in all of these nations--including the socialist working class parties and the women's movements--supported the outbreak of war. In each nation, governments able to frame war and present it to their people as an issue of the other side provoking war. All of the governments involved claimed that they were going into a war of self-defense, so even those who were alienated from government supported the mobilization for war. The enormous early popularity of WWI among almost all the populations involved demonstrates the tremendous appeal of nationalism, patriotism, militarism--even to those who were disenfranchised and oppressed, like workers and women.
When it came, war was like nothing that had ever been predicted. As I said, the assumption had been that war would last only a few weeks--how could this mass mobilization of men and arms be maintained longer? So the war had to be over by Christmas, and nobody made any plans what to do if it were not.
The German plan was based on the assumption of a two front war, against France in the West and Russia in the East—the German s assumed that when it came down to it, the British would probably remain neutral. Germans planned to pivot through Belgium—violating Belgian neutrality—and march their armies into northern France, take Paris and knock France out of the war, then rush troops freed up in the west by France's surrender to the east, to deal with the Russian army.
But things didn't work out quite as the German General Staff had planned. The Belgians put up more resistance than the Germans had anticipated, giving the British, who did enter the war, time to link up with the French forces in Belgium and northern France. And thus although the German army did have some initial successes, it was halted before it reached Paris and France did not capitulate. Instead, by mid-October, 1914, the front lines were stabilized in a line that ran from Belgium through northern France down to the Swiss border, and there was to be very little variation in the line for 3 years. It became a static, immobile war on the Western front.
The opposing armies were halted, and stalemated because of the new artillery--firepower like machines guns or larger artillery which made it impossible to advance on fortified positions--a line of men generally cannot take a machine gun nest: no matter how brave they are, they will be mowed down. Thus, there was Iittle advance on the Western front after the first few weeks—in order to survive the new firepower, armies dug trenches for their men to hide in. Thus, WWI was characterized for much of its duration in many areas by trench warfare. “Over the top” attempts (where a line of men charged across from their trench to try to take the opposing side’s trenches) were mounted to break the stalemate repeatedly by both sides, but rarely had much effect. The German attempt to take the French fortress at Verdun in February 1915, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a few days--the French dead, wounded and missing numbered nearly half a million in this one battle alone, while the Germans lost almost 400,000 men. There were similar bloody and inconclusive battles at Ypres and the battle of the Somme, where the British, French and Germans fought over an area of only a few miles--at the height of the battle, the British had advanced 8 miles, which they later lost in part-for 41/2 months; during this one single battle, the Germans most 1/2 million men, the British 400,000 and the French 200,000.
Thereafter, the war settled down into a stalemate, where each side launched gas attacks (shooting poison gas shells at the other side, which exploded and sent out clouds of poison gas) and periodic assaults. The new weapons, along with these bloody and inconclusive battles, cumulatively caused astonishing, previously unimaginable casualty levels. A large part of an entire generation was lost in fields of France, especially the nobility in all nations, which manned the officer corps, took heavy casualties.
By the end of 1915, it was clear that the Napoleonic principles of warfare--massed line of attack and charge, ending war quickly--upon which soldiers had been raised in Europe for 100 years, were no longer valid. Instead, the war shifted to a new terrain, the war of attrition, the war of exhaustion, where the object of strategy became not the destruction of the enemy army but the exhaustion of the enemy's resources--attacking sometimes without any expectation of tactical success, but in order to compel the enemy to use up his resources faster than one did oneself. This was the reasoning behind the German assualt at Verdun.
Armies were thus no longer the representatives or champions of nations at war. They became instead instruments through which the belligerents could bleed one another of resources and of men. At the same time, that other traditional weapon of warfare, the naval blockade, became grimmer in purpose. Instead of blocking only commerce, as in Napoleonic wars, navies were now used to blockade everything--to starve the enemy I s population. Britain, having largest navy, was most successful at this—Britain imposed a naval blockade on Germany which was almost complete, this began the slow starvation of the German population, since Germany could not grow enough food to feed its own population, and relied on food imports to supplement German agriculture. Once outside imports were cut off, civilians in almost all Central European cities began to become malnourished.
This kind of war of attrition included military tactics and conditions which had never been seen before in European history, and it led to conditions on the domestic front which were also new. For the first time, war was now made total--entire economies were organized around war effort, which entailed the total mobilization of populations in support of war effort to keep up these terrible efforts, these enormous demands that the military front made on the domestic economy.
Women took the place of the husbands and fathers in the factories and farms, once those men had left for the front. Civilians gave up luxuries of all kinds, submitted to the increasingly severe rationing of necessities, and tightened their belts as consumer goods disappeared from the shops and all factories were gradually converted to wartime production, and food, clothing and medicine became harder to find. New clothing became rare, and food became scarce, even impossible to obtain in some areas. German and Austrian women, because of the British blockade, stood in line for hours to obtain bread, when it was available. For an example of the effect on civilians, see the excerpt I have posted from the diary of an Austrian housewife from this period, in the folder for this unit.
By 1918, the average German citizen was consuming only 1000 calories per day--half the amount needed to maintain a normal adult. Famine amennorhea set in: that is, women were so malnourished, they stopped menstruating and became sterile. By the end of the war, even the civilians on the losing side, even the well-to-do, were starving.
At the same time, however, women were moving into new jobs opened up to them by the war. The overalI number of women employed outside the home rose steadily, but not more so than in pre-War years, but the types of jobs women did changed. Many of the kinds of work that women had done before the war--dressmaking, many types of textile work, candy and food making—declined (because now the raw materials for production were hard to get), but where women remained in traditional sectors, esp. textile production, they moved into male jobs. Even more women switched to the more lucrative work offered in heavy industry and munitions, now available to women.
Women entered the workforce f or a variety of reasons. Some because husbands drafted, and needed more than the government allowance for soldiers’ families. Single middle class women entered the workforce out of necessity, or patriotism, or feelings of solidarity with loved ones at the battlefront. Others were drawn out of the home by propaganda. "Shells Made by a Wife may save a Husband's Life" was the headline of a typical British propaganda poster, which tried to recruit wives to work in munitions factories. Newspapers also pointed out what women could do in wartime, highlighting the female tram conductor or subway worker as a war worker in her own right.
Fellow male workers were not always so welcoming to women—in the eyes of the men who remained in the factories, women were unskilled workers who had to be trained, and were taking the jobs of male colleagues and friends. Women changed their clothing to fit the new jobs, wearing overalls or going uncorseted, which made them conspicuous--this increased tension in workplace. Many people agreed with Sigmund Freud that the war was leading to the masculinization of women. Women walked about freely, earned higher wages than ever before, and lived independent lives. Indeed, the whole world appeared topsy-turvy, with women outside the home, on the factory floor, in “men's” jobs, wearing “men's” clothes, and flaunting their independence while men were dying at the front.
The women were often making higher pay, yes, but they still did not earn the same as men in such jobs did, and it was made clear that the new female workers would lose these new jobs when men came home--in German factories, many women signed contracts acknowledging that they would be laid off after the war before beginning jobs. Many women did not seek more training than absolutely necessary, since they knew these jobs were transient. Many had additional responsibilities, children, and so didn't have time to learn most skilled jobs.
In some ways, bourgeois women liberated most of all by war, since gained more power than working class women. Bourgeois women, educated and trained through years of volunteer work, developed new public roles during the war. In France, the female schoolteachers often took over the mayoral functions in small towns, when all educated men gone. In Germany, women moved into municipal government jobs that men had filled, and in many places in Central Europe women became policewomen. As the war continued, the female presence spread throughout management, relief organizations, and government, and bourgeois women became ever more professional.
No woman's role drew so much popular attention or remained so vivid in popular memory as that of the military nurse. For many, she sacrificed all that was sacrificial about women, a perpetual reminder of the 19th century ideal of female virtue, compassion, nurturing and self-sacrifice. Yet the nurse was also a controversial figure. She lived apart from family supervision and amidst men, and loosed 19thC standards of behavior by traveling alone, becoming tougher, more self-sufficient, developing a stronger ego. Thus, although she was a focus of attention and a key figure in wartime propaganda the nurse also threatened the gender structure of the society she served, since she had more independence and less chaperonage than would have been thought proper for women, before the War.
The nurse, along with the home front workers like the munitions worker, the volunteer and other women active in public life became symbolic of the war. Propaganda efforts launched by both sides put women in the headlines, as newspapers tried to recruit new women workers for the war effort by publishing
stories of women's bravery, dexterity, and energy. Once isolated in the home, women now stood boldly outside it, and their activities provided raw material for the propaganda produced by the press and government public information offices.
Yet propaganda also made people acutely aware that gender roles were being blurred, and one of the main groups made aware of this was men. Men were experiencing the war quite differently than women, and the accounts in the home press let men know this.
The men of Europe were experiencing a new kind of war, a war they had not been prepared for, psychologically or physically. Instead of the individual heroes of the past, the war required men in the mass, men to man the machines, like machine guns, cannons, submarines, trucks, trains, and tanks. Where women were mobilized for the war effort, men were immobilized in the trenches, stuck for weeks on end in filth, under constant shelling, and unable to advance or retreat. For some men, being trapped for months in such a threatening situation contradicted what psychologists call the “flight or fight response” (this mean that when confronted with a serious threat, most people will respond by either fleeing or fighting the threat). But the soldiers in the trenches were unable to do either one of those things. They were trapped in the trenches, for the most part. The response for some men was what people back then called “shell shock” (and is today called “combat fatigue” in the army). Really, it was male hysteria. But I mean “hysteria” in the sense that psychologists use the term, not laypeople. “Hysteria” in ordinary conversation means that someone got very upset. But a “hysterical reaction” for a psychologist means a physical condition (like being paralyzed or mute, unable to talk) that is caused by intolerable psychological stress. That’s what was happening to some of these men. They would have a nervous breakdown. Or, they’d wake up one day and be unable to speak or perhaps be paralyzed. And they really WERE paralyzed---they weren’t faking it---but it was not because of an organic injury, but because of stress.
Another response on the part of other soldier was hostility towards women. They weren't suffering (as the soldiers saw it); on the contrary, they were taking men's jobs. War propaganda even made it seem as if women were the cause of the war--after all, weren't men fighting to protect women? In this way, the war had simultaneously blurred gender lines yet also opened up an abyss between the sexes--a gulf between their experiences, and a source of ongoing sexual tensions. There had never been an event in European history that had been experienced so differently by men, on the whole, and by women.
When the war ended, the first question that many men asked was whether women would hold on to these new jobs they had taken over. Bad feelings that men in the trenches had harbored, caused by women's new found strength, only intensified when men returned to find society saturated with women working in jobs that had been male-dominated in pre-war life, and which were therefore seen as “men’s jobs.” In England, mobs of male veterans wrecked streetcars and physically assaulted women still working as streetcar conductors, since they were in what were supposed to be men's jobs. Women had crossed the gender boundaries the 19th century had erected already in the first few months of the war, and now it was economically important to men to reclaim these jobs. Eliminating working women from public view had a psychological value as well for men. The women munitions workers and streetcar conductors had symbolized the war on the home front--regaining a sense of peacetime meant eliminating these female roles and reasserting men's position as breadwinners. Men in general, not just politicians, were acutely aware of what should be male and what female, and violently attempted to set things back the way they had been. Hundreds of thousands of women lost the jobs that they had acquired during the war in a short space of time.
But the war had opened new doors for women, although some only briefly, and thus opened fresh debate as to gender roles. The freedom that some women had experienced called into question the polarized gender roles of the 19th century, while for others, the war's turning gender roles topsy-turvy had been an abomination (similar to the feelings evoked by that image of the woman riding the man, that I showed you in Unit 1), and such people argued that women in “men’s jobs” was a temporary wartime development which should be eliminated and forgotten. Out of the sexual tensions of the war, out of men's resentment, and the freedom experienced by some women during the war, the new gender tensions and debates of the 1920s would arise. Europe during the 1920s would be grappling with many of the war's consequences and legacies. Not the least of these would be new forms of female behavior, appearance, and work--the response of Europeans to these new roles would be crucial, as both the right and the left struggled the remake the gender roles that the war that made hollow.
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