American Women and the Great War

Lynn Dumenil

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
17 (October 2002). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2002, Organization of American Historians
 

This unit focuses on World War I American poster images of women. Exploring these idealized depictions of women allows students to consider the general issue of the role of propaganda in the American war effort, while also addressing the contradictions between images of women and the reality of their experiences on the home front.

Prior to World War I, the federal government communicated with citizens primarily through press releases that were printed in newspapers. As the United States entered the war, the Committee for Public Information, or the Creel Committee, established a Department of Pictorial Publicity. It drew upon an already well-established tradition of using posters for commercial advertising. Posters were just one form of propaganda used to drum up support for the war and for other activities, such as recruiting for the military and workers for war industries, conserving food, and supporting Liberty Bond and Red Cross fund drives.

As students first look at examples of the posters, ask them why the United States had to "sell" the war and citizen participation. Instructors can provide background here as to the opposition many Americans had to entering the war and the resulting perceived need to whip up nationalistic enthusiasm for U.S. war participation. The relationship between the concern for loyalty and 100 percent Americanism may also be tied to the existence of many immigrant groups in the nation, including those with ties to Germany and its allies (a point graphically illustrated in Figure 1).

Another significant theme supporting United States propaganda was the government's commitment to voluntarism. To this end, the government avoided compulsory rationing of food and financed a significant portion of the cost of the war through the sale of small denomination Liberty Bonds. War posters, then, can encourage students to think about how a nation mobilizes a country for war and the importance given to eliciting voluntary support rather than resorting to coercive measures.

Women were central to this voluntarist approach. They were urged to do their part as a demonstration of their citizenship, but their images were also widely used in posters that encouraged all Americans to support the war effort. With a few exceptions, these depictions perpetuated traditional notions of appropriate gender roles. Posters often used women as abstract icons representing the nation and its war aims. A beautiful woman, flanked by the United States flag or sometimes even dressed in "the stars and stripes" symbolized why the nation was fighting. (Figure 1). Posters such as Figure 2 ("It's Up to You! Protect the Nations' Honor, Enlist Now"), featuring a sensuous and vulnerable female form personifying the nation, more explicitly used the female form to indicate that America's honor needed fighting men to protect it. Other posters also traded on images of female sexuality in other ways. These posters featured the young saucy woman dressed in a military uniform. On the surface, Figure 3, which provocatively exclaims, "I Wish I were a Man," seems to challenge gender stereotypes, but on another level it used the teasing woman to reinforce traditional notions of masculinity--real men enlist. One of the most widely distributed posters, "The Greatest Mother of Them All" (Figure 4), was somewhat unusual in that it represented a woman who physically towered over a much smaller wounded soldier. Although the image reversed the role of protector and protected, it reinforced women's roles as heroic nurturers by invoking maternal values.

Even when posters encouraged women themselves to participate in war activities(farming in the Women's Land Army, buying Liberty Bonds, knitting socks for soldiers, or conserving food), the images rarely challenged ideas of women's proper place (Figures 5-7). In figure 5, for example, women in the Land Army are represented as cheerful harvesters in a sunny field, not agricultural laborers performing hard manual labor. Another poster, which acknowledged women in the work force who were supporting the war effort (Figure 7), dramatized the typist, a distinctly feminine occupation, by telling stenographers that "The Kaiser is afraid of you!" On these rare occasions when posters acknowledged that women were working in factories, they did so in ways that minimized ideas of female independence. Thus, the posters of the Young Women's Christian Association, one of many private organizations that produced its own posters, featured women who were taking the place of men in industry (Figure 8) with text that urged viewers to support the YWCA's efforts to protect young women workers in the industrial and urban environment. Domesticity, dependency, self-sacrifice, and gentility thus predominated in the images that promoted female service to the nation. Similarly, poster art supported existing racial hierarchies. While government and voluntary agencies did work in black communities to encourage support for war programs, their posters depicted whites exclusively.

After analyzing the images themselves, ask students what the posters tell us about real women's lives during the war. Posters hint at the extraordinary efforts mounted by mostly middle-class women to mobilize in support of war. What the posters do not reveal is that at the outset of the war, faced with the government's foot dragging in implementing a plan for women's service, national women's leaders--most notably those connected with the woman's suffrage movement--had to push for the creation of a national women's organization to coordinate their war service. Woodrow Wilson's administration finally established the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense (WCND) in April 1917, intending it be purely an advisory body.

But the committee members, headed by suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw, had their own conception of making their organization a channel for delivering woman power to the war effort. They set up state and local branches of the WCND, which in turn used local women's clubs like the YWCA, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and those affiliated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs to put women to work on projects which included conducting state and local "manpower" censuses, selling Liberty Bonds, promoting Red Cross fund raising, and garnering support for food conservation. Women volunteers all over the country conducted a house-to-house canvas, encouraging housewives to pledge to uphold principles of conservation. Women's groups also conducted public lessons on conservation, distributed recipe books, and, in conjunction with the ubiquitous posters, continually urged housewives to conserve vital foods.

The voluntary activities of women, so evident in the food conservation drive, required exceptional administrative skills and for many women this became full-time work, a clear indication of the class nature of much of women's war work. Only leisured women--overwhelmingly white middle-class and elite ones--could take on this responsibility. Despite their skills and contributions, however, their voluntary work--unpaid and generally represented as an extension of women's domestic role of serving the family--did not challenge traditional expectations about women's proper place. Indeed, it often reinforced them.

Although the posters give no hint of the ferment surrounding women's struggle to achieve political rights, many women volunteers were also activists in the suffrage movement, and viewed their war service as a demonstration of their patriotism and claim to full citizenship. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) encouraged its two million members to support the war effort and the Wilson administration, while sustaining its campaign for suffrage. The National Women's Party's (NWP) tactics were far more controversial. Led by Alice Paul, these women picketed the White House to demand that the democracy that the country was fighting for abroad be extended to women at home. Arrested, imprisoned, and subject to force feeding, these suffragists made front-page news. Both the efforts of NAWSA women to prove their claims to citizenship and the militant demands of the NWP women helped to create sympathy for the suffrage amendment. In January 1918, President Wilson finally withdrew his opposition. Although the amendment was not ratified until 1920, the war years were important in the ultimate victory as women seized the war as an opportunity to secure women's rights to share in the democratic freedoms that the war posters promulgated.

The impact of war on women's work was more ambiguous. As the YWCA and Women's Land Army posters indicate, women were offered job opportunities that challenged the traditional patterns of sex segregated labor. Women serving in the Women's Land Army replaced men in farms all over the country in order to sustain agricultural production. In the cities, women took jobs as street car conductors and postal carriers and found employment in shipbuilding and other heavy manufacturing that previously had been closed to them. For African American women, the new opportunities were especially striking because large numbers of them were able to find industrial work for the first time. Even though these jobs tended to be the dirtiest and least desirable, they represented improvement over domestic work and agricultural labor and helped motivate the Great Migration out of the south (see pp. 31-33). But despite the fact that women had proven, according to one manufacturer, that there is hardly a line of work to which a woman cannot adapt herself, women's postwar opportunities in blue-collar work, especially for black women, contracted to their prewar status.

Lesson Procedure

Time Frame
This lesson can be taught over a minimum of two fifty-minute classes, or under a block schedule, one ninety-minute class. Depending on how many activities you incorporate, or how in-depth your class discussions get, you could cover the following material in three fifty-minute classes, or almost two ninety-minute classes.

Objective
This lesson specifically addresses the issues of war-time propaganda techniques, the changing and sustaining roles of women, and the development of the Women’s Suffrage movement. Covering these issues will meet the objective from Standard 2C of the National Standards for History from Era 7, The Emergence of Modern America: 1890 – 1930. Standard 2C states that students will understand the impact at home and abroad of the United States involvement in World War I. Students will address this standard by analyzing World War I American poster images of women.

Procedures

1. Students may read "American Women and the Great War" in the OAH Magazine of History to give them some background on the issues covered in this lesson. A more comprehensive account is Susan Grayzel, Women the First World War, which offers a comparative perspective drawing upon a number of countries.
2. The teacher can then lecture students on key issues connected to propaganda posters and women’s experiences in World War I, as outlined in the preceding essay, paying particular attention to the experiences not conveyed in the posters (working-class women, African-Americans, immigrants).
3. In pairs (or threes depending on the size of your class), have students analyze and complete the worksheet. The Posters are primary sources. The additional reading and teacher’s lecture are secondary sources. You can take this opportunity to remind your students of the distinction between primary and secondary sources and their significance for understanding the past.
4. Have pairs present at least one poster to the class, and their analysis of the poster.
5. After the students have completed the worksheet, hold a discussion around some of the following questions:
   1. Discussion Questions
      
   2. What was accurate or inaccurate about the images of women in the posters?
   3. Do you think the posters served their purpose? Were they effective?? Why or why not?
   4. Do you think these posters had any effects on the future roles and images of women in the United States?
   5. Would this type of poster and this presentation of images of women be effective means of creating support for modern wars?

Additional Assessments or Projects

1. Have students, alone or in small groups, research and present to the class their findings on one of the following war-time organizations. Be sure that students address these organizations in the context of the roles and images of women during war-time. Department of Pictorial Publicity, Creel Committee, Committee for Public Information, Women’s Land Army, YWCA, WCND, NWP, and the NAWSA.
2. If you have internet access, have your students find additional World War I posters, and answer the same questions found on the worksheet. The following are websites for the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.org) and the National Archives (http://www.nara.gov).
3. Have your students, alone or in small groups make a modern day war poster. Students should identify their audience, as well as the reaction they hope to invoke from the audience. What kind of modern “symbols” would a modern war poster need to have? How might an enemy be depicted in a modern war?

War posters were far from accurate in their depiction of American women. The images were white and the messages for the most part reinforced conventional gender stereotypes. The emphasis was on female service and self-sacrifice. For many women, the war effort offered opportunities for volunteer service to the nation that also provided the personal satisfaction of fulfilling, meaningful work, even though it was unpaid labor. For others, the war provided new, though often temporary, employment options. By helping to further the process of granting women's suffrage--a phenomenon absent in the war posters--the war may have had its greatest impact on American women.

Breen, William J. Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and The Council Of National Defense, 1917-1919. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Gavin, Lettie. American Women in World War I: They Also Served. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1997.

Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, ed. Behind the Lines: Gender And The Two World Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.

Rawls, Walton. "Wake Up, America!" American History Illustrated 23 (1988): 32-45.

Shover, Michele J. "Roles and Images of Women in World War I Propaganda," Politics and Society 5 (1975): 469-86.

Steinson, Barbara Jean. American Women's Activism in World War I. NY: Garland Publications, 1982.

Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History at Occidental College. She was recently Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She specializes in U.S. cultural and social history since the Civil War.

FIGURES: Below are listed titles and Library of Congress or NAIL record numbers.

FIGURE 1: Americans All! (LC-USZC4-5845)
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FIGURE 2: It's up to you--Protect the nation's honor, enlist now (LCUSZC4-1960) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 3: Gee I wish I were a man (NARA NWDNS-4-P-55) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 4: The greatest mother in the world (LC-USZC4-3161 color film copy transparency; LC-USZC4-5855, color film copy slide) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 5: The Woman's Land Army of America (LC-USZC4-5855) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 6 : The Fruits of Victory (LC-USZC4-5561) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 7: Stenographers! The Kaiser is afraid of you! (LC-USZC4-7930) View HiRes | LowRes

FIGURE 8: For every fighter a woman worker Y.W.C.A.: Back our second line of defense (LC-USZC4-1419)
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