Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (review)

In this engrossing account, Susan Grayzel argues that despite the vast upheavals traversing British and French society during the First World War, gender roles and identities survived remarkably unscathed. Leaving aside, as she says, the debate over “whether the war was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women”(6), Grayzel instead claims that each society accepted an expanded range of legitimate public roles for women as long as their capacity as mothers remained at the center of their civic identities. The new roles women soon played in their respective wartime societies therefore posed no threat to the prevailing gender system since women’s foremost civic responsibility—to bear and raise future soldiers—still defined their public and private purpose. To recreate the public debate over women’s wartime activities in British and French society, Grayzel draws on an array of sources including novels, plays, newspapers, legislative debates, feminist tracts, public trials, and monuments.

Each society granted men and women a separate sphere to occupy for the duration of the war. Men would fight to protect women physically from the Germans and emotionally from the horrors of war. Women, after encouraging men to enlist, would send enough letters and packages to keep morale high in the trenches, do their best to provide the nation with future soldiers when their men came home on leave, and inspire their men in uniform to perform heroically on the battlefield. Immediately, Grayzel notes, the reality challenged this gender fantasy in significant ways. Importantly, many women lived at the front, either by choice as volunteers for noncombatant jobs like nursing or as captives in occupied territories. Air raid attacks brought the war home to female inhabitants of Paris and London, while the stream of letters flowing back and forth between the front and the rear enlightened most women to the inhumane degradation occurring on the battlefield. Living with a physically wounded or shell-shocked solder soon exposed the most sheltered woman to the true horrors of the war. The highly publicized rapes of women in the German occupied territories vividly illustrated that the war’s victims included many not in uniform.

Despite this constant blurring between battlefront and homefront, gender roles remained remarkably resilient. To make this point, Grayzel focuses on how outrage over rape in the occupied territories evolved into a debate over motherhood and nationality once cases of French women forcibly impregnated by German soldiers began to appear. Was the maternal instinct and French blood of these women strong enough to bear and raise these children or was abortion justified in these cases? Some advocated de-criminalizing abortion to rid France of this bad blood, while others like Dr. Gustave Drouineau, claimed that it was illogical to assume that “nine seconds of paternity counted for more that nine months of maternity.”(62) In Britain, stories of rape from Belgium became stock propaganda images intended to encourage men and women to assume the gender roles of soldier and supporter outlined above.

Much of the book offers a chilling portrait of how total war, with its accompanying evils of massive death on the battlefield and an ever increasing authoritarian tone from supposedly democratic governments, impacted French and British women. In both societies, the state again and again stepped in to regulate or control women’s bodies under the guise of promoting motherhood and the future of the race. Besides the incessant drumbeat to replace the men lost on the battlefield with a new generation, French law forbade abortion (even in cases of rape) and gave nursing mothers regular breaks during the working day to ensure women did not feel compelled to chose between motherhood and working to support the cause. Hoping to deter unwed British women from making the same choice, those with war babies became eligible for funds initially reserved for soldiers and sailors’ families...