Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (review)

Kimberly Jensen's study of women in the First World War is a valuable contribution to the expanding scholarship on the American social and military history of that conflict. Jensen traces the wartime strategies and activities of three groups of U.S. women—female physicians, military nurses, and "women-at-arms" (i.e. women in rifle clubs and civil defense groups). These women sought a place (or in the case of nurses, an expanded one) in the military effort of their nation, and simultaneously laid a claim to "fuller female citizenship" (p. xi).

Most original is Jensen's richly documented and lively discussion of the women who inserted themselves into the home defense campaign with rifles loaded, an analysis that goes far beyond any previous treatment of women and preparedness in the United States. Stories of Russia's all-female "Battalion of Death"—a topic covered extensively in the suffrage press—inspired riflewomen to volunteer their service to the state. During the war, thousands of American women joined gun and rifle clubs or formed their own. Gun manufacturers applauded their efforts, seeing a new market in female consumers. But most Americans were horrified. The specter of women defending their country with firearms subverted the traditional gender convention of men as Protectors and women as the Protected. Furthermore, women at arms were capable of protecting themselves; "women joined gun clubs and defense groups so that they would not be in the same situation as the women in Belgium and northern France, unprotected and vulnerable to rape and assault" (p. 59). Their actions thus called attention to violence against women, both on the war front and domestically. As Jensen perceptively notes, the disruption of gender norms embedded in women's armed defense was particularly disturbing at a moment in time when middle-class Americans felt acutely vulnerable to left-wing and labor violence.

Jensen's analysis of women-at-arms establishes the central, and in some ways surprising, argument of her book: that the wartime activities of the three groups comprised an "anti-violence movement." But this claim elides the many ways that the women's actions were also, paradoxically, constitutive of violence. This can be seen in the case of female physicians. Barred from war service by the U.S. government—a professional access they sought with vigor—many female physicians volunteered for all-female medical units sponsored by woman suffrage and women's medical societies. The women's hospitals rendered extraordinary service overseas, caring for French soldiers, but also providing community and public healthcare to civilian populations, including internal refugees. The primary care that they offered to these vulnerable civilian populations encompassed gynecological and obstetrical services, a strikingly different conception of war zone medicine.

Yet Jensen's broad claim—that women's activities and institutions challenged militarism itself—is problematic. Women physicians, it is true, denounced the rape, violence, and dislocation that war wreaked on women and children. But the victims they spoke of were victims of enemy violence exclusively. When physician Esther Pohl Lovejoy mounted a cross-country speaking tour to raise funds for the women's hospitals, American audiences were riveted by her tales of devastation because they heard them as proof of "German frightfulness" (p. 103). In this sense, then, the wartime work of female physicians reinforced rather than undermined the militarist ideology that sustained the war, unintentionally providing fuel for superpatriotic fires.

There was a quality of the crusade about the allied cause in World War I, and as British historians such as Nicoletta Gullace have shown, women were not immune to the appeal of hypernationalism. The women in Jensen's study, it would seem, had a complex relationship to military violence, encompassing abhorrence but also fascination and imitation. It is difficult to make the case, as Jensen tries to do, that their wartime strategies and activities constituted a fundamental critique of militarism. Such...