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

Women participate in the military in particular roles, such as pilots and machine operators, but also as wives and mothers who send their husbands, sons, sisters, and daughters off to battle. Women also provide support and comfort or sometimes serve as victims when their family and friends come home from war with physical and psychological scars. Kimberly Jensen examines the role and purpose of women’s military participation in World War I in her book, Mobilizing Minerva, to illustrate how women’s involvement in war and militarization was intended to change no less than the military itself and the nation-state that sponsored it (p. ix). She uses three cases of women participating as physician, soldier, and nurse to make her main point: that women participated in the war effort and the accompanying militarization to support claims to full citizenship and to help combat violence that came both with war and in the domestic arena after the war ended.

Her cases reveal at least five themes. First, the historical context for women is different for each war. For elite white women in positions of leadership, the idea of the war acting as a vehicle with which to obtain full citizenship emerged from Progressive-era voluntary public health organizing efforts and the war against disease and dirt. The idea of volunteers as warriors seeped into efforts to join in World War I militarization and was framed by some of the same language. Second, Jensen’s main assertion is that her examples—female physicians, nurses, and women-at-arms—are essential to understanding the history of women’s “definitions of the specifics of complete citizenship, their efforts to achieve it, and the nature of the opposition” (p. xi). She uses the three groups, although the case she makes using female physicians is the strongest, to examine the threads of citizenship activism and women’s suffrage during a time when women’s right to vote was nearly attainable.

Third, Jensen weaves throughout the narrative women’s attempts to reinterpret the countervailing effects of prewar and intrawar efforts to redefine and illuminate violence against women and the efforts of those who perpetuated it. Even though women engaged with the military, a system that produced violence, they did so as part of gendered efforts to support women who were victims of wartime violence, and as a way to decrease violence against women in the workplace and the military itself (p. xi). In her fourth theme, Jensen posits that wartime debates over the inclusion of women in the medical and nursing ranks and in the fighting forces were “related directly to their ongoing campaigns for suffrage, professional status, economic equity, more complete female citizenship, and protection against violence” (p. xiii). For example, nurses’ attempts to gain officer rank was part of women’s overall efforts to gain recognition for their contribution to the war effort and to overcome the sexual and physical harassment they found on the military hospital wards and social settings. Nurses did not gain officer status until after World War II, but their achievement of relative rank in 1920 as part of the Army Reorganization Act was movement toward a place from which they could challenge the structure and power of the U.S. military and use it to finally gain a place for themselves in a highly masculine institution. And, finally, the way “women and their activism had an impact on how the nation conceived of and waged war” was different from traditional gender narratives of how women were acted on by war and violence (p. xiii). During this time period, each nation’s war efforts needed women in leadership positions and as workers providing goods and health care services abroad and at home, challenging their perceived passive and dependent roles in society...