Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in the Great War

There are thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands, of books and articles on World War I. Since at least the early 1980s, works on women and gender have played a key part in that bourgeoning literature. Yet until recently, such work has concentrated on a relatively limited set of places and questions. Historians often focus on England, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, France and Germany. Certain themes have also attracted the lion’s share of attention. These include women’s wartime employment; the effect of war on suffrage; women soldiers and other women directly associated with the troops (as nurses, ambulance drivers, etc.); relationships between the front and the home front; and postwar reactions.

The works under review here reveal the increasing diversity of the field, both geographically and thematically. Their subjects range from lesbian sexuality in Britain to gender and national identity in Alsace, and from models of femininity in Italy to the place of war widows in Germany and the United States. They suggest, collectively, a growing attention to interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative history, and offer different models for how to engage these methodologies. They recast the question of the impact of war on gender relations, and frame the transitions of 1914–1918 in relation to longer-term evolutions. They also call attention to the tensions between representations and experience, and provide material for rethinking the relationships between gender, citizenship, and national identity.

Deborah Cohler’s book, Citizens, Invert, Queer, is the most interdisciplinary, with substantial roots in literary studies. The book has a strong thesis: Cohler argues that in late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered deviant but not lesbian; by the late 1920s, the public generally equated female masculinity with homosexuality. She also argues that the war was pivotal in creating this shift: in short, “Ideological and discursive conditions of home-front England enabled the emergence of a language of female homosexual identity during and immediately after the Great War” (x).

To advance her case, she first seeks to challenge the commonly held view that medical expertise linked gender inversion to homosexuality for men, and somewhat later, for women. She contests the importance of sexology in shaping ideas about lesbianism in the late nineteenth century, arguing that it was only one of a series of discourses. She then seeks to show that lesbianism featured rarely in public discussion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Cohler uses debates over women’s suffrage to argue that masculine women were viewed as socially deviant, not as homosexual. She also turns to places where one might expect more direct discussion of women’s sexuality, particularly the tracts of sexual radicals. Proving a negative is always challenging, but Cohler offers convincing evidence that freethinkers largely ignored female homosexuality, even when discussing other controversial topics, including free love, birth control, eugenics, and male homosexuality.

To document the rise of new attitudes, she looks at Rose Allantini’s Despised and Rejected, a novel that depicted a lesbian pacifist nun and was banned in 1918 under the Defense of the Realm Act. She then explores the contemporaneous trial in which the dancer, Maude Allan, sued a member of Parliament who had published an article, the “Cult of the Clitoris,” suggesting that she was a lesbian. Cohler also examines Parliamentary debates in 1921 about the possibility of criminalizing female homosexuality. She argues...