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  • The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil
  • Sarah Glassford
Lynn Dumenil, The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2017)

In The Second Line of Defense, Lynn Dumenil offers a sweeping synthesis of American women's responses to their country's involvement in World War I, and attempts to reconcile two conflicting perspectives on how the war affected their lives and opportunities. On the one hand, there is consensus among American women's historians that the war did not constitute a collective turning point or watershed for women; on the other hand, Americans of the war years widely believed that it did. After laying out these contradictory positions in a pithy introduction, Dumenil sifts and weighs the evidence in five thematic chapters spanning the full extent of women's involvement in the war: political activism (both for and against American [End Page 291] participation), home front voluntary efforts, war work in Europe, paid labour in the USA, and visual images of women in wartime popular culture. In doing so she synthesizes a wide array of secondary literature while delving into archival sources including women's memoirs and private papers, institutional records of women's organizations and government agencies, print journalism, posters, and film. A lengthy epilogue follows these wartime developments through the 1920s. Chapter 1 is primarily a political history; chapter 5 is a cultural history; chapters 2, 3, and 4 share an emphasis on women's varied forms of wartime labour in diverse settings.

Dumenil persuasively argues that World War I offered genuinely new and exciting opportunities for American women, particularly in the paid workforce – opportunities that many eagerly embraced, and that were heavily publicized at the time. The intersection of wartime mobilization and women's own activism (pushing for significant roles and viewing themselves as a second line of defense) made these opportunities possible. However, the constraints placed on mobilization by early 20th century American gender norms, and the many fractures of class, race, ethnicity, region, and political ideology among women themselves would keep wartime changes from leading to lasting social change or even temporary gender equality during the war years themselves.

The brief duration of American participation in the war and the geographical remoteness of the fighting enabled Americans to remain more optimistic than other combatant countries' citizens when it came to envisioning the potential outcomes of the war. The year 1917 saw mass mutinies within the French army, for instance, while Canada was bitterly divided over conscription for military service. By contrast, this inaugural year of American participation in the war was marked by hyper-patriotic war enthusiasm. Although prominent and vocal pacifist women in the US held few illusions about the likely outcomes of the war, Dumenil asserts that many other women "viewed the war as a vehicle for agendas that often related only indirectly to the war itself," (4) including social reform, racial uplift, personal adventure, and access to better jobs and higher wages. Unfortunately, she concludes, "the war's promise for women fell short." (275) The Nineteenth Amendment (federal women's suffrage), the feminization of clerical work, and the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities were among the only lasting impacts of this brief period of change and possibility, Dumenil suggests: each significant in its own right, but collectively falling far short of ushering in a golden era of gender and racial equality, or improved social, public health, and/or working conditions.

The breadth of the topic tackled in The Second Line of Defense and diversity of sources used leaves the book somewhat uneven in tone. The chapter on political activism, for instance, convincingly conveys the complex web of women's organizations that existed during the war, and the clashing ideologies they held and strategies they employed (ranging from conservative maternalist reformers to radical socialist suffragists, and all points in-between) – but the chapter itself is a somewhat flavourless alphabet soup of organizational acronyms, and relies heavily on the official statements and writings of major public figures. The chapter on overseas war work, by contrast, is rich...

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