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WWI Patriotism, Politics And Women

Imbued With Patriotic Fervor

After April 1917, there was little public debate in the U.S. about American involvement in the war. This was due in large part to the time and energy politicians, public officials, and other civic leaders devoted to instilling patriotic spirit in the citizenry and rooting out suspected dissent. The addresses, editorials, and especially the propaganda posters are imbued with patriotic fervor. The most immediate aim of patriotic messages, of course, was to exhort America to contribute to the war effort, either by serving in the armed forces or by marshalling financial and material resources.

The propaganda posters made the bluntest appeals to nationalist sentiment and anti-German stereotypes. One poster entitled "The Spirit of '18" directly linked the Revolutionary Spirit of 1776 and the world war. Another poster offered a stark choice between "German Slavery or Liberty Bonds." A third contrasted "Civilization vs. Barbarism." Patriotism, in whatever form it was expressed, left little room for political bickering. Beneath the patriotic zeal, however, there was a fear of enemy subversion and espionage that sometimes verged on the paranoid. Americans were swept up in the nationwide "Red Scare" between 1918 and 1921. The outbreak of war, closely followed by Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, built on existing conservatism and inspired a crusade against foreigners, pacifists and opponents of the war, political radicals, and organized labor. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 gave government the power to censor the mails, suppress the media, and imprison a wide range of suspected radicals. The American Civil Liberties Union formed in 1917 in response to the crackdown. It challenged in the courts some restrictions, resulting in several important legal precedents in the area of free speech.

The War Dominated The Curriculum

World War I greatly influenced elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities. The schools contributed mightily to the war effort in several important ways. In a 1917 editorial, one unidentified teacher asked "What Shall We Teachers Do?" to help defeat Germany. The answer was to encourage students of all ages to collect scrap metal, food, bandages, and other raw materials, to sell war bonds, and to plant gardens and then can the produce.

Many male collegians and young teachers became soldiers. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. provost marshal general had wanted to exempt college students from service, but officials strongly opposed such exemption. Instead, most collegians, joined the Students' Army Training Corp. They drilled on campuses and studied Military Science before departing for officer training.

The war dominated the curriculum and the daily lives of male and female teachers and students for the duration of the conflict. In 1917, teachers were urged to indoctrinate their young charges in the superiority of America's democratic civilization over German despotism. Teachers also set the lessons to song with "Patriotic Music in the Grades". Children sang classics, such as "America," "Yankee Doodle," and the "Star-Spangled Banner," but they also learned "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem, as well as popular new songs, such as "We're Going Over," "Over There," "What Kind of An American Are You?" and "If I had a Son for Each Star in Old Glory."

In 1915 and 1916, pacifism and opposition to American involvement had widespread support on campuses. However that sentiment rapidly changed once the United States declared war on Germany. Seemingly every aspect of campus life was altered by the war. Football rallies became Liberty Bond drives where they chanted "Beat Germany." Instructors dropped German from the curriculum and replaced it with Military French. Student-soldiers turned campuses into a maze of trenches and barbed wire.

Second-Class Citizens

By the time of the World War, women were exercising more economic and social power and enjoying more legal rights than their mothers had, but they remained second-class citizens. Working class black and white women had been toiling alongside men in the factories since the turn of the century. Other women had joined the ranks of public school teachers until they outnumbered male teachers, though the salaries of teachers dropped as the gender balance shifted. In the 1910s, however, most middle and upper class married women still remained at home, where they managed the household and the family budget and were thus influential decision makers. Before the war, advertisers often targeted female consumers, while during the war, public campaigns to conserve scarce resources or raise money were often directed at women.

Since the turn of the century, many middle and upper class women also had sufficient economic and social status to join--and in some cases lead--civic and religious organizations that pursued ambitious reform agendas. Women were in the forefront of the temperance movement and then the subsequent prohibition campaigns against alcohol. On the one hand, women were assuming public leadership positions that stretched the traditional boundaries of their duties as wives and mothers. On the other hand, middle class society sanctioned such reform activism because it seemed only to be expanding women's natural role of nurturing mothers to include the larger "family" of their community. Along the way, however, women began to set their reformist sights, not on other "family members", but on themselves. Specifically, they realized that they needed political power to push government to improve the status of women and implement other elements of reform. Like prohibition, the idea of women's suffrage had been debated before the war, but the outbreak of military conflict and the importance of women to the war effort elevated prohibition and suffrage to the forefront of the national agenda.

World War I replicated, in expanded form, the pattern of the Progressive era, in both stretching the boundaries of women's responsibilities while confining that new activism within traditional gender roles. The federal government recognized the potential of the civilian "womanpower reserve" and began to actively recruit it. Propaganda posters targeted females at a young age, with clarion calls s such as "For Girls must work that men may fight: Y.W.C.A". In response, women became a vital part of the war effort. After 1917, 12,000 women across the country volunteered with the Army Nursing Corps. Women even served as yeomen aboard a Navy ship. (The Navy was the only branch of the armed forces to form women's auxiliaries during the war.) At home, women filled the ranks of the WCCS, the Red Cross, and other charitable organizations.

Even more important to the war effort was the fact that thousands of average housewives diverted part of the family budget to buy war bonds. Many also followed advice on how to save precious cloth and suggestions on how to Conserve Food and Keep Down Waste. Finally, there was the unseen army of white and black women who continued to toil in factories. Some of them also took on new jobs and responsibilities temporarily vacated by men. Many prominent white women also assumed influential leadership positions in private groups and government agencies during the war.

With the benefit of historical perspective, three conclusions seem clear. First, as in nineteenth century wars, women during World War I were motivated primarily by necessity and patriotism, not by a more modern sense of "feminist liberation." Second, with the exception of female factory labor, most of women's war work was confined to tasks that fit within their idealized roles as mothers--nursing troops, sewing bandages, conserving food, etc. ... In addition, expressions of patriotism often framed the war in traditional terms of masculinity and femininity and romantic love. Boys were stirred by the appeals to masculine heroism, as illustrated by recruiting posters like "Wanted: Husky Young Americans" or "Tell That to the Marines". Posters such as the "Spirit of America" presented Lady Liberty in a highly feminized, even sexualized form, while "Home Hospitality" depicted an idealized matronly figure tending to her "boys".

These young men will die, if need be, to save you young women from worse than hell. True, they are fighting for their country and are every inch patriots; but, after all, dear young women, it is for you, and you, and you, that they fight. Behind every bayonet, as it flashes in the sunshine of France and buries itself in the bowels of some savage German, is the stimulating memory of you, the girl he left behind. And the honor and glory of being thought worthy of you--the thought that you love and honor him--will nerve and sustain him to the end. But one flutter of your handkerchief, and he will storm the ramparts of hell. Judge Robert Winston to female students at St. Mary's College Raleigh, NC

The war's greatest contribution to the nationwide "woman movement" was in helping create new attitudes toward the role of women in public life. This helped secure the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 granting white women the legal right to vote. Despite wartime acceleration of state and federal government activism, the Progressive movement lost rather than gained ground after the war, leaving many women reformers without a public stage.

In the 1920s, the now familiar figure of the flamboyant flapper burst onto the scene and into our historical imagination, but the image did not fit most American women. The flapper, a young girl, with cropped hair and slinky dress, smoking a cigarette or sipping from a hip flask of illegal liquor, listening to hot jazz music while in the company of a young man, symbolized a youthful postwar generation's revolt against gender roles and sexual propriety. The flapper was one of the most sensational parts of the "Roaring Twenties," but only a small percentage of the female population found the new fashions and scandalous new behaviors appealing rather than appalling. This was especially true in rural Southern states.

Academic Affairs Library (2002). North Carolinians and the Great War. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Georgetown University Library · Special Collections Exhibitions. FIRST CALL. Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

World War I Day by Day A detailed chronological history of WWI from the opening shots at Sarajevo in June 1914 to the armistice in November 1918. All of the major war theaters are covered, as is the fighting in the air and at sea. Dated entries discuss espionage, home fronts, politics, and technology. Additionally, there are a number of features highlighting the conflict's decisive weapons, key personalities and events, and strategy and tactics.

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