World War I and the Modern American Woman:

“Today SHE is everywhere; a Salvation lassie, serving coffee and doughnuts on the firing line; in the Red Cross Emergency Hospital at the front; in the munitions factory at home; filling the gaps in man-made industry everywhere….She is omnipresent.”[1] Anne Emerson’s rather breathless account in a 1918 Forum article perfectly captured Americans’ belief that World War I had ushered in dramatic changes for women. Evidence seemed to be everywhere. Working class women were filling men’s jobs in factories, street cars, and offices. Thousands of women served abroad as nurses, social workers (running canteens for soldiers), and telephone operators. On the homefront, women worked for government agencies as well as defense related private organizations. And the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy enlisted over 11,000 women to serve in the U.S., mostly as office workers. And all this activity was widely publicized in posters and print media. Many were ambivalent about women’s new roles, but few could deny that the war had the potential to transform American womanhood.

During the 1920s, the war’s impact on women continued to be key in explaining the much remarked upon “new woman,” who was seemingly liberated in terms of politics, work, and private life, especially sexually. Of course, this New Women, particularly the “flapper,” was a stereotype—and moreover was meant to describe white, young privileged women. Although there many caveats to how “liberated” women might have been in the 1920s, there is no question that at least among mainstream women, new norms and new opportunities were emerging. But was the war really so transformative for American women?

A starting point for exploring this question is women’s political power. The nineteenth amendment granting women suffrage was passed by the states in 1920, less than two years after the end of WWI. The timing was not accidental; if the war was not definitive in achieving suffrage, it accelerated the process. The modern suffrage movement dated from the 1890s, but didn’t see significant success until the 1910s. By 1914, eleven states had given women the right to vote. The previous year marked the resurgence of the Congressional Union Committee (CU) originally created by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Under the leadership of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the CU promoted more militant tactics than the NAWSA, notably staging a dramatic suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., in 1913. Rowdies attacked the women, while the police looked on, indicating just how radical women taking to the streets was in pre-war America. The tactical use of suffrage parades more broadly signaled how militant women such as Paul and Burns were challenging notions about respectable behavior.

Despite their differences, the women of the NAWSA and the CU found common cause briefly when the European war broke out in August 1914. They joined millions of other women and their organizations who were central to the burgeoning peace movement. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, however, the peace movement foundered, especially with the spread of hypernationalism, which called for unyielding support for the American war effort. In 1916 the CU broke with the NAWSA and created the National Woman’s Party (NWP) designed to use already enfranchised women to put pressure on political parties, creating further tensions with the NAWSA. This would escalate when the CU and then the Woman’s Party not only refused to endorse the war, but began picketing the Whitehouse, shocking the nation with banners that proclaimed “Kaiser Wilhelm” and asked why Americans fought for democracy abroad but did not achieve it at home. The eventual arrest of the pickets, their ill treatment while imprisoned, including the force-feeding of some protesters who had embarked on a hunger strike, further publicized the women’s commitment and proved a thorn in President Woodrow Wilson’s political side.

The NWP’s activities infuriated the NAWSA, which had immediately turned from pacificism to supporting the U.S. war effort enthusiastically. Under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, it used the war not for protest, but for evidence of women’s claim to citizenship. The organization celebrated how women’s organizations tirelessly raised funds for the Red Cross and Liberty Loan campaigns and vigorously promoted the federal government’s food conservation drive. And, too, the NAWSA repeatedly drew attention to working women whose labor in war production industries were crucial to winning the war.

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