The Great War of 1914—18 marks, for most historians, the conclusion of the long nineteenth century which started with the French Revolution of 1789.
For women's historians the war has become a key subject of critical debate. Did it mark the end of women's subordination and the beginning of women's long twentieth-century march to liberation? Conversely, did the war grant women limited and ineffectual rights in return for perpetuating their lives along old grooves and postponing the feminist challenge for another fifty years?
The idea of the war as a caesura, a defining moment in modern European history, stems in part from the very nature and scale of the conflict as much as from its political impact on the geopolitics of the continent.
The First World War was a new type of war: a war waged not just on the battlefield but also on the home front. This war, unlike any war of the nineteenth century, dissolved the border between the home front and the field of conflict in both an ideological and a practical sense. The war was not something that was happening somewhere else. For non-combatants in the belligerent countries (Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey), the war was ever present in the lists of lost and fallen soldiers printed in the newspapers, in the letters sent home from soldier sweethearts, in the food shortages, and in the physical destruction wrought by air-raids on civilian populations and by advancing armies on local residents. Women were in the front line, literally and metaphorically. As war workers, mothers, lovers, mourners, servicewomen, nurses and victims of violence as well as the objects of government propaganda and emotional blackmail, women were participants in this war as never before.The Great War has been made to bear a great deal of interpretative weight by historians of women. It comes at the end of a period of feminist activism and caps several decades of quite profound change in women's experience, and is easy to view as a turning point or a catalyst. Some women who lived through the war believed this to be the case. The suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett remarked of women in 1919 that the war had ‘found [them] serfs and left them free'.1 Others have stressed the continuities in gender roles through the war. This approach emphasises the temporary nature of shifts in the labour market and the continuing power of long-standing ideas about gender roles. This chapter examines the ways in which European women's identities and roles were affected by the exigencies of wartime, and asks whether the war marks a turning point for women in terms of individual and collective experience, considering their roles as civilians and combatants, as workers, as sexual beings and as patriots or pacifists.