THE HOME AT WAR
It was usual during the war years to represent the home and battle fronts as diametrically opposed, mirroring perceived gender roles. The home front was perceived as feminine, conveyed by the image of peaceful and stable home life and the absence of many men.
The fighting front was indisputably male terrain, dominated by expressions of masculinity — violence, aggression and male camaraderie. It was a dichotomy used by governments desperate to maintain morale amongst the troops and stability at home, but it was also alluded to by feminists and pacifists for whom war was innately masculine in contrast to the more peaceful, conciliatory and life-affirming nature of woman. Yet, the experience of war did not fall neatly into two separate domains. The borders of each front were porous. The battle front was purveyed by scenes of domesticity; the home front was invaded by war.Women were mobilised during the First World War as never before in wartime. As workers and as civilian service personnel they participated directly in the war machine. Mothers and potential mothers were urged to reproduce as part of their patriotic duty; motherhood became war work. As non-combatants they were subject to domestic legislation framed to meet military demands. This mobilisation of the home front made it more likely that the war would impinge directly on people's everyday lives. In Britain, France, Germany and the Low Countries, civilian populations were targeted by air-raids. The invasion and occupation of Belgium and France brought stories of atrocities perpetrated against civilians including the rape of women. In Britain, the presence of Commonwealth, and later American, soldiers brought the war into villages and towns hitherto untouched by the conflict. In Germany, the chronic food shortages as a result of the Allied blockade of German ports put housewives on a continuous war footing.
In those countries where the war was physically being fought, civilian populations experienced the war on their doorstep: soldiers moving to and from the front, the retreat of the wounded, the sound of shells. In Freiburg in southern Germany, close to the border with France, the war was just 50 kilometres distant so that, when the westerly wind blew, windows in the town rattled from the roar of the heavy guns; ‘no-one, no woman, no child could forget for one day that we were in a war', wrote an observer in 1917.2 And the war was ever present in people's consciousness, brought home by letters from the front, lists of casualties in the newspapers and newsreel shown at the cinema. Women, then, were not innocent bystanders in this war. They were asked to fill a number of positions, all contingent upon the unique wartime conditions but at the same time informed by pre-existing ideas about woman's role. The nineteenth-century construction of woman as wife, mother, domestic manager and emotional anchor, allied to the more negative assumptions about her dangerous sexuality and her place in a wartime society where men were absent, informed the ways in which governments sought to control the home front. It was almost as if the disruption of wartime was used by governments to justify a return to values that women had just spent decades resisting.The first women to experience the impact of war on their doorsteps were those living in the regions of Belgium and France invaded and then occupied by the German army. Almost immediately following the invasion in August 1914, so-called atrocity stories started to circulate in Britain and France, telling of the alleged rape and brutalisation of women and the murder of infants. Reports of outrages, including the rape of pregnant women and women having their breasts cut off, were difficult to evaluate, although in view of what we know about more recent conflicts (in the former Yugoslavia, for instance) it is entirely credible that the rape of women may have been an element of military campaigns in the past.
The spreading of atrocity stories was not the preserve of the Allied powers though. In Alsace, a contested region of France, German soldiers returning from combat told tales about the French cutting out the tongues of those who spoke ill of their presence.3 Whether the reports were true or exaggerated, the uses to which the stories were put illustrates the dominant attitudes towards women in this particular conflict. It was no coincidence that Belgium was frequently portrayed as a female victim of a brutal rape which was subsequently ‘milked’ of her resources.4 The representation of wartime atrocities in newspaper reports and poster campaigns ‘bolstered an understanding of gender that aimed to preserve traditional notions of male and female behaviour as well as the divide between the sexes exemplified by the home front/war front split’ in the face of evidence to the contrary, that is, that the war front had already infiltrated the home.5 Stories of rape were used explicitly to mobilise men to defend their womenfolk and their home and to encourage women, who could not fight, to persuade men to volunteer. ‘You have read what the Germans have done in Belgium’, read one British recruitment poster; ‘Have you thought what they would do if they invaded this Country?’ The poster, though, was directed not at men but at women: ‘Won’t you help and send a man to join the Army today?’6Notwithstanding the immediate shock value of the stories of rape and violence against women, the real propaganda value lay in the ways in which acts of violence against women were used to reinforce a number of influential discourses on woman during wartime. The first was the portrayal in British propaganda of women as (sexually) passive or helpless victims whom men had to defend. The second, which pervaded French discussion of rape, was the emphasis on women as mothers, as reproducers of the nation and the race. In both cases, concern for the rape victim was subordinated to issues of national survival.
In Britain, atrocity stories were used to encourage men to join the armed forces; in France debate focused on the potential outcome of rape, the so-called boche-baby. In the light of shifting attitudes against interracial mixing in the colonies in the prewar years, it is not surprising that, in France, debates about the availability of abortion and what or who determined the nationality of any child born of rape, dominated discussion at the expense of concern about the violence perpetrated against women.7 War was violent and rape was only the most obvious intrusion of that violence into everyday life.In France and Belgium, the German invasion and occupation took the war into people’s homes and into their psyches. Most women were not the victims of physical or sexual violence at the hands of the enemy, but they heard the stories from refugees or read them in the newspapers, and lived in a state of fear of those ‘barbarians’ who requisitioned their homes and food and, it was feared, their bodies. In Britain and Germany, women were largely spared the anticipatory terror of sexual violence, although those living along Germany’s southern border with France were on constant alert fearing an imminent French invasion. But their femininity was compromised or threatened in different ways: by the destructive impact of air-raids and, in Germany, the effects of the British naval blockade which transformed women's role in the home as they strove to put food on the table. Aerial bombardment by planes and Zeppelin airships in the south of England and in the south-west of Germany took the war to civilians for the first time. In Freiburg, for instance, the population was totally unprepared for air attacks and was left to pray to God to protect them in the absence of any effective defence. ‘Trembling and silent we sat downstairs in the hallway, the ceiling shook, the windows and chandeliers rattled, a thunderous noise rolled over the house as I had never experienced before', wrote Charlotte Herder in her diary after one French onslaught.8 Civilians, women and children included, were now regarded as legitimate targets and those who had been bombed out of their homes were used by British propaganda to shame men into signing up and doing their duty for home and country. ‘Innocent' women, who had found themselves caught up in the war, were feted as stalwart heroines, representative of the determination of the country as a whole to stand up to the enemy.
Women workers in munitions factories, on the other hand, although much more at risk of death than their sisters in homes along the British south coast — owing to the frequent factory explosions and Zeppelin raids on industrial plants — were given little praise or even recognition for the risks they took. In fact, such explosions were rarely publicised for fear of affecting morale, and in one such event — at a shell-filling factory in Lancashire — the workers were shut in behind locked and guarded gates while the shells exploded inside.9 In Germany, though, women were forthright in their criticisms of the authorities. In the spring of 1917 a group of women sent an anonymous letter to the town council of Freiburg cleverly making use of the familiar language of male protection, remarking that ‘it is bad enough that our menfolk are out in danger, but we women and children must be better protected at home.'10The most tangible impact of the war in German and, to a lesser extent, in British and French homes, was felt at the kitchen table. In Britain there were shortages of food staples such as tea and sugar, the supply of fresh food in the towns was affected by the submarine warfare of 1916—17, and by 1918 rationing of bread, meat, butter and bacon had been introduced. In France, requisitioning of food by German troops contributed to shortages and price rises. But the privations and inconveniences experienced by British and French housewives were nothing compared with those of their German counterparts who ‘spent countless hours fighting the war from their own kitchens'.11 In the absence of 9 million male ‘breadwinners', provided with inadequate state assistance, and obliged to pay extortionate prices for basic foodstuffs, working-class women especially were forced to take paid work and to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy procuring and preparing food. By 1917, rations of meat, eggs and butter were less than 20 per cent of peacetime consumption levels, basic food prices had increased by 800 per cent, and millions only just survived on a fat- and protein-free diet.12 Those in urban areas grew vegetables on any available space, and when these supplies were inadequate, women and children embarked upon ‘hamstering' journeys to the countryside where they could buy or barter foodstuffs.
In the towns, barter was the only other way to obtain food if one did not have the requisite ration cards or enough money to purchase items on the black market.In this type of economy the role of housewife and household manager became crucial to survival and the result was the politicisation of women, who blamed the government for their plight. From the beginning of the war, housewives had been criticised for stockpiling food; as the food shortage intensified they were reproached for manipulating the ration system, for not managing the pitiful rations sensibly, and for obtaining from farms food which had been destined for the towns thus disrupting the government's food distribution system. From the point of view of the women trying to put a meal on the table, the state was an impediment. The so-called turnip winter of 1916—17 was a turning point in Germany. The winter that year was exceptionally cold and wet, the frost ruined the potato crop, there was a lack of fat, meat and dairy products, and people were forced to delve amongst rubbish heaps and alongside railway lines for fuel. The story of Berlin women rushing out of their homes when a horse collapsed and died in the street, tearing at it with knives and even collecting the blood in containers, relays the sheer desperation of urban inhabitants.13 Urban suffering was endemic. Mortality rates rose as a result of an influenza epidemic as well as malnutrition, tuberculosis and other diseases of the poor and weak. In the light of rumours that the war was lost, food riots and demonstrations by women and young people became commonplace. ‘It is the countless female workers who constantly agitate and stir things up', commented an official report from 1916.14 The extension of the war into the kitchen transformed the role of housewife. According to Ute Daniel, ‘The subversive strategies that, above all, workingclass women developed during the war to fulfil their responsibility of providing for their families turned into strategies of subversion that, in the end, irrevocably destroyed the consensus of wartime society between the rulers and the ruled.'15
Hunger, air-raids, fear of invasion — all brought the war home to women. But the common experience for all women on both sides was loss. The massive loss of life and bodily mutilation amongst soldiers, first on the Western Front in France and Belgium and later in the war in the east in Russia, had an enormous impact on those left behind. The war generated awesome statistics: around 9 million people dead, 21 million seriously wounded, 5 million widows and 9 million orphaned children. Individual stories show how the war, in its sheer human devastation, destroyed families and forced women to reconfigure their lives as mourners, widows, and carers. Anna Eisenmenger, a middle-class Austrian wife and mother, graphically and movingly described her loss with hardly a trace of self-pity. In 1918 she wrote in her diary of the armistice and the end of ‘the terrible massacre of human lives'.
After four years that seemed as if they would never end, I have to mourn a terrible war sacrifice: my husband and Otto [son] dead, Erni [son] for the time being deprived of his sight; Rudi [son-in-law] a cripple with only half a leg; Karl [son] utterly changed owing to his head wound and perhaps not sane; Liesbeth [daughter] weak and ailing for lack of nourishing food, Aunt Bertha bedridden with bone-softening due to under nourishment... Five of my nephews and one of my nieces were sacrificed to the war fury... myself, still in health, but nervously overstrained and in need of a rest. Fully conscious of my heavy obligations, and firmly resolved to withstand the tempests of fate, and under these melancholy circumstances still to make the best of everything.16
Anna Eisenmenger's experience was shared by the women of the enemy nations. ‘Before I had reached my twenty-first birthday', wrote the Englishwoman Barbara Wootton, ‘I had experienced the deaths of my father, my brother, my favourite school friend and the husband to whom I had been married in theory for five weeks and in practice for something less than forty-eight hours... I do not think that anyone can live through such experiences without some significant and permanent marks remaining.'17 The daily casualty lists, the constant fear that a loved one would not return, the fearful wait for the telegram, personalised the war for women. The letters received from the front brought the fighting home to those waiting. The most well- known female chronicler of the war, Vera Brittain (1893—1970), described how, upon receiving her dead fiance Roland's mud-caked uniform, the smell of it vividly brought home to her the ‘mortality & decay & corruption' of war.18 Some of the bereaved asked if they could be told where their loved ones were buried since, at least in the British case, bodies were left close by the field of battle. Despite all of this, the overriding impression gained from personal memoirs is of stoic women doing their best to carry on. We know very little about those women who cracked under the strain. The story of a young German woman who ‘went mad' upon hearing of the death of her husband can surely not be an isolated one.19 From the point of view of those — the majority — who lost loved ones, the First World War represented a change of gear, a rupture in personal lives. For the woman whose husband was killed leaving her with children to bring up alone, and for the young girl who lost her betrothed, life in the future would be a far cry from what they had envisaged.