WOMEN AS THE ENEMY WITHIN

Women, it was said, ‘had the hardest job' of the war. They had to stay at home.²⁰ It was hard to wait, and it was difficult to keep morale high. But women were repeatedly told by governments that their ‘emotional and reproductive labour' was as important to the war effort as the combat role of men.²¹ And precisely because of their crucial role at home they were also identified as potential internal enemies, capable of undermining the war effort if they did not conform to the image of the stoic housewife, if they failed to discipline themselves.

The bodies of civilian women became a focus of attention of a variety of groups during the war, and once again, just as during the 1870s and 1880s across Europe, women's sexuality was subjected to legal and moral dis­cipline. The double-standard lived on and in some respects was reaffirmed during the war as soldiers were permitted considerable sexual freedom as a reward or release from the combat experience. On the other hand, all women, civilians and those in combat-support roles, were expected to eschew temptation in the name of patriotism and morale.

Ironically, though, wartime offered young women new forms of excite­ment and greater freedoms, especially in Britain. Unlike in occupied France and Belgium or blockaded Germany, women in Britain were spared many of the immediate horrors of war and could take advantage of the loosening of family constraints in the absence of many fathers. In the early months of the war, British towns became home to encampments of volunteer soldiers which were an obvious draw for young girls and boys. But whilst the boys could channel their excitement into joining up, girls had no ‘patriotic outlet for their urge to participate in the great national effort', especially since the outbreak of war had been accompanied by large-scale female unemploy- ment.²3 So they hung about the camps, flirted with the soldiers, invited them home for tea, accompanied them to pubs and, it was alleged, engaged in lewd sexual activity. These girls were accused of succumbing to an infection called ‘khaki fever', a condition that made respectable girls ‘lose their heads'. The Times newspaper in October 1914 noted that ‘little imagination is needed to picture the evils which may arise when a young girl in a state of mental restlessness produced by the war finds herself at once unemployed...

Girls stricken with khaki fever were not, however, regarded as innocent victims of circumstance but as little vixens exhibiting an active sexuality, causing a nuisance to soldiers who were loath to accept their advances, and presenting a moral danger to themselves. By January 1916, when conscrip­tion for men was introduced in Britain, there was an influx of women into factory and munitions work, raising new fears about the behaviour of women who were no longer constrained by patriarchal authority. The khaki fever panic was soon superseded by the identification of another internal enemy: the so-called amateurs in Britain, or wild prostitutes in Germany (that is women who had sex for fun). Munitions workers especially took advantage of their situation; living away from parents and with their own wages to spend, there were few constraints on their behaviour. It was this very public display of female sexuality accompanied by smoking, drinking and swearing that concerned critics who saw it as an expression of women's increasing independence from men and which seemed to indicate a rejection of the middle-class respectable morality of the 1880s and 1890s.

It was not only young, single women who attracted critical comment. War-wives and mothers also found themselves censured for all kinds of behaviour deemed inappropriate and damaging to stability at home and the war effort in general. Marriage and birth rates in all the belligerent countries fell during the war whilst the death rate was rising. In Germany, where polit­icians had already been expressing fears about the fertility decline before the war, there was almost a halving of marriages from more than 500,000 in 1913 to only 278,208 in 1915. Not surprisingly the birth rate also fell dramatically from 110 births per 1000 women of childbearing age in 1913 to a low-point of 53 in 1917.

Fulfilling the role of the moral wife and fecund mother was a woman's national duty. Any woman who strayed from the ideal of the respectable wife at home was subject to censure. Women who drank were especially castig­ated, and alleged drunkenness amongst women was blamed for the rise in convictions of child neglect. The foremost child-saving charity in Scotland commented in 1917 that:

In the course of their work the Men Inspectors find that there is a determination amongst a large number of women to go their own way and live as they like in the absence of their husbands...

The decline of the marriage and birth rates also drew attention to the so- called war babies phenomenon. These were children born out of wedlock, either as a consequence of prewar liaisons between women and men who then joined the forces or, as in France, the result of rape or consensual inter­course between French women and German soldiers. In Germany, women who engaged in relationships with enemy men, such as prisoners of war who had been assigned to work on farms, were not only prosecuted but publicly humiliated in the media who referred to them as ‘dishonoured women' and as women who had no national pride.²⁹

The official justifications for these attempts to control female sexuality in all of the participating countries were given as the need to prevent disease and the requirement to maintain morale. The fighting strength of the country was said to be influenced by not only the fitness of its soldiers but also sol­diers’ motivation to defend home and family. Both arguments were flawed in theory and in execution, not least because the military authorities were powerless to prevent soldiers using prostitutes and, recognising this, they put their efforts into trying to protect the men from disease. ‘Every time that you have the weakness to be tempted by these women, don’t neglect to use a rubber preservatif these words warned French soldiers of unprotected sex with prostitutes yet implicitly condoned their actions whilst the women were positioned as the active seducers.³⁰ German soldiers were not so lucky. The military authorities there preferred to recommend chemical treatments for sexually transmitted diseases as well as implementing a novel idea to reduce the number of prostitutes.

The war transformed the role of the family. The absence of men, often for years at a time, meant the family no longer fulfilled a reproductive function. Rather the function of the family was the production and consumption of goods. This shift in emphasis helps to explain why attempts to discipline women's sexual behaviour had little impact. In Germany it has been sug­gested that the state lost its moral legitimacy as women especially were forced to adopt subversive or illegal strategies in order simply to survive. Women who were working in the war industries and continuing to fulfil their familial obligations came to realise that the state was not on their side. Women, in Daniel's words, ‘emancipated themselves from the system'.³¹ When they demonstrated against food shortages, it was not the privation as such that prompted their protest, but a perception that inequalities in food distribution had been caused by iniquitous state measures. Street protests targeted the government for its perceived failure to stem profiteering and for its inability to engineer equitable distribution of food. Commenting upon disturbances in Vienna amongst women waiting for hours in a queue for a pathetic ration of horse-meat, Anna Eisenmenger regarded the ‘patient apathy with which we housewives endure... blameworthy and incomprehensible.'³² The war politicised Austrian and German women, not because these special circum­stances permitted state intrusion into private matters which women resented, but because women themselves came to understand that the system (rather than the war) was at the root of their problems. By 1917, women were joining with strikers from munitions factories and demanding not just bread but peace and democratic reform. The enemy within was not the sexually promiscuous girl but the housewife.

Food shortages, price rises and war-weariness alongside long working hours and low wages for female war workers were the immediate causes of female unrest across Europe. From Glasgow to St Petersburg, ordinary women — women who had never been involved in politics — took to the streets, went on strike and took part in demonstrations, acts of sabotage and civil disobedience. Italian women workers in the industrial centre of Turin, angry at the food shortages, the long hours of work and the continuation of the war, marched through the streets to the city hall in August 1917 demand­ing food and an end to the war.³³ At the start of 1918, women workers in the Loire region of France marched in the streets shouting ‘Down with the war! We want bread!' and singing the Internationale. ‘It's no longer a question of extra pennies or the young class of conscripts', wrote one working mother to a relative in the trenches. ‘It's peace that's important.'³⁴ Even in non­belligerent Spain the war had an impact, causing inflation and food short­ages. In cities across the country, women marched to demand reductions in the price of basic foodstuffs such as olive oil, fish and potatoes, and in Barce­lona during the harsh winter of early 1918 housewives and textile workers attacked coal trucks, went on strike, and demanded reductions in rents and prices to pre-war levels.³⁵ In Glasgow and other cities across Britain with a high proportion of rented accommodation, women reacted to rent increases imposed by landlords who were exploiting the high demand for rented housing from the influx of war industry workers. Tenants unable to pay were evicted. At a time when the home front was being exhorted to unify behind the war effort, tenants regarded landlords' actions as morally reprehensible. Crowds, mainly of women, gathered outside the homes of evicted families, and in 1915 tenants began a rent strike — a housewives' campaign which challenged not only the landlords but the state as well. A combination of kitchen cabinets, local committees and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association, none of whom were formally affiliated to any political move­ment, successfully managed this protest by working women and, by the end of 1915, the government had introduced legislation to limit rents.³⁶ This was not the end for Glasgow's women, however, who, whilst not engaging in revolutionary activity to compare with their sisters in Germany and Russia, were motivated to involve themselves in the peace movement and labour politics at the war's end.

Elsewhere, women's action had more immediate and far-reaching con­sequences. In Germany, working-class women's experiences had alienated them from the state. War-weariness and a desire for peace had been evident across the country since 1916, but housewives and war workers were rightly regarded as the most radically opposed to the continuation of the war. The starvation diet and the mistrust of the wartime authorities, allied with women's lack of identification with a state that did not recognise them as citizens, fuelled collective action. By 1918, working women had already eman­cipated themselves from the state; they laid the groundwork for the revolu­tion. In Russia, similar privations — food shortages, rising prices, low wages — plus anger at the government's inefficiency as well as the slaughter of men on the Eastern Front, fuelled working women's protests in St Petersburg and Moscow. Already by 1915 women were stoning and looting food markets and stores and engaging in strike action, but on 23 February 1917 (Russian calendar), International Women's Day, the food riots, strikes and the mass demonstration of women came together in the city of St Petersburg. ‘The

Russian Revolution was begun by hungry women and children demanding bread and herrings', recorded one observer. ‘They started by wrecking tram cars and looting a few small shops. Only later did they, together with workmen and politicians, become ambitious to wreck that mighty edifice the Russian autocracy.'³⁷ These were not organised or political women in any formal sense; they were workers and housewives, war-weary and tired of endless queues for food. As in Germany, their role was to destabilise the regime rather than to create a new one. The war had stimulated women's nascent political consciousness by asking them to play the role of producer and consumer but it gave them nothing in return.