Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War.

Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War. By Susan R. Grayzel (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xix plus 334pp.).

In this engrossing account, Susan Grayzel argues that despite the vast upheavals traversing British and French society during the First World War, gender roles and identities survived remarkably unscathed. Leaving aside, as she says, the debate over "whether the war was 'good' or 'bad' for women" (6), Grayzel instead claims that each society accepted an expanded range of legitimate public roles for women as long as their capacity as mothers remained at the center of their civic identities. The new roles women soon played in their respective wartime societies therefore posed no threat to the prevailing gender system since women's foremost civic responsibility--to bear and raise future soldiers--still defined their public and private purpose. To recreate the public debate over women's wartime activities in British and French society, Grayzel draws on an array of sources including novels, plays, newspapers, legislative debates, feminist tracts, public trials, and monuments.

Each society granted men and women a separate sphere to occupy for the duration of the war. Men would fight to protect women physically from the Germans and emotionally from the horrors of war. Women, after encouraging men to enlist, would send enough letters and packages to keep morale high in the trenches, do their best to provide the nation with future soldiers when their men came home on leave, and inspire their men in uniform to perform heroically on the battlefield. Immediately, Grayzel notes, the reality challenged this gender fantasy in significant ways. Impormntly, many women lived at the front, either by choice as volunteers for noncombatant jobs like nursing or as captives in occupied territories. Air raid attacks brought the war home to female inhabitants of Paris and London, while the stream of letters flowing back and forth between the front and the rear enlightened most women to the inhumane degradation occurring on the battlefield. Living with a physically wounded or shell-shocked solder soon exposed the most sheltered woman to the true horrors of the war. The highly publicized rapes of women in the German occupied territories vividly illustrated that the war's victims included many not in uniform.

Despite this constant blurring between battlefront and homefront, gender roles remained remarkably resilient. To make this point, Grayzel focuses on how outrage over rape in the occupied territories evolved into a debate over motherhood and nationality once cases of French women forcibly impregnated by German soldiers began to appear. Was the maternal instinct and French blood of these women strong enough to bear and raise these children or was abortion justified in these cases? Some advocated de-criminalizing abortion to rid France of this bad blood, while others like. Dr. Gustave Drouineau, claimed that it was illogical to assume that "nine seconds of paternity counted for more that nine months of maternity."(62) In Britain, stories of rape from Belgium became stock propaganda images intended to encourage men and women to assume the gender roles of soldier and supporter outlined above.

Much of the book offers a chilling portrait of how total war, with its accompanying evils of massive death on the battlefield and an ever increasing authoritarian tone from supposedly democratic governments, impacted French and British women. In both societies, the state again and again stepped in to regulate or control women's bodies under the guise of promoting motherhood and the future of the race. Besides the incessant drumbeat to replace the men lost on the battlefield with a new generation, French law forbade abortion (even in cases of rape) and gave nursing mothers regular breaks during the working day to ensure women did not feel compelled to chose between motherhood and working to support the cause. Hoping to deter unwed British women from making the same choice, those with war babies became eligible for funds initially reserved for soldiers and sailors' families. Laws regulating illicit sexual relationships also focused on monitoring female bodies as transmitters of disease. Because they abandoned t heir assigned role as the guardians of moral virtue, girls took the majority of the blame for unregulated sexual relationships in Britain. Just the mere suspicion that they were spreading venereal disease was all the authorities needed to subject women to an intimate medical exam whether or not they consented. Why is it that a "man's sin is always to be traced to woman's power of temptation?," dissenting British feminists asked.(134) France continued, as it had before the war, to regulate brothels and give prostitutes regular medical exams. State control of women's bodies occurred whether or not they were using those bodies to defy or support the war effort. In Britain, some women eventually served as uniformed noncombatants to free more men for battle. Uniforming the female body immediately provoked questions over whether male privates would soon have to salute female officers. To avoid this, women of rank received a rose or fleur-de-lis to designate their grade rather than recognized badges of military rank . The body underneath the uniform continued to matter more than the similarity of roles many men and women now performed for the military.

The alternative voice that feminists offered throughout the war receives major attention in the book. Feminists, however, both challenged and embraced the prevailing gender divisions to send their message. Pacifist feminists, for example, embraced their identity as mothers to justify their refusal to support the war. Life-givers by nature, how could they be expected to offer up the flesh and blood they had created and nurtured? Feminists used this difference-based argument to justify their claim for full political rights, arguing they would bring a much needed voice for peace into government. During her trial for defeatism, French feminist Helene Brion challenged the government's right to charge her with a political crime when she had no political rights or legal status in French society before asserting that as a woman she naturally had pacifist sentiments.

Brion's statement freed her, but did little to advance the cause of suffrage in France. In 1918 British women gained a limited franchise, while French women had to wait until 1944 to vote. Grayzel dismisses the significance of this difference, focusing instead on the similar intentions of each society to protect the gender order as constructed. In France, this meant denying women the vote. In Britain, viewing female suffrage as a "motherhood franchise" helped it win passage. "Ultimately," Grayzel writes, "it was their relationship to men and to the state as mothers that remained the core of their claims to national identity." (214) Even peace did not bring respite from the image of the mother in service of the nation. The figure of the mourning mother graced more than a few war monuments and took central stage at the interment of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey.

As this core argument suggests, there is much compelling information and rich insight in Grayzel's account of the public debate surrounding women during the war. A moving vignette towards the end of the book, however, suggests a missing piece to the portrait which might have contributed significantly to the argument Grayzel constructs by giving more insight into how common women reacted to these public pronouncements of their value and place in society. After the war, French police reported with sympathy the clandestine exhumations by women who refused to leave the body of their loved ones in official cemeteries. Asserting her own right to the body, one mother dug up her son's body in the middle of the night, registered it as baggage on the train ride home, and reinterred it in her village cemetery. This story in the final pages exposes the absence of the voices of ordinary women throughout the book. Grayzel consciously limits herself to the public debate, but ultimately the reader feels as detached from the ordinary women under consideration as the men and women making public pronouncements about them. Marrying, mothering, and grieving have a private as well as public dimension which deserves consideration in any discussion of gender and civic identity.