History 281–Handout for Second Essay Assignment Answer one of the questions below in a typed, double-spaced, 3-4 page essay. Be sure to build your answer using evidence (material from the lectures an

History 281–Handout for Second Essay Assignment Answer one of the questions below in a typed, double-spaced, 3-4 page essay. Be sure to build your answer using evidence (material from the lectures an
Gender Crisis in the 1920s? This course unit covers the debates about gender during the 1920s. These debates (which are the subject of your readings for this unit) mostly took place among European conservatives, who were upset or concerned about changes in women’s roles that they saw around them in the period after WWI. Liberal or politically progressive people were NOT so upset about these changes, so they generally did not dominate this discussion (which was carried out in newspapers, magazines, novels, theater pieces, etc.). So, you should bear in mind while you do the readings that certainly not ALL Europeans were concerned about the changes in gender roles that followed WWI, but that traditionally-minded people, religious people, and conservatives certainly were. It is their voices that you largely hear, in these readings. While it was mostly the Right that was upset or angered, the changes were not only in their own minds: they did exist. The 1920s witnessed some shifts in women’s political rights, occupational patterns, in how women dressed, and in how they were portrayed in popular culture. So, this unit first summarizes briefly some of these changes, and then moves to introduce what the reactions of conservatives were to these changes. First, most European nations saw significant changes in women’s political rights. In most European nations (as in the USA) women were given the right to vote, and almost achieved equality in most other civil and political rights as well. The exceptions to this rule where the Catholic nations of France, Italy, and Spain, where women were NOT given the right to vote until 1945. But in most other nations, they had achieved a formal (and superficial) political equality by 1918. At the same time, this period witnessed a shift in women’s occupational patterns. It’s not that the percentage of women in the labor force changed very much, in most nations. For most of this period, women’s labor force rates were static. But the kinds of jobs that women did changed somewhat, with the result that women’s work was more “visible” to the public. As a result, there was an erroneous (but widespread) impression that the number of women employed outside the home had grown enormously. Before WWI, the main areas in which women were employed were as servants (in the homes of bourgeois families); in the textile industries or in other sorts of clothing production; or in food production of various sorts. After WWI, many of these areas of employment declined. Increasing numbers of bourgeois families could no longer afford servants, after WWI. And there were newer, more attractive areas of employment for working women, which younger women increasingly preferred to domestic service or to textile production. These newer areas of employment included: the rapid growth of all sorts of “office work” (typing, stenography, clerical work, telephone receptionist); the increased employment of women in retail sales (esp. as saleswomen in stores); and in factories of the socalled “light industries,” which made new consumer goods (small new electronic products like irons, or radios). Thus, there was a decline in traditional women’s jobs, especially in the number of women employed as domestic servants and in Mom and Pop businesses. Women whose mothers had been servants for years (before they had married and had children) now preferred to become typists, instead. And at the same time, many of the “new jobs” were more public (certainly office work and retail sales put the women in a more “visible” position to the public than working as servants in private homes had. Since many of these new jobs more public and visible, there was therefore a perceived growth in number of women employed. Needless to say, this was NOT perceived as a positive development by conservatives or traditionally religious people. A third change that was widely commented on during the 1920s was an alteration in women’s dress. For an image of what I’m talking about, please see the images posted in this unit’s folder. The new look here originated in the shortage of cloth for civilians during WWI, but this new fashion trend was clearly carried much further in terms of shorter hair length, and more widespread use of make-up, etc., after 1918. To us, this change in appearance might not be so startling, but you have to remember that European women had been wearing ankle-length skirts for over a thousand years. Before around 1910, it had been embarrassing if a woman’s ankles were seen when she go in and out of a carriage, etc. And traditionally, European women had not cut their hair ever: a woman’s hair was often so long that she could sit on it, when she let it down, at night. So, the shorter skirts and haircuts were strong (and potentially upsetting) symbolic changes to that generation: much more so than we might realize, today. The new political rights, new jobs, and new appearance all worked in conjunction with each other to create a new stereotype of younger women, a stereotype sometimes referred to as “The New Woman.” The New Woman image symbolized a more modern image of femininity, someone who was more independent, and (in eyes of conservatives) someone who was possibly more sexually active, not traditional in terms of sexual morality. As you saw in the 19th century units, women were supposed to be demure, chaste, and lacking in sexual appetite (esp compared to men). But the New Woman stereotype often implied that these young women were in fact sexually active before marriage, and might even enjoy sex. Such New Women images were ubiquitous in the popular culture of the 1920s (in movies and novels, esp). A visitor from another culture, who only looked at magazines, novels and movies might have (falsely) come to the conclusion that ALL European women were now dressing and acting like the “New Women” characters in popular culture. One famous example was the character of Monique Lebier, the heroine of a best-selling 1921 French novel, called La Garconne. This novel was translated into many European languages, and widely read. In it, the heroine (Monique) epitomized most of the traits of the “New Woman”: she wore shorter skirts, played tennis, smoked cigarettes, drove her own car, attended university, and even had sexual affairs (and was not punished for this with pregnancy, as would have always happened in a 19th century novel). Historians and sociologists believe that such rapid changes in lifestyle and the workplace, in only one generation, coming on top of the shocks of the war, created considerable tensions and anxieties on the part of some people, particularly men and older people of both sexes. Much of the public discussions of the 1920s (as you will see in the readings for this unit) are about these rapid changes, but they used gender as a vocabulary, a set of images, to discuss anxieties about changes that are actually much more far-reaching: the image of the New Woman came to stand for ALL of the broader changes in lifestyle and culture associated with post-WWI modernity. The “New Woman” image combined with tensions generated by gap in wartime experience to create enormous concern about gender roles, and women’s perceived independence and less dependent position vis-à-vis men. There was also here a discussion of youth (of young people) whose images were also used as vocabulary to process these anxieties. Many people had a sense that the control over young people that had existed in pre-War society had been loosened during the war (with fathers at front, and mothers working in “men’s” industries). Now, youths were prominent in many of recreations associated with modern consumer societies (going to movies at night; dancing in dance halls, etc.). Again, you see in these readings an anxiety about “unnaturally” independent youths, similar to anxieties about “unnaturally” independent women One novelist who lived in Paris during the 1920s described nightlife in Paris by saying that “pencil thin, cigarette-wielding women swayed to the rhythms of jazz bands . . . untold quantities of wine and cocktails were consumed.” Another, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, (as you will see in this unit’s readings) wrote that French civilization had been driven mad by the war, it was now a “civilization without sexes” since the boundaries between femininity and masculinity had been so undermined by the war. He wrote of young French women during the 1920s that “ can one define la femme moderne? No, no more than the waistline on the dress she wears. Young girls today are difficult to locate precisely. If you wanted to be true to French tradition, it would be barbaric, in my opinion, to call our pretty Parisiennes “young girls.” These beings without breasts, without hips, without underwear, who smoke, argue, work, and fight exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Bologne, with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and acrobatic pleasures on the plush back seats of 7 horsepower Citroens, these aren’t young girls! No more young girls! No more women, either! 1925 French writer “The innocent young thing of yesterday has given way to the garconne of today. In this way as well, the war, like a devastating wind, has had an influence. Add to this sports, movies, dancing, cars—the unhealthy need to be always on the move—this entire Americanization of the old Europe, and you will have the secret of the complete upheaval of people and of things.” These quotes capture a lot of what I’m talking about in this lecture, because they combine several aspects of modern consumer culture: the new gender images (a masculinized, because not so exaggeratedly feminine, female figure, who is active rather than passive—she has muscles, she dances, she has sexual desire), the new pastimes (dancing, movies), and new consumer goods (cocktails, jazz music, fast new cars, new fashions), and the idea that all of these changes together: in products, gender, and lifestyle, add up to something called “Americanization.” But you have to be aware of the particular location, in social and political terms, of these anxious voices. Not everyone in 1920s Berlin, Vienna, London or Paris was this anxious about the changes in women’s roles. These anxious writers tended to be people on the Right, politically, particularly religious conservatives and nationalists. They also included people in rural areas, who tended to be more conservative and traditional, looked at the populations in the cities (esp. women and younger people) and shuddered at their “immorality”. But to people who were rural, religious, traditional and/or politically conservative, the changes in women’s roles (and the greater independence now allegedly enjoyed by younger people) of the 1920s were deeply disturbing, and portended social decline. These anxieties, as we shall see, became an important part of the growing fascist movements, which were mobilizing during the 1920s to try to “put things right”, including “things” with women, gender, and the family.
History 281–Handout for Second Essay Assignment Answer one of the questions below in a typed, double-spaced, 3-4 page essay. Be sure to build your answer using evidence (material from the lectures an
The Great War and the Renegotiation of Masculinity The last few units, we’ve been looking at domesticity and the polarized gender roles that emerged alongside industrialization, and examining the work that this set of stereotypes about masculinity and femininity did in the 19th century. And let’s face it: this whole package of gender roles and concepts did a LOT of work (in terms of being the foundation for the organization of social roles, work assignments, values and norms, etc). As we’ve seen, it helped to set up a new sexual division of labor that went with industrialization; it influenced the development of class identities and lifestyles and what was “respectable”; it underwrote a world view that justified imperialism; it determined family roles and the legal position of men vs. women in the family, along with many other social relationships. But WWI presented this package of gender roles with an almost insurmountable challenge–it threw them into question completely, and by 1918, gender was really “in play,” up for grabs throughout Europe. The impact of WWI on the gender roles of the 19th century, and particularly on established notions of masculinity, is the subject of this course unit. Because one of the most important foundations for these gender roles (maybe THE most important–only religion was more influential in this regard) was a strict sexual division of labor, with women assigned to the home, or to jobs like sewing, food production, etc. that were associated with domestic work, even if they took place in a factory. And WWI undercut this sexual division of labor entirely. The men went off to war, and women had to step across the lines that had circumscribed and defined gender, and go into roles and places that were clearly masculine. But that’s only part of the story. The war also opened up the can of worms with regard to masculinity, since it exposed men to circumstances and stresses that they had never been trained or prepared for. WWI was proceeded by the formation of blocks of diplomatic alliances–Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one side formed a diplomatic alliance that was opposed by an alliance consisting of. Britain, France, and Russia–and these blocs represented the fusion of economic, military, and imperialist rivalries. These alliances, once made, were frozen into place by the new imperatives of military planning and the industrialization of war. Industrialization meant that there were now ­railroads to transport much larger armies to battlefields more quickly than ever before, and also that there were new ,more accurate, and more destructive forms of firepower—the prewar period saw the rise of artillery and machine gun fire. Thanks to industrialization, the technology of killing had thus advanced dramatically by the end of the 19th century, thanks not only to the virtual revolution in the speed and firepower of small arms and artillery, but also by the transformation of warships by means of new and far more efficient turbine engines, combined with more effective protective armor for ships and the capacity to carry far more guns on ships. In addition, factory system made it possible to produce all these new weapons, esp. small firearms and hand grenades for infantry on mass scale, and thus arose for the first time to possibility of equipping for truly massive armies. And since it was now possible to equip a mass army, the prewar period saw the introduction of mass conscription among all European nations which would be involved in WWI except Britain. During the prewar period, there was constant unrest in Balkans, both the part which belonged to Austria-Hungary and the independent nation of Serbia. Serbia was encouraged by Russia, which sought to convert Balkans into Russian sphere of influence. The Balkans were thus the most important geographic region where these two diplomatic alliances collided. The climax of these diplomatic tensions came in July 1914, when heir to Austria-Hungarian throne was assassinated during a state visit to Serbia. Austria-Hungary made demands on Serbia, and was backed up in making these demands by Germany-­Serbia resisted, and was backed up in her resistance by Russia. The statesmen of Europe thought that probably would blow over like other earlier diplomatic crises, but if it did not blow over, most leaders also saw now as most opportune time for a war which everyone was convinced was inevitable. As a result, none of the government leaders tried too hard to defuse the situation. War was officially declared and initiated in August, 1914. Europeans went into it not knowing what they were getting into. Everyone assumed that war would be as it had been much earlier in the 19th century–rapid and decided by a single battle, as for example the Franco-Prussian war of 1870had been. It was thought that the new killing technology was simply too destructive and dreadful for war to last more than a few weeks, and millions of young men rushed to enlist to get into that decisive battle before it was all over, and millions of women encouraged them to go and saw them off at the train stations. Europeans had no idea what war involved, because for several generations, peace had been the normal and expected framework of European lives. Since 1815, the fall of Napoleon, there had been no war involving all the European powers, and those few wars which had occurred between 1815 and 1871 had been fought by 2 or 3 nations, and had ended quickly. Since 1871, no European power had ordered its armed men to fire on those men of any other European power. The great powers had chosen their opponents, their victims for 2 generations from among the weak, the unarmed nations of the non-Western world during the period of imperialism, and they were unable to envision what the scale and duration of a war with one of their own kind would be like. So, Europeans, including Germans, went lightheartedly off to slaughter and to be slaughtered–almost all of the social groups in all of these nations–including the socialist working class parties and the women’s movements–supported the outbreak of war. In each nation, governments able to frame war and present it to their people as an issue of the other side provoking war. All of the governments involved claimed that they were going into a war of self-defense, so even those who were alienated from government supported the mobilization for war. The enormous early popularity of WWI among almost all the populations involved demonstrates the tremendous appeal of nationalism, patriotism, militarism–even to those who were disenfranchised and oppressed, like workers and women. When it came, war was like nothing that had ever been predicted. As I said, the assumption had been that war would last only a few weeks–how could this mass mobilization of men and arms be maintained longer? So the war had to be over by Christmas, and nobody made any plans what to do if it were not. The German plan was based on the assumption of a two front war, against France in the West and Russia in the East—the German s assumed that when it came down to it, the British would probably remain neutral. Germans planned to pivot through Belgium—violating Belgian neutrality—and march their armies into northern France, take Paris and knock France out of the war, then rush troops freed up in the west by France’s surrender to the east, to deal with the Russian army. But things didn’t work out quite as the German General Staff had planned. The Belgians put up more resistance than the Germans had anticipated, giving the British, who did enter the war, time to link up with the French forces in Belgium and northern France. And thus although the German army did have some initial successes, it was halted before it reached Paris and France did not capitulate. Instead, by mid-October, 1914, the front lines were stabilized in a line that ran from Belgium through northern France down to the Swiss border, and there was to be very little variation in the line for 3 years. It became a static, immobile war on the Western front. The opposing armies were halted, and stalemated because of the new artillery–firepower like machines guns or larger artillery which made it impossible to advance on fortified positions–a line of men generally cannot take a machine gun nest: no matter how brave they are, they will be mowed down. Thus, there was Iittle advance on the Western front after the first few weeks—in order to survive the new firepower, armies dug trenches for their men to hide in. Thus, WWI was characterized for much of its duration in many areas by trench warfare. “Over the top” attempts (where a line of men charged across from their trench to try to take the opposing side’s trenches) were mounted to break the stalemate repeatedly by both sides, but rarely had much effect. The German attempt to take the French fortress at Verdun in February 1915, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a few days–the French dead, wounded and missing numbered nearly half a million in this one battle alone, while the Germans lost almost 400,000 men. There were similar bloody and inconclusive battles at Ypres and the battle of the Somme, where the British, French and Germans fought over an area of only a few miles–at the height of the battle, the British had advanced 8 miles, which they later lost in part-­for 41/2 months; during this one single battle, the Germans most 1/2 million men, the British 400,000 and the French 200,000. Thereafter, the war settled down into a stalemate, where each side launched gas attacks (shooting poison gas shells at the other side, which exploded and sent out clouds of poison gas) and periodic assaults. The new weapons, along with these bloody and inconclusive battles, cumulatively caused astonishing, previously unimaginable casualty levels. A large part of an entire generation was lost in fields of France, especially the nobility in all nations, which manned the officer corps, took heavy casualties. By the end of 1915, it was clear that the Napoleonic principles of warfare–massed line of attack and charge, ending war quickly–upon which soldiers had been raised in Europe for 100 years, were no longer valid. Instead, the war shifted to a new terrain, the war of attrition, the war of exhaustion, where the object of strategy became not the destruction of the enemy army but the exhaustion of the enemy’s resources–attacking sometimes without any expectation of tactical success, but in order to compel the enemy to use up his resources faster than one did oneself. This was the reasoning behind the German assualt at Verdun. Armies were thus no longer the representatives or champions of nations at war. They became instead instruments through which the belligerents could bleed one another of resources and of men. At the same time, that other traditional weapon of warfare, the naval blockade, became grimmer in purpose. Instead of blocking only commerce, as in Napoleonic wars, navies were now used to blockade everything–to starve the enemy I s population. Britain, having largest navy, was most successful at this—Britain imposed a naval blockade on Germany which was almost complete, this began the slow starvation of the German population, since Germany could not grow enough food to feed its own population, and relied on food imports to supplement German agriculture. Once outside imports were cut off, civilians in almost all Central European cities began to become malnourished. This kind of war of attrition included military tactics and conditions which had never been seen before in European history, and it led to conditions on the domestic front which were also new. For the first time, war was now made total–entire economies were organized around war effort, which entailed the total mobilization of populations in support of war effort to keep up these terrible efforts, these enormous demands that the military front made on the domestic economy. Women took the place of the husbands and fathers in the factories and farms, once those men had left for the front. Civilians gave up luxuries of all kinds, submitted to the increasingly severe rationing of necessities, and tightened their belts as consumer goods disappeared from the shops and all factories were gradually converted to wartime production, and food, clothing and medicine became harder to find. New clothing became rare, and food became scarce, even impossible to obtain in some areas. German and Austrian women, because of the British blockade, stood in line for hours to obtain bread, when it was available. For an example of the effect on civilians, see the excerpt I have posted from the diary of an Austrian housewife from this period, in the folder for this unit. By 1918, the average German citizen was consuming only 1000 calories per day–half the amount needed to maintain a normal adult. Famine amennorhea set in: that is, women were so malnourished, they stopped menstruating and became sterile. By the end of the war, even the civilians on the losing side, even the well-to-do, were starving. At the same time, however, women were moving into new jobs opened up to them by the war. The overalI number of women employed outside the home rose steadily, but not more so than in pre-War years, but the types of jobs women did changed. Many of the kinds of work that women had done before the war–dressmaking, many types of textile work, candy and food making—declined (because now the raw materials for production were hard to get), but where women remained in traditional sectors, esp. textile production, they moved into male jobs. Even more women switched to the more lucrative work offered in heavy industry and munitions, now available to women. Women entered the workforce f or a variety of reasons. Some because husbands drafted, and needed more than the government allowance for soldiers’ families. Single middle class women entered the workforce out of necessity, or patriotism, or feelings of solidarity with loved ones at the battlefront. Others were drawn out of the home by propaganda. “Shells Made by a Wife may save a Husband’s Life” was the headline of a typical British propaganda poster, which tried to recruit wives to work in munitions factories. Newspapers also pointed out what women could do in wartime, highlighting the female tram conductor or subway worker as a war worker in her own right. Fellow male workers were not always so welcoming to women—in the eyes of the men who remained in the factories, women were unskilled workers who had to be trained, and were taking the jobs of male colleagues and friends. Women changed their clothing to fit the new jobs, wearing overalls or going uncorseted, which made them conspicuous–this increased tension in workplace. Many people agreed with Sigmund Freud that the war was leading to the masculinization of women. Women walked about freely, earned higher wages than ever before, and lived independent lives. Indeed, the whole world appeared topsy-turvy, with women outside the home, on the factory floor, in “men’s” jobs, wearing “men’s” clothes, and flaunting their independence while men were dying at the front. The women were often making higher pay, yes, but they still did not earn the same as men in such jobs did, and it was made clear that the new female workers would lose these new jobs when men came home–in German factories, many women signed contracts acknowledging that they would be laid off after the war before beginning jobs. Many women did not seek more training than absolutely necessary, since they knew these jobs were transient. Many had additional responsibilities, children, and so didn’t have time to learn most skilled jobs. In some ways, bourgeois women liberated most of all by war, since gained more power than working class women. Bourgeois women, educated and trained through years of volunteer work, developed new public roles during the war. In France, the female schoolteachers often took over the mayoral functions in small towns, when all educated men gone. In Germany, women moved into municipal government jobs that men had filled, and in many places in Central Europe women became policewomen. As the war continued, the female presence spread throughout management, relief organizations, and government, and bourgeois women became ever more professional. No woman’s role drew so much popular attention or remained so vivid in popular memory as that of the military nurse. For many, she sacrificed all that was sacrificial about women, a perpetual reminder of the 19th century ideal of female virtue, compassion, nurturing and self-sacrifice. Yet the nurse was also a controversial figure. She lived apart from family supervision and amidst men, and loosed 19thC standards of behavior by traveling alone, becoming tougher, more self-sufficient, developing a stronger ego. Thus, although she was a focus of attention and a key figure in wartime propaganda the nurse also threatened the gender structure of the society she served, since she had more independence and less chaperonage than would have been thought proper for women, before the War. The nurse, along with the home front workers like the munitions worker, the volunteer and other women active in public life became symbolic of the war. Propaganda efforts launched by both sides put women in the headlines, as newspapers tried to recruit new women workers for the war effort by publishing stories of women’s bravery, dexterity, and energy. Once isolated in the home, women now stood boldly outside it, and their activities provided raw material for the propaganda produced by the press and government public information offices. Yet propaganda also made people acutely aware that gender roles were being blurred, and one of the main groups made aware of this was men. Men were experiencing the war quite differently than women, and the accounts in the home press let men know this. The men of Europe were experiencing a new kind of war, a war they had not been prepared for, psychologically or physically. Instead of the individual heroes of the past, the war required men in the mass, men to man the machines, like machine guns, cannons, submarines, trucks, trains, and tanks. Where women were mobilized for the war effort, men were immobilized in the trenches, stuck for weeks on end in filth, under constant shelling, and unable to advance or retreat. For some men, being trapped for months in such a threatening situation contradicted what psychologists call the “flight or fight response” (this mean that when confronted with a serious threat, most people will respond by either fleeing or fighting the threat). But the soldiers in the trenches were unable to do either one of those things. They were trapped in the trenches, for the most part. The response for some men was what people back then called “shell shock” (and is today called “combat fatigue” in the army). Really, it was male hysteria. But I mean “hysteria” in the sense that psychologists use the term, not laypeople. “Hysteria” in ordinary co

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