From Wartime Mobilization to Uneven Empowerment: Women’s Work, Activism, and Citizenship in Britain and the United States during the First World War
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21694810Anahtar Kelimeler:
First World War, women’s empowerment, women’s labour, citizenship, suffrage, peace activism, intersectionalityÖzet
The First World War expanded women’s participation in paid employment, public service, political organizing, and transnational peace activism. Yet the conflict did not produce a uniform or irreversible transition from subordination to empowerment. This article critically compares women’s wartime experiences in Britain and the United States and asks how war mobilization widened women’s economic and political agency while preserving, and at times intensifying, inequalities based on class and race. Methodologically, the study is a qualitative historical review combining selected primary documents—including articles from The Freewoman, wartime government records, and institutional archives—with established scholarship on gender, labour, citizenship, suffrage, and intersectionality. The comparison shows that women entered munitions, transport, agriculture, clerical work, auxiliary military service, and voluntary organizations in unprecedented numbers. These experiences created income, skills, public visibility, and new claims to citizenship. However, employers, unions, and states frequently treated women’s labour as temporary, maintained unequal pay, and promoted postwar demobilization. Political gains were also partial: Britain enfranchised only women over thirty who met property qualifications in 1918, while the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 without eliminating racial barriers to voting. The 1915 International Congress of Women further demonstrated that anti-war activism could generate an autonomous form of women’s political agency. The article concludes that the war should be understood not as a straightforward liberator but as an accelerator of contested change. It broadened the repertoire of women’s citizenship while leaving the structures of gendered and racialized inequality substantially intact.
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