Women and the First World War

Alison S. Fell

Women’s participation in war was nothing new in August 1914. For centuries, wives had sometimes followed their husbands to battlefields, as had other camp followers who worked as cooks or laundrywomen. Women had also carried out humanitarian and relief work, a role which had been given impetus by the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. Military nursing was also becoming more established and professionalised, especially in Britain where in the two decades preceding 1914 the army sent members of the Army Nursing Service (which became the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1902) to the Boer wars. But the rulers of the belligerent nations during the First World War required women’s labour, both paid and unpaid, more than they ever had before. Historians often use the term “total war” to describe the extent to which the conflict mobilised not just men of military age, but also civilians, as the waging of war on such a massive scale and on multiple fronts required the active consent and participation of a significant percentage of a nation’s population [1]. Total war meant that women were participants in war on an unprecedented scale, and in a diverse range of roles. This essay will begin by outlining some of the key roles that women performed, before discussing the ways in which their war work and war service were presented, particularly in photographs, to the wartime population.