Susan R. Grayzel

“The Souls of Soldiers”: Civilians under Fire in First World War France*

In September 1915, a cartoon appeared in Le Figaro depicting two soldiers (poilus) immobilized in their trench. One expresses the hope that “they hold on.” When asked who “they” are, he replies, “the civilians.” These two trench-bound soldiers symbolize the “real” war, yet their reliance on the civilians’ ability to hold on suggests the importance of noncombatants and of their morale for the successful waging of this war. The punch line adapted from this cartoon— “Pourvu que les civils tiennent” (Let’s hope the civilians hold on)—has been cited often enough in studies of France during the First World War to have become something of a shorthand for the altered experience of modern, total war.1 While military history continues to treat soldiers as if their exploits were unquestionably

‘The Mothers of Our Soldiers’ Children’

During the First World War, motherhood was used as a central way to define female identity and promote a sense of unity among women. A variety of social commentators and activists voiced new pronatalist concern over women as mothers, producers of the national resource of the next generation of soldiers. However, a different sort of widespread interest in motherhood emerged in debates about state support for dependent women, and these discussions touched off further controversy over how to regard and regulate wartime female sexual behaviour leading to illegitimate births. This public focus on sexuality, motherhood, and illegitimacy must be considered in the context of the war’s unexpected death tolls; the war’s costs and longevity soon undermined the belief that this would be a short war and a quick victory for Britain. Thus many wartime commentators began to view Britain’s declining birthrate as further weakening the nation by creating additional casualties; some felt that even illegitimate motherhood should perhaps be encouraged. Court records about abortion and infanticide indicate that women continued to make decisions about their pregnancies that contradicted some of their social mandate to reproduce for the sake of the country, yet they did so in a climate that seemed newly aware of the significance of maternity for national, political ends.1 Motherhood came to represent for women what soldiering did for men: a gender-specific experience that could provide social unity and stability during a time of unprecedented upheaval.

The Baby in the Gas Mask: Motherhood, Wartime Technology, and the Gendered Division Between the Fronts During and After the First World War

In 1916, Marie Donnay published La Parisienne et la Guerre in order to pay tribute to the contributions of Parisian women to the war effort. Like many such efforts, this small pamphlet aimed to record and promote the accomplishments made by real French women and girls to war work. She called attention to the ‘sublime’ efforts of mothers who sacrificed their sons and to all women who helped France endure, even though they could not engage directly in military action on behalf of their beloved nation. In the same short text, Donnay also highlighted one of the war’s new heroines, 13-year-old Denise Cartier, who asked those caring for her not to tell her mother that her injuries were serious, despite being gravely wounded by an aerial attack upon Paris in September 1914. Thus, in the early years of the war, Donnay witnessed a transformation in women’s relationship to war and the toll exacted specifically upon them. Owing to military technology such as air power, women no longer experienced war merely through damage done to other bodies, through sacrificing their sons. As the example of young Denise Cartier illustrated, wartime technology now brought war home to injure the female population — women and children — directly, well beyond the battle lines.1

“Fighting for the Idea of Home Life”: Mrs Miniver and Anglo-American Representations of Domestic Morale

First appearing as the title character in a column by Jan Struther [the pseudonym of Joyce Maxtone Graham] in the London Times in the late 1930s, “Mrs. Miniver” went on to achieve iconic status as a trans-Atlantic image of stoic womanhood in the face of the traumas of World War Two.1 The book version of Mrs Miniver was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States, and the Hollywood film version, which opened in June of 1942 in the United States and a month later in Britain, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Such acclaim for a story about war (both anticipated and then experienced) that focuses mainly on family life and the so-called home front suggests that it may tell us something significant about how Anglo-American culture constructed women at home as active wartime participants. By examining the popular images of gender and class during World War Two through an analysis of Mrs Miniver, this essay participates in the ongoing project of rethinking what is meant by “the people’s war” and by the “myth of the Blitz” as key elements of the war’s cultural experience. It further explores how these two notions interacted with the ways in which women became held responsible for maintaining domestic morale.