Women in World War I
In February 1918, the United Kingdom passed a major suffrage law that was considered directly related to the importance of women's participation in the war effort.
[4] After years of opposition, United States President Woodrow Wilson changed his position in 1918 to advocate women's suffrage in recognition of their services.
[32] Many war posters challenged current social attitudes that women should be passive and emotional, and have moral virtue and domestic responsibility.
In one war propaganda poster, titled "These Women Are Doing Their Bit", a woman is represented as making a sacrifice by joining the munitions industry while the men are at the front.
[32] These posters do not communicate the reality of munitions labour, including highly explosive chemicals or illnesses due to harsh work environments.
[36] Some of the common diseases and illness which occurred were drowsiness, headaches, eczema, loss of appetite, cyanosis, shortness of breath, vomiting, anaemia, palpitation, bile stained urine, constipation, rapid weak pulse, pains in the limbs and jaundice and mercury poisoning.
Women from all over the world came to work there, manufacturing what was known as the Devil's Porridge, a term coined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to refer to the mixture of gun cotton and nitroglycerine that was used to produce cordite as a shell propellant.
[40] Most of the site was sold after the war had ended and the women returned home, some having had new experiences such as playing in the factory ladies football team.
[43][44][45] York Minster’s Five Sisters window is the only memorial in the UK dedicated to all the women of the British Empire who lost their lives in World War I.
[citation needed] During World War One, there was virtually no female presence in the Canadian armed forces, with the exception of the 3,141 nurses serving both overseas and on the home front.
Facing wheat shortages, the country eventually began producing K-brot, a maligned type of bread made with potato.
She was singled out for the ire and suspicion of the working class who questioned whether she fit the idealized image of the frugal wartime homemaker who formed the backbone of the "voluntary homefront army".
"[72] The police resented that women would benefit in such manner from their husband's service and protestors rejected the notion that soldiers' wives should be spending their afternoons "consuming quantities of cake and whipped cream with their children" while the nation could scarce afford such luxuries.
One German officer said "it is exactly the poorer women who daily occupy the cafes of department stores, sampling delicacies that certainly don't number among the most necessary foods.
"[72] Women had limited front line roles, being nurses and providing a subsidiary work force of emergency medical personnel.
The mass mobilization of the male workforce prompted the nation to speed up the process of allowing urban, educated Muslim women into white collared jobs.
To make matters worse, there were deserters and refugees roaming vast areas in the Ottoman Empire plundering and stealing large stocks of goods such as maize and hazelnuts that were stockpiled to last the war.
Many homes were also commandeered by the military for various purposes forcing people (mostly women, due to the vast majority of men being absent to fight in the war) to sleep oitside or under trees.
As such children were the main victim of the war in Serbia, as women were forced to take upon the "social responsibilities of men including toiling in the fields, doing hard physical labour, breeding livestock and protecting their properties.
Some of them took up arms (Milunka Savić, Sofija Jovanović, Antonija Javornik, Slavka Tomić and others) defending their fatherland no differently than men, showing surprising courage and valour.
They were housewives, artists (Nadežda Petrović), writers (Danica Marković), doctors (like Draga Ljočić), semi-skilled nurses, caretakers, teachers; some of them were highly educated and others were not as fortunate but they were astute, skillful and quick-learners.
Most Serbian nurses had completed crash courses on looking after the ill and wounded at in-patient clinics or makeshift military field hospitals and ad hoc dressing stations.
Draginja Babić, Ljubica Luković, Kasija Miletić and Mirka Grujić worked as members of the Circle of Serbian Sisters, whereas others were organized as part of the Red Cross mission in Serbia and abroad to solicit aid (Helen Losanitch Frothingham).
Women from foreign countries, the members of international medical missions, were also of great support to Serbian volunteers in their effort to help others.
During the early stages of the conflict foreign missions arrived in Serbia from Great Britain and Scotland, the United States of America, France, Imperial Russia, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Elsie Inglis, Evelina Haverfield, Elizabeth Ross, Leila Paget, Mabel Grouitch, Margaret Neill Fraser, Louisa Jordan, Edith Holloway, Josephine Bedford, Isabel Emslie Hutton, Katherine Harley, Laura Margaret Hope, Jessie Scott, Eleanor Soltau, Lillias Hamilton, Florence MacDowell, Frances "Fairy' Warren,[93] Mabel St Clair Stobart who founded the Women's Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps and Olive Kelso King who drove an ambulance truck – these were some of the female humanitarian workers who shared the fate of Serbian people and army in the Great War.
Together with their "Samaritan sisters" from Serbia, they used their medical knowledge and experience to help the Serbian army and in this way, they became part of the modern history of a small country from the Balkans and of the people who suffered the tragic Great Retreat over the treacherous Albanian mountains in the middle of 1915–1916 winter.
Not until 1978, the 60th anniversary of the end of World War I, did Congress approve veteran status and honorable discharges for the remaining women who had served in the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit.
They served stateside in jobs and received the same benefits and responsibilities as men, including identical pay (US$28.75 per month), and were treated as veterans after the war.
[103] It is widely believed that twin sisters Genevieve and Lucille Baker transferred from the Naval Coastal Defense Reserve to the U.S. Coast Guard in 1918[104][105][106][107] but their story has been discovered to be apocryphal.
