Gender and the Great War provides a global, thematic approach to a century of scholarship on the war, masculinity and femininity, and it constitutes the most up-to-date survey of the topic by well-known scholars in the field.

The First World War cannot be sufficiently documented and understood without considering the analytical category of gender. This exciting volume examines key issues in this area, including the 'home front' and battlefront, violence, pacifism, citizenship and emphasizes the relevance of gender within the expanding field of First World War Studies.

Drawing on both wartime discourse about women and the voices of individual women living at the Italian Front, Allison Belzer analyzes how women participated in the Great War and how it affected them. The Great War transformed women into purveyors and recipients of a new feminine ideal that emphasized their status as national citizens. Although Italian women did not gain the vote, they did encounter a less empowering form of female citizenship just after the war ended with Mussolini's Fascism. Because of the Great War, many women seized the opportunity to participate in a society that continued to recognize them as guardians of the nation.

Essays analyze the two world wars in respect to gender politics and reassesses the differences between men and women in relation to war

During World War I the U.S. demanded that all able-bodied men work or fight. White men who were husbands and fathers, owned property or worked at approved jobs had the benefits of citizenship without fighting. Others were often barred from achieving these benefits. This book tells the stories of those affected by the Selective Service System.

Joyce Marlow presents a fascinating and varied collection of women's writing on the Great War drawn from diaries, newspapers, letters and memoirs from across Europe and the States. Starting with material from 1914, she outlines the pre-war campaigns for suffrage and then the demand from women eager to be counted amongst those in action. Contemporary accounts and reports describe their experience on the field and reactions to women in completely new areas, such as surgery as well as on the home front. The words of women in the UK, America, France and Germany display a side to the war rarely seen. Familiar voices such as those of Vera Brittain, Millicent Fawcett, May Sinclair, Alexandra Kollontai, the Pankhurst family and Beatrice Webb, as well as the unknown, make this anthology a truly indispensable guide to the female experience of a war after which women's lives would never be the same.

In tracing the rise of the modern idea of the American "new woman," Lynn Dumenil examines World War I's surprising impact on women and, in turn, women's impact on the war. Telling the stories of a diverse group of women, including African Americans, dissidents, pacifists, reformers, and industrial workers, Dumenil analyzes both the roadblocks and opportunities they faced. She richly explores the ways in which women helped the United States mobilize for the largest military endeavor in the nation's history. Dumenil shows how women activists staked their claim to loyal citizenship by framing their war work as homefront volunteers, overseas nurses, factory laborers, and support personnel as "the second line of defense." But in assessing the impact of these contributions on traditional gender roles, Dumenil finds that portrayals of these new modern women did not always match with real and enduring change. Extensively researched and drawing upon popular culture sources as well as archival material, The Second Line of Defense offers a comprehensive study of American women and war and frames them in the broader context of the social, cultural, and political history of the era.