Deborah Thom's Nice Girls and Rude Girls is a set of essays concerning women workers in Britain during the First World War while Susan Grayzel's Women's Identities at War is an examination of the cultural constructions of womanhood produced and consumed during the Great War, grounded in the author's comparative research on Britain and France. Read together, these books provide one with the opportunity to assess the contributions of somewhat different perspectives on and approaches to the topic of women and the home front in World War I.

Deborah Thom's book, set in the context of working-class women's prewar history of industrial employment, explores the situations encountered by women workers in wartime industries and is based on research she conducted in the 1970s. In addition to including essays devoted to this topic, some of which were previously published in the 1980s, the book is self-consciously an argument about doing women's history. Thom's historical argument is that the extent to which women's employment and women workers' experiences were affected by their wartime jobs was very limited. What changed about women's work during the war, she suggests, is how the government organized it and represented it. There was neither little actual technological change nor was there a long-lasting transformation in the labor process. Women workers, Thom notes, were identified during the war in relation to men. Yet, even though women workers were generally represented as substitutes for men or dilutees, most women worked at jobs defined as women's work. Their wartime employment was understood as “for the duration” even though the working-class women who were employed in factories during the war were likely to have worked prior to the war if they were of school-leaving age and after the war was over in jobs identified as “women's work.” Thom suggests that visual representations of working women focused on those women doing stereotypically “men's jobs,” even though this was far from the actual experience of the majority of working women. Interestingly she notes that such representations of the “woman worker” made an implicit contrast with the prewar iconographic portrayal of “the woman worker” as a sweated worker. Both representations focused heavily on women workers in London, thus distorting conceptions of working-class women's employment by ignoring women workers in other regions of the country as well as the variety of forms of work that women of the period were employed to do.

As one reads through the chapters that analyze wartime statistics, photographs, oral histories, and trade union documents, the reader comes away with the impression that it was such representations of women's work rather than the actual diversity of working women's jobs that informed public policy and debate. Thom's evidence and discussion make a very convincing argument about the power of representations to shape public perceptions and public policy, and she hints that these representations might have affected how working women subjectively experienced their wartime industrial employment as the women “war-workers were constantly addressed, interpreted to themselves and portrayed in print”(p. 17).

Yet, the introduction and conclusion to the book seem to be written against some contemporary trends in women's history that explicitly and self-consciously focus on representation and discourse. Her complaint about the recent “discursive turn” in women's history is that its practitioners ignore differences among women, flatten out lived experience, and focus more on sexuality than on labor and class. Thom sees her own essays as bringing class to the forefront and as giving voice to the women themselves. But I am not certain that she succeeds in providing them with a venue for speaking out except through oral histories. While these are most certainly first-person accounts, they are self-representations recorded some thirty years after the fact. As Penny Summerfield suggests in her latest book, historical memory and self-composition grow out of and are informed by the stories and visual interpretations available to the subjects of oral history during the war.Footnote 1 One might add that they are informed as well by collective memory based on the stories, visual representations, and public monuments that accumulated over time after the war had ended.

Thom's discussion of women's actions on their own behalf focuses primarily on women trade union leaders and social reformers. She notes at the end of a chapter dealing with this, “For too long women have been the stage army of history, particularly labor history. We need less of seeing them as others saw them, more of seeing them as they saw themselves” (p. 90). But how do historians get at this? Unless the historical subjects represent themselves, they leave few traces except through the eyes of others who represent them. A major challenge in doing working-class history is to recover an array of voices, not only those belonging to leaders who claimed to speak for their comrades. And then, I would argue, and Thom might agree, that their self-representations do not exist independently of the array of representations of them. Their self-reflections at the time are informed by their own life engagements always already filtered through the cultural representations available to them.

But Thom's essays do something very important—they show how ideological constructions of the woman worker ignore and mask their lived lives. For example, she sensitively suggests that the photographs of women workers are significant distortions of their experiences. She writes,

In the end Thom suggests she primarily is criticizing discursive or cultural histories that “collapse profound differences of class and material opportunities in looking at the effects of…discursive formulations.” (p. 207) Thom is not alone in her concern. Many feminist historians, especially but surely not exclusively those who do labor and working-class history, are attempting to weave discursive practices and material opportunities together in such a way that their historical reconstructions are fuller and more complex than would be the case by an exposition of either one or the other alone.

Susan Grayzel's Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War is unabashedly a cultural history—a history of the various discourses about women that proliferated on both sides of the channel. As Grayzel notes, while men's contributions to the war in both countries were assumed and therefore unremarkable, (except, of course, in heroic depictions) the same was not true for women. There was widespread apprehension in both nation-states that the war and women's involvement in it would disrupt the gender order and, in particular, diminish women's primary national duty—their obligation to bear and rear children. Thus, debates about women generally became debates about mothers. Grayzel explores the diverse ways that motherhood and women's maternal responsibilities figured in public debates, legislative deliberations, newspaper accounts, letters to the press, and novels all produced during the war itself. Along with Deborah Thom, Grayzel argues that the war did not lead to transformation in the ways that gender shaped women's lives. While Thom focused on working-class women's roles as workers and the constraining impact of their being seen as substitutes and dilutees, Grayzel argues that significant change was circumscribed by the broad cultural emphasis in both countries on traditional assumptions about women in general as either potential or actual mothers. Motherhood, she argues, served as an “anchor for stabilizing gender” (p. 10).

Grayzel begins her exploration of the cultural construction of women's identities by examining fictional and nonfictional accounts of the fighting and the “war at home.” She reads these texts as doing a particular kind of cultural work—the work of imagining a firm boundary between the home front and the war despite the many ways that the barrier was physically breached. The home front/war split and the distinction between female and male were mutually reinforcing ideas she suggests. A major theme of the book deals with the actual fluidity of this boundary as it was evident, Grayzel argues, that women and home were symbolically central to the nation at war, even as fighting men occupied pride of place in the pantheon of war heroes at the time and in war memorials afterward. She explores this theme by examining the pervasive anxiety, especially in Britain, about women's sexual immorality, and in both countries about venereal disease and prostitution. Grayzel comments that “what happened behind the front lines was, once again, viewed as integral to the nation's defense” (p. 156). This theme also informs her discussions of the perceived threat of feminist peace activists in France, and is relevant, as well, to her discussion about suffrage, citizenship, and the meanings of women's wartime service. In the final substantive chapter of the book, Grayzel focuses on the general absence of the representations of women, except as grieving widows, in war memorials. In an interesting way this echoes Thom's observation, based on her oral history testimonies, that working women's recollections of the war focus on bereavement. This is not to say that the massive loss of life during the great war did not have a profound effect on the war's survivors. But combined with Grayzel's discussion of gender and representation in war memorials—representations that live in the present—they suggest the important connections between cultural representation and memory. Additionally, Grayzel's discussion of how the symbolic distinction between home front and war belied the fluid boundaries between them is reminiscent of Thom's emphasis on how representations of various kinds masked how people actually lived their lives during the war.

The heart of Women's Identities concerns how various debates and discussions in both France and Britain seemed inevitably to home in on motherhood. Although there were some differences in the nature of particular debates, especially the debate about out-of-wedlock pregnancy and childbirth, generally the focus on motherhood was a cross-channel obsession. One of Grayzel's chapters deals with rape and the reported atrocities committed by Germans in their march across and occupation of France and Belgium. She suggests that even these accounts and the uses to which they were put, focused not on the violence against women per se but on mothers. In Britain the government, quick to marshal the atrocities for propaganda purposes, used the material to stimulate women's anxieties about their homes and families and to encourage their sons and husbands to fight. A British mother's primary contribution to the wartime nation was to sacrifice her loved ones. In France debates swirled around the problem of women who had become pregnant as a consequence of being raped by a German. Should abortion and infanticide be tolerated in spite of the French obsession over depopulation? What if the woman in question had actually conceived as a consequence of consensual sex? Even if women had conceived as a consequence of being raped by Germans, wouldn't their French “blood” and/or their French upbringing make them French? Or was German “blood” inexorably polluting? The issue of race and national “purity” was particularly at issue in debates about abortion.

Grayzel's comparisons of Britain and France reveal remarkable similarity in the way that the two countries responded to women's participation in the war effort, a point the author underscores. There were differences, of course. In Britain there were fierce debates about and expressions of hostility to women wearing uniforms, as though women in khaki costume would subvert the gender order. The two countries responded differently to illegitimacy as there was widespread unease in Britain about giving separation allowances to mothers who were not married to the soldier fathers of their children while the French made it easier for illegitimate babies to be recognized as legitimate. Although feminists on both sides of the channel used women's participation in the war to argue for the suffrage, in Britain suffrage was given on a limited basis to some women while in France, no women were enfranchised. As Grayzel comments, in both countries women's wartime sacrifices did not lead to their being treated as the “political equals of male citizens” (p. 225). Finally, in spite of the apprehension expressed in Britain and France about the conflict between women's wartime industrial work and their capacities to be mothers, nothing was done in Britain to deal with the conflict and in France the only measure passed was one that provided nursing mothers with paid time off to breast-feed their babies.

Women's Identities at War is a richly textured examination of how diverse voices contributing to the public culture in Britain and France represented “the woman question”—a question raised anew by the challenges confronting both countries as a result of their involvement in total war. Grayzel calls upon a wealth of material from advertisements to novels, from policy debates, to the pronouncements of social reformers and medical experts in delineating the shared cultural contexts informing British and French women's “experiences of surviving, laboring, and mourning.” (p. 246)

While there are significant differences in Susan Grayzel's and Deborah Thom's subject matters and their approaches, both authors underscore how resilient the gender order remained in spite of the massive upheaval produced by World War I. While Thom focuses on the practices and the cultural representations that depicted women's wartime industrial labor as “for the duration only,” thus constraining long-term change in the nature of women's economic opportunities, Grayzel has centered on the discourses of motherhood and the gendered ideological distinctions between the home front and the battle front that stressed women's identities as mothers, “particularly as producers of future soldiers” (p. 246). Although Thom's work involved oral histories, while Grayzel restricted herself to what was produced during the war itself, both authors touch upon women's “agency”—but notably (and understandably) they dealt with the agency of those women who were trade union activists, social reformers, peace activists, suffragists, and feminists—in other words, women who were public actors.

There is another difference in their approaches that is deserving of mention. Although Thom is somewhat dismissive of histories of discourse or cultural history, she herself analyzes discourses, but she fairly consistently does something with them that Grayzel, who has written an unabashedly cultural history of the wartime home fronts, only does on occasion. Thom examines discourses for what they leave out—for their absences and silences. In order to do this, she has paid close attention to a variety of sources that suggest what working-class women may have been experiencing using a social history approach. She leaves out, however, the kind of evidence provided by Grayzel. Grayzel's work predominantly focuses on what images and ideas were present in the cultural productions of the war years that also were a part of women's wartime experiences, informing the meanings that they gave to their lives. Surely, both approaches have merit and actually complement one another thus enriching what we understand about gender and women's wartime lives. Read together these books underscore the complementarity between cultural and social history suggesting that the concerns expressed by some historians about the “turn to discourse” or the “turn to culture” are perhaps overly exaggerated.