Did the two World Wars really trigger fundamental changes in the gender order?

Did the two World Wars really trigger fundamental changes in the gender order and contribute to the emancipation of women, as is often claimed? Feminist literary critic and historian Margaret R. Higonnet tells Christa Hämmerle about the ‘double helix effect’ in gender relations during and after the First World War.

Margaret R. Higonnet’s co-edited volume, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, published in 1987, has been essential for historiographical debates on women’s and gender history of the First World War. With contributions by leading international feminist historians such as Joan W. Scott, Michelle Perrot and Karin Hausen, the volume discusses in depth the need to reconceptualize the effects of these two totalized wars on the relations between women and men. 

Did war really trigger fundamental changes in these relations or the gender order, and help emancipate women, as often claimed? Margaret and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet’s introduction uses the image of the ‘double helix’, with its ‘structure of two intertwined strands’, to deconstruct such an assumption, suggesting a more differentiated view. The two argue that ‘the changes in women’s activities during wartime did not improve their status’ as ‘the female strand on the helix is opposed to the male strand, and position on the female strand is subordinate to position on the male strand’. In recent decades, the concept of the ‘double helix’ has become extremely influential in the field of women’s and gender history of World War One and its aftermath, and is still much cited.

Christa Hämmerle: ‘When is change not change?’ reads the first sentence of your introductory chapter in Behind the Lines. Gender and the Two World Wars (1987). Drawing on the case studies of the volume, this initial sentence questioned the traditional assumption that these wars radically changed women’s social and economic positions. How persistent is this view? In which historiographical contexts do you think such a pattern still plays an important role?

Margaret R. Higonnet: The problem of the relationship between wars and social change is complicated: today, historians recognize that the world wars’ impacts on gender varied across national wartime experiences and cultures. Historiographically, one context is the distinction between short-term and long-term change. The rise of diverse women’s movements before 1914 fostered women’s embrace of new roles during World War One, as well as their ability to sustain political consciousness following the war. The war became a platform on which those social changes would be performed; simultaneously, new wartime activities such as participation in an ambulance corps, replacing a conscripted mayor or serving in local Russian parliaments, for example, generated new identities, and the deaths of men gave some women new responsibilities over the long term. 

Historians’ early assumption that the two world wars improved women’s social and economic positions over the long run, however, was implicitly optimistic, rather like the Pollyanna-ish observation that the ‘Great War’ led to improvements in plastic surgery (setting aside the mutilations that occasioned such medical innovations). Today’s views are more nuanced, and the historiography of gender in both wars has become more egalitarian, changing the stories told in schoolbooks to include civilian as well as military experiences. Instead of the scandalous ‘emancipation’ of mannish young women, the focus has shifted to the daily life of people often considered marginal to war or politics.

During World War One, governments advocated women’s short-term employment as substitutes for men mobilized to fight.. read more: https://www.eurozine.com/change-not-change/