Women have traditionally knitted garments, including socks, to keep soldiers warm during wartime. In World War I, women knitted and rolled bandages, but they also welded machinery, drove trucks, served in combat areas as nurses, and worked as telephone operators for the army in France.
Women played a major part in the peace movement before the United States entered World War I. They also supported preparedness. But one of the biggest concerns for women just before and during the war years was women’s suffrage—the right to vote. When the war started, only women in a few states could vote; most women could not. They had to decide whether to put aside the suffrage fight until the war was over or to keep hammering at President Wilson and Congress to give them the vote.
Most women supported the decision to go to war. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, called on each woman to “inspire, encourage and urge the men of her family to perform their patriotic duty. This is the service of sacrifice and loyalty which the Government asks of the women of the nation at the present critical hour.” Women believed that if they showed their patriotism and willingness to work for the war effort, it would persuade male members of Congress to grant them suffrage.
Congress was not ready to agree. Many of those who opposed the female vote believed that women were on the side of peace, that they thought as mothers did of protecting their sons, and that they were naive and emotional—that they would vote against politicians who supported defense and would make the United States weak. This had nothing to do with fact. Many women had supported preparedness. The suffragists themselves had split into two groups, one using traditional methods of persuasion, the other civil disobedience. The militant National Women’s Party, founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, picketed the White House, enduring threats and violence.
Even after the United States entered the war, they continued to picket the White House. Many Americans felt this was unpatriotic. The National Women’s Party felt the issue of votes for women was just as important during war as during peace. The women held up banners that challenged, “How long must women wait for liberty?” They marched through the streets of cities. They sang protest songs, often with special lyrics set to older music, like this one, called “Rise Up Women!” set to the Civil War fighting song “John Brown’s Body”:
Rise up, women, for the fight is hard and long;
Rise up in thousands singing loud a battle song.
Right is might, and in strength we shall be strong
And the cause goes marching on
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! The cause goes marching on.
The women who picketed were brave and determined. They were physically attacked—sometimes banners were torn from their hands. Some of these read “Kaiser Wilson,” a reference to the undemocratic leader of Germany that suggested that President Wilson was undemocratic for not giving women the vote. Over four days in June, twenty-nine women were arrested. Six were fined but refused to pay the fine and were sent to prison. Sixteen more women were arrested in July. The Espionage Act had already been passed, and the judge who tried these women considered charging them under it. But the only quotations written on their picket signs were from President Wilson’s speeches about democracy. Instead, they were convicted for obstructing traffic. Wilson pardoned all the women.
Women picket the White House on January 25, 1917, calling for the right to vote. After the United States entered the war, some suffragists stopped such actions of civil disobedience. Others continued to picket and go to jail because they believed the vote for women was part of the larger issue of guaranteeing freedom for all, which President Wilson stressed as a reason to go to war. The signs they carried used Wilson’s own words about liberty.
In October, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and nine other women were arrested. One suffragette spoke out at her trial: “As long as women have to go to jail for petty offenses to secure freedom for the women of America, then we will continue to go to jail.”
The women were sent to the Occoquan workhouse in northern Virginia, the prison used for people convicted of crimes in Washington, D.C. They considered themselves political prisoners, not criminals, and refused to work in the garden or sewing room, the work assigned to women prisoners. The head of the workhouse “announced . . . that there will be no visitors for the ladies and they will not be allowed to communicate with any one,” reported the Washington Post. In mid-November 1917, sixteen women, led by Alice Paul, began hunger strikes. “Mrs. Lawrence Lewis . . . and Miss Lucy Burns . . . were removed from Occoquan to jail Tuesday, where they were forcibly fed, Miss Burns by means of a tube through the nose,” stated the Post.
Because of this harsh treatment, more Americans began to agree that it was time for women’s suffrage. New York State gave women the vote in November 1917. Wilson himself came to support votes for women, informing Congress in 1918 that women’s suffrage “is vital to the winning of the war.” He was talking not about the protesters but about all the women on the home front and in France whose work was contributing to the war effort. However, it took until 1919 for both the Senate and the House of Representatives to approve an amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote. After the needed three-quarters of the states ratified it, the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1920.
Women use powerful air-driven hammers to chip away at parts at a Pennsylvania weapons company in 1918. Women held factory jobs during World War I, but even more worked in traditional “female” occupations, which included teachers, secretaries, and cashiers in shops.
In the meantime, American women were demonstrating their patriotism by filling in for men who went to war. The manpower shortage prompted industries, government agencies, and patriotic groups to urge women to fill the gaps. One poster declared, “Stenographers! Washington needs you.” (A stenographer was someone who took down in shorthand the words people said and typed them up later.) “For Every Fighter a Woman Worker,” another poster read. A Connecticut weapons factory even had airplanes drop leaflets encouraging women to work.
Women did work during the war, but not in significantly greater numbers compared to the number of working women before the war. (This was true in World War II as well, when more women held skilled jobs than they had before, but the number of women added to the workforce was not much higher than it would have been with young, unmarried women taking jobs.) About one million women in World War I were part of the job force, but the large majority had worked before. They were unmarried women who moved up to better jobs—at least until male soldiers returned—or married women who went back to earn more money while their husbands were away. The big difference was not in numbers but that before the war, most women had worked in “female” occupations—for example, as teachers, housekeepers, cleaners, and seamstresses. During the war they drove streetcars and trucks, assembled airplanes, operated cranes, fixed railroad tracks, welded machinery, and made rubber tires. Even more women worked in offices, as clerks, secretaries, and bookkeepers, or as cashiers in shops or as telephone operators.
These women, photographed in June 1918, have joined the reserve forces of the U.S. Navy. They are ranked as yeomen—naval personnel who do administrative and clerical work, including managing an office, answering telephones, and handling mail.
Although African American women had a harder time than white women getting these kinds of jobs, many joined the Great Migration and left farming and domestic work for factory jobs and laboring. “We are making more money at this than any work we can get [before the war]. . . . [W]e do not have to work as hard as at housework,” said one African American woman who got a job as a railroad worker.
The federal government also needed women to replace men who had gone overseas. Hildegarde Schan was eighteen years old and living in New York when she passed the civil service exam in the fall of 1917. She “got the telegram at one o’clock in the morning for me to report [to Washington, D.C.] on December seventeenth. The next morning, I called them in Washington, and asked if they could wait until after Christmas, you know. And no, they said I had to come right away.” Schan was a clerk in the office in charge of storing and supplying weapons. The government “had built a lot of barracks on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that’s where we worked, in [a] . . . big, open space.” She shared the space with dozens of other women. Although her job in the country’s capital ended with the war, she stayed in the civil service, working for the Veterans Bureau (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) back in New York.
Despite increasing the need for their labor on the home front, World War I did not change general attitudes toward women. They would still be paid less and not have the same authority as men. Nor did most of them keep their jobs. “[T]he same patriotism which induced women to enter industry during the war should induce them to vacate their positions after the war,” said the Central Federated Union of New York, which believed, like many Americans, that women should gladly give up their jobs to returning soldiers. By 1920, there was a smaller percentage of women working than there had been in 1910.
Women worked not only on the home front; they also served in the U.S. armed forces. The U.S. Navy made an effort to reach out to women—to employ them in clerical jobs like record keeping, typing, and filing. More than 11,000 women filled these jobs, and almost 270 worked for the U.S. Marines. “I’ve got the greatest news,” wrote Martha L. Wilchinski in a letter to her boyfriend. “Are you ready? Well, then, —I’m a lady leatherneck; . . . I’m a real, live, honest-to-goodness Marine!” Six hundred women turned out with Wilchinski for the first call at a New York City enlistment center. Only three were eventually chosen. But after Wilchinski had begun her service, she wrote another letter: “What’ll I say to my grandchildren . . . [w]hen they ask me: ‘What did you do in the Great War, Grandma?’ I’ll have to say: ‘Washing windows on the second floor.’”
Female naval personnel and marines were given the same rank as men doing the same jobs—if they were doing the same jobs—although no women were officers. They could also receive veterans’ benefits after the war. But the government did not offer them long-term careers in the navy.
The U.S. Army did have a nursing corps, formed in 1898, and more than 21,000 women served in it during World War I. Some were actually in the army; others in fact worked for the American Red Cross. The Red Cross recruited nurses for the army, so often the organization they worked under wasn’t clear. About half those nurses served in France. In October 1918, when the Spanish flu epidemic was raging, General Pershing asked for 1,500 additional nurses, instead of more doctors. Nurses might deal with up to fifty patients in a day, working fourteen to eighteen hours. Although more nurses were always needed, only nine African American nurses were accepted to care for soldiers. They worked in Ohio and Illinois, and their only patients were black, not white, men.
More than 200 female Red Cross workers died of influenza. “I felt sick & went to bed about lunch time,” wrote one volunteer on a ship filled with soldiers heading toward Europe in October 1918. “Have ‘flu,’” she continued, “so frightened. Cannot yet go on deck. Ship still rocks frightfully. . . . Many cases Spanish influenza among privates.” Three days later, she recorded, “5 boys dead.” By the time the ship landed in France, “Total deaths while on trip were 72.” The volunteer survived.
Some nurses in France were members of the U.S. Army; others worked directly for the Red Cross. Here an American Red Cross volunteer, identified as Mrs. Hammond, gives a cup of water to a wounded British soldier on a train platform in Montmirail. This photograph was taken on May 31, 1918.
These agricultural workers in the American Women’s Land Army farmed in Newton Square, Pennsylvania. The program was modeled on one in Britain and was organized in the United States by women, many of them supporters of suffrage. It brought some 20,000 women from cities and towns to countryside farms to replace men who were in the military. They planted, harvested, plowed, and drove tractors—whatever was needed to keep Americans supplied with food.
Some nurses were stationed at the front to care for the badly wounded and ill who could not be transported behind the lines. They worked in dangerous conditions, sometimes without electricity or water. “Imagine having 280 medical patients and six medicine glasses, no cups or bowls available,” wrote one nurse, and later, “I never want to see another case of pneumonia following influenza, it is a dreaded disease that is filling our A.E.F. cemetery fast.” More than 200 American nurses received decorations for bravery under fire.
Some 6,000 women also did other jobs for the army. Recruited by the Red Cross, as well as by the YWCA and other nonmilitary groups, they, like their civilian counterparts on the home front, were typists, clerks, stenographers who took shorthand, and telephone operators. “For days I was on duty from eight in the morning until ten at night,” explained Grace Banker, one of the telephone operators who transmitted calls from the front lines to commanders at headquarters. “[I]t seemed worth while when we gazed at the prison pen filling up with German soldiers.”
Some women were translators. Others, called “welfare workers,” welcomed and served soldiers at canteens—cafeterias set up by volunteer organizations to give troops a break from the war. They served doughnuts and chatted and danced with soldiers at parties. Only nineteen African American women were accepted to serve with the YMCA in France, running canteens. The canteens for white servicemen had signs that said “No Negroes Allowed.” Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson were two of the black volunteers in France. “The fact that prejudice could follow us for three thousand miles across the Atlantic tremendously shocked us,” they wrote in a book about their experiences. The injustice “seared . . . [black soldiers’] souls like a hot iron, inflicted as they were at a time when these soldiers were rendering the American army and the nation a sacred service.”
Welfare workers like these, as well as clerical workers, wore uniforms and were under the command of army officers, but they were not considered to be officially in the military. They received no veterans’ benefits when the war ended; they were just told to go home. In 1979 Congress finally did recognize one group—telephone operators—as members of the U.S. armed forces. Some thirty telephone operators still living were honorably discharged from the army.
Most American women neither worked in factories and offices nor served in the military or as volunteers overseas. They strove to show their patriotism in ways common to women in all wars: they rolled bandages, knitted socks and sweaters, and assembled “comfort kits” for soldiers that included sewing thread, handkerchiefs, writing pads, postcards, buttons, pencils, and Bibles. “The American made wrappings [bandages] etc. are very useful being larger and better than those made in France,” wrote a grateful soldier, Francis Erle Cavette.
American women also sent chocolates and cigarettes. At the University of Illinois they formed a chocolate and tobacco fund in September 1917, sending more than 130 boxes of these luxuries to American troops for their first Christmas overseas. F. Lindahl Peterson thanked them: “In a world of rain, discomfort, and work, and where good tobacco is unobtainable, nothing is more highly appreciated than American cigarettes.”
More than a million women bought Liberty bonds in the first round of sales—one-third of all the Liberty bonds sold. In an effort to conserve food, they tended victory gardens for their families’ use, producing crops worth $350 million ($5.51 billion in today’s money) by 1918. In that year, Ida Clyde Clarke published American Women and the World War. She focused on the many established and new women’s organizations that raised millions of dollars for causes like Belgian refugee relief and the French ambulance service. Clarke described her book as “a story transcribed by me but written in golden deeds by twenty million loyal-hearted women in every state of our great American Union.” She wrote the book to record “the actual beginnings of the greatest massed effort of women the world has ever known.”
The vast volunteer and work efforts of American women in World War I often went unnoted. After the war, most women returned to their conventional places in the home. They still experienced job discrimination. Their work was valued less than men’s. But they did achieve the vote; and, like African Americans, individual women who had participated in the war effort on the home front and in France earned a sense of themselves as capable, valuable human beings.
