Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War / Edition 1

by Kimberly Jensen

Overview

Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War analyzes the strategies of female physicians, nurses, and women-at-arms who linked military service with the opportunity to achieve professional and civic goals. Since women armed to defend the state during war could also protect themselves, Kimberly Jensen argues, Americans began to focus on women's relationship to violence—both its wielding against women and women's uses of it. Intense discussions of rape, methods of protecting women, and proper gender roles abound as Jensen draws from rich case studies to show how female thinkers and activists wove wartime choices into long-standing debates about woman suffrage, violence against women, gender-based discrimination, and economic parity. The war created new urgency in these debates, and Jensen forcefully presents the case of women participants and activists: women's involvement in the obligation of citizens to defend the state validated their right of full female citizenship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252074967
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	02/08/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kimberly Jensen is a professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University.

Table of Contents

Preface: "Mobilizing Woman Power" in the First World War   vii
Acknowledgments   xv
Prelude: The Washington, D.C., Suffrage Parade of 1913   1
1. Negotiating Gender and Citizenship: Context for the First World War   11
2. Gender and Violence: Context and Experience in the Era of the World War   21
3. "Whether We Vote or Not — We Are Going to Shoot": Women and Armed Defense on the Home Front   36
4. "The Fighting, Biting, and Scratching Kind": Good Girls, Bad Girls, and Women's Soldiering   60
5. Uncle Sam's Loyal Nieces: Women Physicians, Citizenship, and Wartime Military Service   77
6. Helping Women Who Pay the "Rapacious Price" of War: Women's Medical Units in France   98
7. A Base Hospital Is Not a Coney Island Dance Hall: Nurses, Citizenship, Hostile Work Environment, and Military Rank   116
8. "Danger Ahead for the Country": Civic Roles and Safety for the Consumer-Civilian in Postwar America   142
Conclusion   165
Notes   177
Bibliography   209
Index   231

Editorial Reviews

"Jensen astutely analyzes the interplay between US women's attempts to attain professional and civic equality and overcome gender-based violence during WWI. . . . She expertly interweaves case studies and gender representations from women activists, popular culture, wartime propaganda, real-life accounts, and a host of other sources. Highly recommended."—Choice

“Not simply a tale about World War I or the women's suffrage movement, but a story of the complicated intersection of gender, citizenship, violence, and war in the early twentieth century.”—H-Minerva

“Mobilizing Minerva is a useful analysis that contributes thoughtfully to the history of women, gender, war, and antiviolence activism and joins a growing body of literature that places the suffrage campaign within a much wider context of women’s activism.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

“Kimberly Jensen’s study of women in the First World War is a valuable contribution to the expanding scholarship on the American social and military history of that conflict.”—Military History

"A fascinating and well-researched book on the mobilization of American women during the First World War."—Minerva Journal of Women and War

"As we struggle to understand the roots of violence against women and also to train women in the military and police forces to exercise violence in the name of the state, Kimberly Jensen's timely book helps us place important challenges in historical context. Jensen's imaginative research reveals many unappreciated dimensions of the First World War; her wise analysis deepens our understanding of civilian and military culture. An important book."—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

"The archives and popular printed magazines and papers that Jensen has tracked down are full of juicy insight into both the anti-suffrage and suffrage debates. She does a superb job of showing the reader how America's entrance into WWI affected those suffrage debates and discourses."—Cynthia Enloe, author of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives

From the Publisher