A New Kind of Woman Is Following the Army: Women’s Work with the American Expeditionary Forces

In May 1918, a young woman with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), explained to American soldiers in France that as she watched young men from her hometown being shipped off to war.  She wished that she “too had been a man to have a small part in this great conflict.”  When the YMCA accepted her into its canteen program, she embraced the chance for wartime service.  Throughout the war, approximately 3,500 women opened huts and canteens for soldiers and sailors across Europe.  U.S. military and civilian leaders justified this new kind of wartime work by asserting that women played a crucial role in bringing a sense of domesticity, morality, and wholesome fun to a warzone filled with temptations that threatened soldiers’ physical health and military efficiency.  Recreation work thus drew on prevalent notions of gender that linked women’s race and class to their moral status and served to protect the women’s reputations in the war zone.  While women embraced their task to domesticate the military environment through motherly and sisterly support, they also welcomed the challenge of a new kind of war work.  Many women relished the opportunity to meet men outside of their social circles and learned to navigate the complex relationships they formed in the course of their work.  Despite program officials’ intent that the women symbolize conventional gender norms, recreation work provided new wartime roles for women who understood their labor as the feminine equivalent of soldiering and a symbol of their more public and participatory place in the nation.  This presentation examines the ways women’s work utilized gender and sexuality to maintain troop morale and argues that their efforts are an important tool for measuring the relationship between women and the state at a crucial moment in U.S. history.