“Housewife to the Troops They Serve”: Gender and Labor in the British Army Service Corps, 1914–18

From ports and camps to the devastated areas behind the trenches, an army of workers supported the British Empire’s fighting forces on the Western Front during the First World War. Although gendered notions of service expected men to be fighters, nearly a million white British soldiers labored alongside this global workforce. The Army Service Corps (ASC) was the largest regiment of military logistical workers, comprising roughly 300,000 soldiers. Its members served as the British army’s bakers, drivers, butchers, and clerks. These jobs and their location behind the lines contradicted public expectations for men at war.

This paper analyzes how ASC men serving in Britain and France tried to justify and contest their uncertain position in wartime race and gender hierarchies. Using their writing to family and friends in letters and unit periodicals, I reconstruct how these soldiers discussed their work experiences in a branch of the military that the public derided or ignored. I argue that men tried to reshape the meaning of their service by centering their physical experience of toil and reveling in their status as ‘forgotten’ workers. In the process, they temporarily broadened the meaning of military service to include both themselves and many of the men of color and white women they worked alongside.

This paper builds on the rich scholarship on European women and colonial non-combatants serving during the First World War by analyzing identity formation amongst white British soldiers in similar roles. Ironically, historians have overlooked enlisted men. By examining the writing of white men performing marginalized work, my paper provides new insights into the fragility and power of racial and gender hierarchies structuring the meanings of wartime labor.