Welcome to The Deep Dive. We are just so incredibly
glad you're here joining us today. Yeah, thanks
for listening. You know, when we usually picture
World War I, it is almost impossible not to conjure
up a very specific, almost cinematic image in
our heads. Right. I mean, everyone sees the muddy
trenches. Exactly. The mud, the barbed wire,
and just this endless sea of men in uniform.
But for this deep dive, we are taking a stack
of notes from a remarkably comprehensive Wikipedia
article. It really is extensive. It is. It's
simply titled Women in World War I. And we are
going on a specific mission with this one. Our
goal today is to completely shatter that monolithic
male -centric image of the Great War. Because
it's just not the whole story. Not at all. We
want to show you the astonishing, multifaceted,
and honestly deeply dangerous roles that women
played all across the globe. We're talking about
everything from the home front to the actual
front lines. Okay, let's unpack this. Because
looking through these sources, it is clear that
women weren't just, you know, passively waiting
for the men to return. No, absolutely not. But
they also weren't all just drafted into service
by their governments either. There seemed to
be a massive spectrum of reasons why women stepped
into the fray. It's a profound shift in perspective
when you look at the sheer scale of it. And you're
spot -on about the motivations. It wasn't some
single unified mindset. Right. For some women,
Participation was deeply personal. They wanted
to prove their worth or they felt a patriotic
duty to actively support their loved ones who
were fighting. They saw a chance to do more than
what society traditionally boxed in as, quote
unquote, women's work. Yeah. But we also have
to look at the highly strategic side of this.
A massive portion of women firmly believed that
making themselves indispensable to the war effort
was the ultimate leverage to finally secure the
right to vote. The ultimate bargaining chip like
we kept the country. Now give us the ballot.
Precisely. And the thorough material shows that
this strategy actually yielded huge gains during
and right after the war. Oh really? Oh yeah.
Places like Denmark and Iceland granted full
suffrage to women in 1915. Wow. Right in the
middle of the war. Exactly. The U .K. passed
a major suffrage law in 1918 that was directly
tied to women's wartime contributions, and the
U .S. eventually followed suit. But then on the
completely opposite end of the spectrum, you
had women whose participation was defined by
active resistance to the war itself. That's fascinating.
Consider the 1 ,000 women who braved heavily
restricted, dangerous wartime travel to attend
the 1915 Women's Peace Congress in the Netherlands.
A thousand women. Yes, they were actively protesting
the violence and trying to persuade world leaders
to negotiate an end to the slaughter. I love
that right from the start, we're seeing women
as political strategists, peace activists and
patriots. But I want to move to the actual front
lines, because the storytellers and the rule
breakers of this era are just mind blowing. They
really are. Imagine being a female journalist
at this time. You are facing all the usual lethal
dangers of a war zone, plus a military establishment
that absolutely does not want you anywhere near
the action. There's a story in the notes about
Dorothy Lawrence that is just wild. Her story
is incredible. She was an aspiring English journalist
and she realized very quickly that The military
wasn't going to just hand her a press pass to
the trenches. No way. So she took matters into
her own hands. Right. She actually disguised
herself as a male soldier. The notes say she
posed as a sapper for the Royal Engineers. What
exactly did a sapper do in World War I? Because
it doesn't sound like a desk job. And not at
all. A sapper is basically a combat engineer.
Think of the most grueling, dangerous physical
labor you can imagine in a war zone. Oh, wow.
They were the ones digging the complex trench
networks, laying landmines, repairing defenses
under heavy fire. It was brutal work. And she
just joined them. Yeah, Dorothy Lawrence managed
to infiltrate this world. She bound her chest,
wore a corset to flatten her figure, and actually
made it to the front lines in France. She was
doing heavy combat engineering in a corset. Yes,
which makes the physical toll even more staggering.
She managed to stay undercover for 10 whole days,
living in the mud and the terror of the trenches.
Before the sheer physical exhaustion, the difficulty
breathing and failing health forced her to turn
herself in to the commanding officers. I have
to imagine the British military command did not
take kindly to a female journalist exposing how
easy it was to slip past their security. What
happened to her? They panicked. They were terrified
of the public relations nightmare. She was essentially
detained, interrogated, and forced to swear herself
to silence. That is awful. And the tragedy is,
even when she tried to publish her book after
the war, which was titled Sapper Dorothy Lawrence,
it was so heavily censored by the authorities
that it completely flopped. The War Office effectively
erased her from the narrative. Erased for trying
to tell the unvarnished truth, which, as we keep
seeing in these sources, was a massive threat
to the authorities. It wasn't just journalists
getting silenced. It was anyone who didn't stick
to the heroic script. The governments heavily,
heavily curated the narrative of the war. They
needed a constant stream of young men willing
to enlist, which meant they needed stories of
glory, honor, and heroism. Right, the propaganda
machine. Exactly. They absolutely did not want
the bloody reality published. A prime example
of this is the American nurse and author Ellen
Lamott. In 1916, she wrote a book called The
Backwash of War. Because she was actually there,
right? Yes. She was a nurse working in a French
field hospital in Belgium. So she saw the direct
aftermath of artillery and gas. And I imagine
she didn't write about glorious charges over
the top. Far from it. Her book focused on the
agonizing, unglamorous, terrifying deaths of
soldiers. She wrote about men dying slowly of
gangrene, crying out for their mothers. God,
that's dark. It was completely stripping away
the romantic myth of combat. It was brutally
honest. And because of that honesty, the book
was banned in France. It was banned in Great
Britain. And the moment the United States entered
the war, it was banned there too. It is wild
to think about a nurse. someone actively saving
lives, being treated as a threat to national
security just for writing down what she saw during
her shift. What's fascinating here is the underlying
reason why these female writers were so threatening
to the establishment. Think about it. Women were
generally outside the military hierarchy. Oh,
I see. They weren't bound by the male macho code
of wartime glory. Because they were outsiders,
they were free to report the unglamorous truth,
making them a unique threat to wartime propaganda.
That makes total sense. Look at Mary Ethel McCauley.
She was an American artist and war correspondent
who spent two years in Germany. She published
Germany in wartime in 1917. OK. But because the
book depicted ordinary Germans, citizens suffering
and facing starvation due to the Allied blockades,
the U .S. government deemed it far too sympathetic
to the enemy. As soon as the U .S. entered the
war, the government literally seized her book.
They confiscated it because empathy for starving
civilians ruined the narrative that all Germans
were monsters. It really highlights how tightly
controlled information was, but if the front
lines and the press were tightly controlled,
the home front was undergoing a massive chaotic
transformation. Oh, completely upended. The sheer
industrial output required to fight this war
was staggering. I want to shift to the munitions
factories in Britain. I was reading about the
munitionettes, who were mostly working class
women. typically between the ages of 18 and 29.
The backbone of the war. And the conditions describe,
I mean, strip away all modern OSHA safety gear.
We are talking about environments that were lethal
before a bomb even went off. The scale of their
work is hard to overstate. With millions of men
conscripted, these women were stepping into massive
industrial complexes to manufacture the very
exclusives keeping the war going. The sources
specifically highlight HM factory, Gretna, which
was the UK's largest cordite factory. For you
listening, cordite is a type of smokeless propellant
used in artillery shells. And the process of
making it sounds terrifying. What were these
women actually doing day to day? They were doing
the chemical mixing. Specifically, they were
mixing gun cotton and nitroglycerin by hand in
massive vats. Yes, and nitroglycerin is incredibly
unstable. A slight change in temperature or a
sudden jolt could level the entire building.
It was such a volatile, terrifying mixture that
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes, visited the factory and dubbed the mixture
The Devil's Courage. The Devil's Courage. That
paints a picture. But they weren't just risking
instantaneous death from explosions. The day
-to -day exposure to these chemicals was actively
destroying their bodies. The notes mention they
earned a nickname Canaries. Yes, and the reason
for that nickname is quite grim. The toxic chemicals
they worked with, specifically TNT, caused severe
jaundice and liver damage, which literally turned
their skin bright yellow. Turned their skin yellow.
That is horrifying. They suffered from horrific
illnesses, TNT poisoning, severe respiratory
issues, even the breakdown of their blood. So
you have women turning yellow and slowly dying
in TNT factories in Britain. But this kind of
home front hardship wasn't localized. The sources
show that the specific flavor of suffering just
changed depending on where you lived. The global
socioeconomic collapse was universal, but the
friction it caused varied wildly. If we widen
the lens to the Ottoman Empire, we see the Islamic
organization for the employment of women or the
I .O .E .W. Okay, what did they do? They organized
and placed women into military footwear factories
like the massive facility in Bako's which employed
over 900 women. But outside those factory walls,
the situation for village women was a desperate
struggle for pure survival. With the men gone,
these women had to shoulder the entire agricultural
burden. But the tragedy was they faced starvation
anyway because the military routinely requisitioned
their grain, grain meant for the women's own
families, with little to no compensation. The
military even commandeered their physical homes
for strategic use, forcing women and children
to sleep outside under the trees. kind of home
front nightmare. You're either breathing in toxic
fumes, making artillery shells, or you're starving
under a tree because the army took your house.
Exactly. And wartime scarcity does something
terrible to a society. It inevitably turns citizens
against each other. People start looking for
someone to blame. Right. The text points out
a fascinating, if dark, example of this societal
policing in the German Empire. Germany was hit
incredibly hard by food shortages due to the
Allied blockades. The working class was forced
to survive on kebrat, which was a widely maligned
inferior bread made largely from potatoes and
fillers. Right. People were desperate. But the
notes say that amid all this starvation, A fierce
social resentment started brewing specifically
against soldiers' wives. Why them? Because of
the military pensions they received and, more
importantly, how society perceived they were
spending them. When domestic economies collapse,
people look for scapegoats. The public and even
the police fiercely judge these women if they
dare to eat wheat bread or enjoy a slice of cake
and whipped cream at a café. Cake and whipped
cream. Yeah, there was this intense societal
policing of women's behavior. The police actually
complained that these women weren't fitting the
idealized, propagandized image of the frugal
wartime homemaker. One officer formally complained
that soldiers' wives were untouched by despair
and shouldn't be occupying cafes sampling delicacies
while the nation suffered. That is just so telling.
The entire global economy is collapsing. Millions
of men are dying. But society still finds the
time to form a mob because a soldier's wife eat
a piece of cake. It really is wild. It really
underscores how women are often the first scapegoats
when domestic stability fractures. But let's
transition from the toxicity of the factories
and the scarcity of the home front to the direct
result of all those new weapons being built.
The medical need must have been absolutely unimaginable.
Unprecedented is the only word for it. The scale
of medical support provided by women during World
War I reshaped modern medicine. We're talking
about over 21 ,000 U .S. Army nurses alone stepping
into the void. And they weren't just treating
standard gunshot wounds. The weapons were completely
novel. They were. The medical community literally
did not have protocols for things like chlorine
or mustard gas attacks before this war. The source
material specifically highlights Canadian nurses
who became internationally famous for their constant
soothing care of these agonizing gas victims.
They were figuring it out as they went. Exactly.
They were inventing modern trauma and respiratory
care on the fly, intense mere miles from the
artillery lines. And doing so at incredible personal
risk. The notes mention Edith Cavell, who is
probably one of the most famous figures to come
out of this era. She is a towering figure of
defiance. Cavell was a British nurse working
in occupied Belgium. True to her medical oath,
she treated injured soldiers from both sides
of the conflict without prejudice. Both sides?
Yes, but she went a step further. She actively
used her position to help allied soldiers escape
from behind enemy lines, funneling them into
the neutral Netherlands. When the Germans uncovered
her resistance network in 1915, she was tried
and executed. Her death wasn't just a localized
tragedy. It sparked an international outrage
that caused enlistment numbers in the British
Army to absolutely soar. She became a massive
symbol for the Allied cause. But as dangerous
as the enemy was or the artillery or the threat
of execution, here's where it gets really interesting.
The deadliest threat to these nurses wasn't human
at all. No, it was an invisible enemy. The 1918
flu pandemic. And this wasn't like catching a
bad cold. This was a historically lethal virus.
It was devastating. And during the 1918 flu,
the medical world didn't have strong antiviral
medicines or antibiotics to treat secondary infections.
The only real treatment was intensive. round
-the -clock nursing care. Right, just keeping
them alive. Lowering fevers, keeping patients
hydrated, maintaining strict sanitation. Nurses
became the primary and often the only defense
against the virus, and it cost them dearly. For
you listening, consider this staggering statistic
from the text. Out of the 134 United States Army
nurse deaths during the entirety of World War
I, 127 of them were caused by disease. 127 out
of 134. Not by enemy attacks, not by shrapnel.
by the invisible illnesses they contracted while
trying to save others. That is incredibly sobering.
It completely reshapes where you imagine the
front line actually was. But speaking of the
literal front line, we also have to talk about
the women who actively sought out combat. Because
the sources make it clear, women didn't just
treat the wounded or build the bombs. Some of
them actually picked up rifles. They did, though
it's a part of the history that is frequently
overlooked or dismissed as myth. But the records
are clear. I am so eager to share this part.
In 1917, the Russian Provisional Government actually
deployed official all -female combat units. They
were known as the Women's Battalions of Death.
What a name! Right. They were led by a woman
named Maria Bakhareva who had petitioned and
received personal permission from the Tsar to
fight. And then you have Serbia. In Serbia, women
took up arms out of sheer desperate necessity
to defend their homeland from invasion. You have
figures like Milunka Savic who fought throughout
the war and famously captured 23 enemy soldiers
single -handedly during the Battle of the Krona
Bend. Capturing 23 soldiers single -handedly
completely upends the traditional narrative of
the passive female civilian. And this defiance
of traditional roles extended into the shadows
as well, into the highly dangerous world of espionage.
Spies. Yes. We touched on Edith Cavell's resistance,
but there were women actively working as intelligence
assets, like Martha Cunnockert. Her story sounds
like a Hollywood thriller. She was a Belgian
nurse who treated soldiers, but she was secretly
recruited by British intelligence to be a spy.
For a time, she operated as a double agent. And
in a truly incredible twist of fate. She was
actually awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans
for her dedicated medical service to their troops,
all while she was secretly feeding strategic
information back to the British. Stop and just
imagine the sheer unbelievable awkwardness of
that moment. The absolute imposter syndrome of
standing there at an enemy award ceremony, smiling
politely, pinning an iron cross to your uniform,
knowing full well you're actively orchestrating
the downfall of the men clapping for you. It's
just wild. The nerves of steel required for that
are just off the charts. And speaking of crucial
communications and nerves of steel, we cannot
forget the Hello Girls. Ah, the Hello Girls,
a vital yet historically marginalized group that
revolutionized military communications. They
were the U .S. Army Signal Corps Female Telephone
Operators Unit. From what I read, General John
J. Pershing specifically called for them in 1917
because communications on the Western Front were
a complete disaster. It was chaos. Total chaos.
They needed operators who were fast, precise,
and completely bilingual in English and French
so that split -second artillery orders wouldn't
be misunderstood. Out of 7 ,000 women who applied
for this incredibly high -pressure job, only
450 were accepted. They wore U .S. Army uniforms.
They were subject to strict Army regulations.
They were stationed in war zones. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the story of the
Hello Girls perfectly encapsulates the post -war
betrayal experienced by so many of these women.
Despite wearing those uniforms, despite following
those military regulations and serving under
fire, the U .S. government officially classified
them as civilians. Civilians. Unbelievable. Because
Army regulations technically specified the male
gender for soldiers, these women were denied
honorable discharges and veteran status when
they returned home. It wasn't until 1978, 60
years after the war ended, that Congress finally
approved veteran status for the remaining Hello
Girls. 60 years. They had to fight their own
government for six decades just to be recognized
for the uniform they wore in a combat zone. And
unfortunately, that pushback wasn't an isolated
incident. Once the armistice was signed and the
war officially ended, women across the globe.
in the munitions factories and the civil service,
in the military, were largely pushed right back
out of the workforce. The men returned from the
front, and the societal expectation was that
women would just quietly fold away their overalls
and go back to the domestic sphere. The labor
statistics confirm exactly that. Female employment
dropped right back down to pre -war levels almost
immediately. The doors that had been blown open
by wartime necessity were firmly shut again,
and they really wouldn't open on that industrial
scale again until 1939, with the outbreak of
the Second World War. So what does this all mean?
We started this deep dive looking to shatter
the illusion that World War One was just men
in muddy trenches. And looking at all these sources,
it is abundantly clear that this war was a global
crucible. It really was. It forced societies
out of sheer desperate survival to temporarily
abandon their rigid gender norms. And even though
there was a massive cultural backlash after the
war, you can't unring that bell. It forever changed
the trajectory of women in medicine, in heavy
industry, in journalism, and in the military.
That is the crucial takeaway. For you listening,
I want you to consider how many of the rights,
the workplace norms and the societal roles that
you see and experience today were quite literally
forged in the fires of these incredibly harsh,
toxic and dangerous environments. Absolutely.
Think about the sheer grit it required for an
entire generation of women to step into the massive
void left by millions of conscripted men. They
weren't just filling in temporarily, they were
innovating trauma care, fighting on the front
lines and sacrificing their health and plants.
From the canaries turning yellow in the TNT factories
to the nurses battling the invisible 1918 flu
to the spies wearing the Iron Cross. It's an
incredible legacy and this raises an important
question which is the thought I want to leave
you with today. If this devastating global conflict
hadn't forced societies to rely on women for
their very survival, if the governments hadn't
been backed into an existential corner where
they desperately needed women in the factories
and on the front lines, how many decades longer
would it have taken for the global suffrage movement
to succeed? Did the unimaginable tragedy of World
War I inadvertently act as the greatest catalyst
for women's liberation in modern history? That
is a profound question to chew on. Thank you
so much for joining us on this deep dive. We
will catch you next time.