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.
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
