As the war dragged on, conditions on the home front became
a matter of concern for all the participants. The
prolongation of the war had transformed it into a total
conflict that affected the lives of all citizens, however remote
they might be from the battlefields. The need to organize
masses of men and matériel for years of combat
(Germany alone had 5.5 million men in active units in
1916) led to increased centralization of government powers,
economic regimentation, and manipulation of public
opinion to keep the war effort going.
Because the war was expected to be short, little
thought had been given to economic problems and
long-term wartime needs. Governments had to respond
quickly, however, when the war machines failed to
achieve their knockout blows and made ever-greater demands
for men and matériel. The extension of government
power was a logical outgrowth of these needs. Most
European countries had already devised some system of
mass conscription or military draft. It was now carried to
unprecedented heights as countries mobilized tens of millions
of young men for that elusive breakthrough to victory.
Even countries that continued to rely on volunteers
(Great Britain had the largest volunteer army in modern
history—one million men—in 1914 and 1915) were
forced to resort to conscription, especially to ensure that
skilled laborers did not enlist but remained in factories
that were important to the production of munitions. In
the meantime, thousands of laborers were shipped in from
the colonies to work on farms and in factories as replacements
for Europeans mobilized to serve on the battlefield.
Throughout Europe, wartime governments expanded
their powers over their economies. Free market capitalistic
systems were temporarily shelved as governments
experimented with price, wage, and rent controls; the
rationing of food supplies and materials; the regulation
of imports and exports; and the nationalization of
transportation systems and industries. Some governments
even moved toward compulsory employment. In effect, to
mobilize the entire resources of the nation for the war effort,
European countries had moved toward planned
economies directed by government agencies. Under total
war mobilization, the distinction between soldiers at war
and civilians at home was narrowed. As U.S. President
Woodrow Wilson expressed it, the men and women “who
remain to till the soil and man the factories are no less a
part of the army than the men beneath the battle flags.”
As the Great War dragged on and both casualties and
privations worsened, internal dissatisfaction replaced the
patriotic enthusiasm that had marked the early stages of
the conflict. By 1916, there were numerous signs that
civilian morale was beginning to crack under the pressure
of total war. War governments, however, fought back
against the growing opposition to the war, as even parliamentary
regimes resorted to an expansion of police powers
to stifle internal dissent. At the very beginning of the
war, the British Parliament passed the Defence of the
Realm Act (DORA), which allowed the public authorities
to arrest dissenters as traitors. The act was later extended
to authorize public officials to censor newspapers
by deleting objectionable material and even to suspend
newspaper publication. In France, government authorities
had initially been lenient about public opposition to
the war, but by 1917, they began to fear that open opposition
to the war might weaken the French will to fight.
When Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) became premier
near the end of 1917, the lenient French policies
came to an end, and basic civil liberties were suppressed
for the duration of the war. When a former premier publicly
advocated a negotiated peace, Clemenceau’s government
had him sentenced to prison for two years for
treason.
Wartime governments made active use of propaganda
to arouse enthusiasm for the war. The British and French,
for example, exaggerated German atrocities in Belgium
and found that their citizens were only too willing to
believe these accounts. But as the war dragged on and
morale sagged, governments were forced to devise new
techniques for stimulating declining enthusiasm. In one
British recruiting poster, for example, a small daughter
asked her father, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great
War?” while her younger brother played with toy soldiers
and a cannon.
Total war made a significant impact on European society,
most visibly by bringing an end to unemployment.
The withdrawal of millions of men from the labor market
to fight, combined with the heightened demand for
wartime products, led to jobs for everyone able to work.
The war also created new roles for women. Because so
many men went off to fight at the front, women were
called on to take over jobs and responsibilities that had
not been available to them before. Overall, the number of
women employed in Britain who held new jobs or replaced
men rose by 1,345,000. Women were also now employed
in jobs that had been considered “beyond the capacity
of women.” These included such occupations as
chimney sweeps, truck drivers, farm laborers, and factory
workers in heavy industry. By 1918, some 38 percent of
the workers in the Krupp armaments factories in Germany
were women.
While male workers expressed concern that the employment
of females at lower wages would depress their
own wages, women began to demand equal pay legislation.
A law passed by the French government in July
1915 established a minimum wage for women homeworkers
in textiles, an industry that had grown dramatically
thanks to the demand for military uniforms. Later in
1917, the government decreed that men and women
should receive equal rates for piecework. Despite the noticeable
increase in women’s wages that resulted from
government regulations, women’s industrial wages still
were not equal to men’s wages by the end of the war.
Even worse, women’s place in the workforce was far
from secure. At the end of the war, governments moved
quickly to remove women from the jobs they had encouraged
them to take earlier. By 1919, there were 650,000
unemployed women in Britain, and wages for women
who were still employed were lowered. The work benefits
for women from World War I seemed to be short-lived as
demobilized men returned to the job market.
Nevertheless, in some countries, the role played by
women in the wartime economy did have a positive impact
on the women’s movement for social and political
emancipation. The most obvious gain was the right to
vote, granted to women in Britain in January 1918 and in
Germany and Austria immediately after the war. Contemporary
media, however, tended to focus on the more
noticeable, yet in some ways more superficial, social
emancipation of upper- and middle-class women. In everlarger
numbers, these young women took jobs, had their
own apartments, and showed their new independence by
smoking in public and wearing shorter dresses, cosmetics,
and new hairstyles.
World History
