White Country Dresses for Women

Women 'fighters.'
There are pictures where you see women in France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, accompany the departing soldiers to the front in the summer of 1914. They are older women, adult, young, girls, girls: mothers, wives, sisters, girlfriends or daughters of men mobilized for war. Many smiling as their people on the march, while other women throw flowers as they passed. There are some photos of the ladies arms that somehow army fought alongside the men. And then there are more numerous pictures of women who work at home sewing military clothes, and many other curves in the fields of labor and livestock, more than they ever did in the past because all non-disabled men were at the front and they remained there for years. And finally, there are photos of grieving women, mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the fallen, painful living symbols of the tragedy of war, which swept the existence of millions of families affected by the death of an about the front every day dreaded for months and years.

For nearly a century, women's involvement in the Great War was remembered by these figures but have overlooked by historians engaged in studying the Great War only as a male experience of general and soldiers. Only a few decades, the role of women in the First World War is being researched, especially by historical. Nationalist rhetoric extolling war as a sublime and heroic masculinity experience: in reality, the Great War was the first experience of a massive war manhood assisted by femininity without the cooperation of women, no country in the war could stand after the first months fighting. Men fought the Great War, but without the active assistance of women, the soldiers would miss not only the care in hospitals, weapons, and bullets but even the uniforms. The Great War was a collective experience of men and women, drawn into a shared destiny of life and death. Imagined the Hungarian writer Andrea Latzko, who fought on the Italian front, where Andrea Latzko injured in the story of his war experience titled Men in War, published in 1921. Latzko did say in an official hospital for "a severe nervous shock" caused by 'horror of war, an invective against his wife, who was trying to assist him lovingly, and against all women because they had left their men to go to war. Not the cruelty of war had been for him a surprise, the officer yells, because "war is as it should be. That woman is cruel, here's the surprise.

That they can give away their husbands, their children, their children. Women than they sent to the front! No general could have done something if the women had not chased us in the trains, whether they had shouted that we were looking not at him if we became murderers. " Cursing the officer mentioned the suffragettes who had slapped ministers and burned museums to have the right to vote, but for their husbands' do not cry! ... Has he ever hit a woman for us ministers, or has ever clung to the rails? ... Not one has struggled, not one defended us. Not one has moved around the world. "
The copy of the book Latzko from which I took the quotation has a handwritten dedication to the author "Madame Anita Dobelli Zampetti plain de reconnaissance et admiration. Niederalm 1922 ". We do not know what he thought invective against women Ms. Dobelli Zampetti, a leader of the Italian feminist movement, suffragist, and pacifist, who, unlike most of the feminists in other countries, did not convert interventionism, as is indicated in one of the stages of the Great War of Italian.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the movement for the emancipation of women in politics, in the workplace and society, was perceived as a serious threat to male dominance, symbolized in man martial masculinity, the soldier of the national state. Intellectuals and politicians were auspicating the possibility of a new war as a means to counter feminism, masculinity regenerates and reaffirms the primacy of man martial. Instead, during the Great War, the mobilization of women to support the war effort was equivalent to the mobilization of men on the battlefield. The family, hospital, industry, countryside, office, transport, posts, public service were the battlefields of women. And many were the dead and the violence suffered by women in war zones and employment. The emancipation was the reward that many women hoped their contribution to the human martial war. Instead, for millions of women, the reward was the restoration of quiet awe. It took another and largest World War, with a more intense involvement of women and a higher toll of female victims, to impart a constant acceleration to the emancipation of women in the Western world.