Patriotic women and citizenship in Australia, 1914-18

World War I made significant demands on the citizens of the new nation of Australia as they encountered a national ethos that embraced sacrifice as a core signifier of citizenship. This thesis proposes that patriotic women understood citizenship as profoundly gendered and engaged with the war in fulfilment of their duty as ‘maternal citizens,’ alongside their counterparts the ‘citizen soldiers.’ They sought to advance progressive ideals of women’s place in society without overturning the existing structures, thus acting progressively within a conservative framework. This study challenges the early feminist analysis that the women’s movement in Australia failed to exploit opportunities offered by the war to overturn traditional gender stereotypes. In doing so, it contributes to an approach that moves away from considering the impact on women and toward an understanding of these women as active agents in their experience of war. It considers how patriotic women used citizenship as a framework to assign meaning to their participation in the war effort. World War I raised questions of citizenship for all Australians and patriotic women responded to the war in the context of traditions of activism and feminine citizenship that predated the conflict. The doctrine of separate spheres was understood by women’s organisations to value the distinctive contribution women made to public life and they formed groups such as the Australian Women’s National League, the Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia and the network of the National Councils of Women. This thesis is based on an examination of the rhetoric and activities of these organisations during World War I, along with the Australian branch of the British Red Cross Society, to which women contributed the bulk of the labour force. Patriotic women engaged actively with the war in three principal areas – rhetorical support for the Empire, patriotic work and maternal duty. This thesis argues that patriotic women conflated citizenship with patriotism, loyalty and the Empire, and support for the war and universal military service was justified in progressive terms of the good of the nation over that of the individual. When the only official role open to Australian women during the war was to enlist for overseas service as nurses, patriotic women considered the contributions women could make to the national effort through modifying their production and consumption habits. Wartime exigencies gave added power to the pre-war ‘social purity’ agenda and patriotic women sought to shape the behaviour of men and women by reconfiguring temperance and self control as patriotic virtues. This thesis considers how private behaviour and public good were merged in the cause of the Empire and what had previously had little or nothing to do with citizenship became much more closely connected.