Total Warfare, the Homefront and Women in Europe during the First and Second World Wars

This paper traces the fundamental transformation of the meaning of European civilian experiences and spaces of war during the First and Second World Wars.  It does so by focusing on the changing representations and lived experiences of women. The term ‘home front’ and the question of how and why states made use of this concept as civilian lives and spaces became increasingly incorporated into the waging of industrialized, modern war in the first half of the twentieth century animates the entire paper.  It begins by interrogating the very category of the “home front” at the moment of its entry into common parlance in World War I. It argues that gender was at the heart of a profound cultural change as civilian bodies and spaces became targets of new modes of warfare and new forms of state intervention into domestic and everyday life. The paper thus will briefly investigate new understandings of female war work, the depth and cultural meanings of wartime violence especially under occupation, and the growth of state interest in monitoring sexuality in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease. It will conclude by analyzing how modes of total war heightened the levels of violence aimed at civilian societies and thus led to the blurring of the borders between feminized home fronts and masculinized battlefronts. This had far reaching consequences for gender identities and relations and, above all, for the expansion of state regulation in ways that fully militarized the home.