"Take my Husband Please": American and Canadian Women respond to Conscription during the First World War.

“Take my Husband Please”: American and Canadian Women respond to Conscription during the

First World War.

Canada and the United States both implemented conscription during the First World War. This highly divisive policy elicited strong reactions from supporters and opponents alike.

The draft itself was highly gendered, but it impacted women as well as men. One draft board noted that, “The Mothers are the ones that tried to keep their boys from going to war.” Another board reported the opposite problem, “We found so many mother-in law’s that wanted to send their daughter’s husbands to war.”

While it was not the intent of the Selective Service Act to discipline ne’er-do-well husbands or police marriages, in a great many cases this is exactly what happened. One board observed that, “the draft law gave wives a weapon with which to bring recalcitrant husbands to terms” and both governments took steps to prohibit “slacker marriages” and expended great effort investigating attempts to conceive children “with a primary view of evading military service.”

In an environment that conflated military service with the duty of citizenship and punished opponents and transgressors, support for conscription also became entwined with the issue of suffrage, which proved to be a divisive issue among feminists and other progressives.

Drawing heavily upon archival material from the United States and Canada this transnational study explores the impact of conscription upon North American women and the negotiation of power and gender that underlined their wide variety of responses.