For Love and Country: Gender Roles, Masculine Space, and Wartime Propaganda in the Ruth Fielding Series

“Men and women are not equal, dear. And they never will be. Wearing mannish clothes and doing mannish labor will never give women the same outlook upon life that men have. And when men encourage us to believe that our minds are the same as theirs, they do it almost always for their own selfish ends . . .” So declares series heroine Ruth Fielding in Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross, and yet her own actions during the Great War belie the belief that she is not equal to a man in her abilities. Ruth aids the auxiliary organization by first making a motion picture that raises money for the Red Cross, then working in the Supply Department of her state Red Cross, and finally going overseas with the supply unit of a Red Cross base hospital. Ultimately, she exposes a trio of embezzlers who have stolen almost ten thousand dollars in supplies. In Ruth Fielding at the War Front, Ruth learns that her beau, Tom Cameron, has been spying for the American Army and may have been captured by the Germans. She disguises herself in several ways, including in male clothing, and crosses into the German trenches in search of him. Ruth’s excursion as a male-dressed spy only serves to highlight the permeable gender boundaries of the battlefield. For love and country, she is allowed to transgress the gender boundaries that would constrain her in peacetime, but she does so under the aegis of military supervisors.