Women and the French Army during the World Wars, 1914–1940

Andrew Orr

Description

How did women contribute to the French Army in the World Wars? Drawing on myriad sources, historian Andrew Orr examines the roles and value of the many French women who have been overlooked by historians—those who worked as civilians supporting the military. During the First World War, most officers expected that the end of the war would see a return to prewar conditions, so they tolerated women in supporting roles. But soon after the November 1918 armistice, the French Army fired more than half its female employees. Demobilization created unexpected administrative demands that led to the next rehiring of many women. The army's female workforce grew slowly and unevenly until 1938 when preparations for war led to another hiring wave; however, officers resisted all efforts to allow women to enlist as soldiers and alternately opposed and ignored proposals to recognize them as long-term employees. Orr's work offers a critical look at the indispensable wartime roles filled by women behind the lines.

Introduction
1. Weapons of Total War, 1914-1918
2. The Failure of the Demobilization Purge, 1919-1923
3. The 1927 and 1928 Army Laws
4. War Clouds, 1929-1938
5. "She remained at her post until the very end:" Women and Second World War
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Women
• Primera Guerra Mundial
• World War I
• Military
• Woman
• The Women
• Première Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253026781
• Langue: English

Extrait

WOMEN AND THE FRENCH ARMY DURING THE WORLD WARS, 1914-1940
WOMEN
and the
FRENCH
ARMY
DURING
THE WORLD WARS,
1914-1940

ANDREW ORR
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Andrew Orr
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02630-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02677-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02678-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Weapons of Total War, 1914-1918
2. The Failure of the Demobilization Purge, 1919-1923
3. The 1927 and 1928 Army Laws
4. War Clouds, 1929-1938
5. She Remained at Her Post until the Very End : Women and the Second World War
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM DEEPLY indebted to the professors who trained and encouraged me both as a graduate student and an undergraduate. Most of all I am grateful to Tom Kselman, my doctoral advisor, for his patience, encouragement, and sage advice. Without fear of exaggeration, I can say that he always knew the right advice to give me and the most tactful way to do it.
During my time in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame I was lucky enough to acquire debts to a number of committed and talented professors, including Doris Bergen, who took the time to teach me how to apply for graduate school successfully and whose friendship and support I still value. Laura Crago invested an inordinate amount of time in improving my writing and teaching me to analyze sources with greater rigor. Gary Hamburg s aggressive questioning forced me to learn to articulate my arguments with greater precision and encouraged me to radically recast my project. I am also grateful to Emily Osborne, Semion Lyandres, and Jim Turner for their assistance. In addition, I am cognizant of the debts I owe to Gaines Post Jr. and Harold Rood, my advisors at Claremont McKenna College. Their teaching methods and research interests continue to shape my work.
I have been fortunate to receive financial support at several critical junctures while researching and writing this book. I am grateful to the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame for helping to fund my initial research and to L Institut de hautes tudes internationales et du d veloppement in Geneva for providing funding through an Albert Gallatin Fellowship. An Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame gave me the time to reevaluate my work and begin the long process of turning it into this book. I am also grateful to Kansas State University s College of Arts and Sciences for generously supporting the final stages of my research with a Faculty Enhancement Program grant and a University Small Research Grant.
I would like to thank the editors at Indiana University Press. Gary Dunham s support for this project has been steadfast, and I appreciate his help. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose careful reading of my manuscript and judicious advice have helped to make this a better book. Brian Bendlin s copyediting had greatly improved the quality of this book and I am thankful for his invaluable assistance.
In my time as a graduate student and professor I have been especially blessed to work with a large number of colleagues whose friendship and professional expertise have helped me to develop, refine, and complete this book. I am grateful to Marc DeVore for his comradeship going back to our undergraduate days. I also want to thank Sean Brennan, with whom I spent many hours exchanging ideas. In addition, I am grateful to the Euro Lunch crew from Notre Dame, including Neil Dhingra, Troy Feay, Kari Foster, Mark McCarthy, Miriam Rainbird, Wendy Shrank, Nichole Thompson, and Samy Zaka.
Tina Pham has always been generous with her time and has helped me talk through the problems I have run into while working on this project. I would also like to thank my former flatmate in Geneva, Hebatullah Selim, whose friendship helped me enormously when I was writing far from my family and the rest of my friends. I am also grateful to Meggan and Jamie Keith and William and Zandra Towns, whose friendship in graduate school I have not forgotten.
Since becoming a professor I have been fortunate to continue to accumulate debts of gratitude. In particular I would like to thank Rachel Chrastil, whose advice on how to improve and shape my work has been unerringly wise. Jeff Crane, George Diaz, and Lila Rakoczy have helped me to improve my scholarship even as they have enriched my life with their friendship. I am also grateful to many of my colleagues at Kansas State University for their encouragement and friendship. In different ways David Defries, Al Hampshire, Michael Krysko, Heather McCrea, Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, and Jim Sherow have all gone out of their way to help me and my family both professionally and personally.
Most of all I would like to thank my family for their encouragement and support. My wife Suzanne Orr helped me to conceptualize this book as a project focused on women in the French Army and assisted me as I grappled with European women s history, a field in which I had not originally intended to work. She has lived through this process with me and her encouragement has helped me to keep working even when I wanted to despair. Without her expertise and encouragement I would not have written this book.
I also want to thank my parents Cynthia Bemis and William Orr for everything they have done for me. Their love and sacrifices have helped me throughout my life, and I am deeply grateful to them. Nothing I have accomplished would have been possible without their support.
INTRODUCTION
JEANNE D ARC s memory hangs over any study of women and the French military. The fifteenth-century peasant girl from Lorraine who, despite being wounded by an arrow, led French soldiers to victory at Orleans and went on to take Jargeau after suffering a head wound has captivated women and men for nearly six hundred years. Her improbable string of victories turned a dynastic conflict into a holy war that reached its zenith when her army allowed the dauphin to be crowned King Charles VII of France in Reims on July 17, 1429. Even being burned at the stake in Rouen by her English enemies for allegedly practicing witchcraft added to Jeanne s romantic appeal by making her a martyr, and later a saint of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the heroic image associated with St. Jeanne d Arc has, too often, obscured the contributions other women have made to France s national defense. For all of her prominence, Jeanne s story was ordinary in its extraordinariness. Rather than a unique figure, Jeanne d Arc was merely the most prominent example of the many individual women who took up arms during the Middle Ages. Other examples included Isabel of Conche, Jeanne de Flandre (Jeanne la Flamme), and Jeanne Florquet (Jeanne Hachette). Although few women fought in field armies, let alone commanded them, like Jeanne d Arc, many helped defend cities and castles. In individual instances their contributions were significant, but they were limited and remained extraordinary exceptions to the male preserve of combat. Focusing on the small number of women who either impersonated men or, like Jeanne, fought openly as women in an otherwise male force obscures the broad contributions women have made to national defense and reinforces the faulty assumption that until the twentieth century the military had always been a masculine preserve.
By studying the experiences of women who worked for the French Army from 1914 until 1940, this book challenges the conceptual barriers that separate scholarly studies of the military and civilian worlds by integrating the elements of political, women s, and social history with the military history of the French Army. The women who worked inside the army were officially civilians, and thus have been ignored by military historians, but they have also been overlooked by historians who have examined France s home front because they were part of the army. In addition, historians of the home front have accepted military history s convention of privileging wartime over peacetime and focusing only on periods of active warfare. This book studies the entire time period from 1914 until the fall of the Third Republic in 1940 as a cohesive whole by placing the interwar era at the center of its narrative as opposed to treating it as an interlude between more important events or a prologue to the Second World War. The result is a history of women and the French Army that shows that women and civilian men were much more involved in national defense than scholars have realized and provides a new way to explore the political evolution of the army s senior leaders, the men who created the Vichy Regime in 1940.
The First World War reversed the progressive exclusion of women from France s military