A World War I Gallery of Women, or, a 1919 Project
A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.
Graduate and undergraduate students and I worked as a research team in 2022-2024.
Is war good for women? It’s an absurd question—no, war has always meant a terrible fate for women. The theaters of war around the world today are blighted by “conflict-related sexual violence,” CRSV, as it is too well known. The war dead too often are women and children. Refugees or survivors suffer all the more because of codes, doctrines, and religious or political laws concerning women’s rights, along with economic, racial, ethnic, and national inequalities. So let’s rephrase the question. Which war, which women, what is their social status and location during it? What have some historical women gained from military conflict?
I wouldn’t attempt to answer this question for all eras and wars, nor would I quibble about a cost/benefit analysis. We noticed that collections of chapter-length biographies of women show the impact of wars across centuries, even though it is widely assumed that politics and the military are exclusively male. (Feminist studies have gone further into historical gender analysis than biographies can go, for example Carol Cohn, ed. Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures [Polity, 2012].) Within the horizon of a digital humanities project on English-language books published 1914-1921, we considered the effects of World War I on this genre of biographical record about women’s lives. Versions of women’s life stories published during and after World War I suggest that some women gain recognition for their war efforts, but also that this war called new attention to historical women of many times and occupations. Books published during the war and its aftermath years opened up pathways to becoming noteworthy that still seem pioneering or defiant of gender norms of that time.
What We Did and Who We Were
“A Gallery of World War I Women” was a rewarding collaboration in 2022-2024 of graduate, undergraduate, and faculty researchers supported by a library staff and infrastructure. Our nickname for the team’s focus on a set of books from these years “the 1919 project,” was a humble, distant echo of the famous 1619 Project, the New York Times Magazine production by Nikole Hannah-Jones (also a major book by many hands). This series of blog posts is no controversial transformation of women’s history as The 1619 Project is of U.S. history. But we found surprising reconfigurations of women’s nationalities and collective histories in this period.
We were Alison Booth, Director of Collective Biographies of Women, Professor of English and Faculty Director of the DH Center, UVA Library; Lloyd Sy, project manager for CBW, PhD (’23) English, now assistant professor at Yale; Isabel Bielat, research assistant, PhD candidate in history; Mackenzie Daly, research assistant, MA (’24) in English, soon to enter the doctoral program at Boston College; Yichu Wang, research assistant, MA (’23) in English, now a PhD candidate at Cornell; Anna Seungyeon Lee, research assistant, BA (’23) in English and statistics. We met, usually weekly during semesters, in my English-department office to coordinate our parallel research on the books listed in Isabel’s guide to the CBW books 1914-1921. Find these texts in CBW through the hyperlinks, e.g. a844.
A meticulous bibliography underlies the database, so we have a ready-made timeline of publication dates. Some books on this chronological sample are conspicuously about World War I, as a844 is; others belong to perennial types of collection: biblical, regional, religious, beauty, high status, arts, mothers. CBW researchers have identified collections by tagging with terms for the kinds of subjects/roles depicted in them. Although Yet many biographies showcasing women’s lives are liberal, advocating Abolition or education. CBW includes volumes dedicated to African American women’s lives; many Irishwomen, adventuresses, writers and artists, and figures who seem to have superpowers desired today.
It was a good guess that volumes published in and around World War I would reflect greater internationalism and wider vocational range. As you will see in the series of posts, each researcher focused at a different angle and scale on texts in this project. Perhaps the books that seem to have least to do with the trenches of European power struggle reveal the most surprises for readers today, as some books feature women of nationalities, religions, or races at margins of Empire.
Lloyd, Isabel, Mackenzie, Yichu, and Anna have each come up with their own contributions, peer reviewed them, and shared them with members of the Scholars’ Lab staff for further vetting. This series of blog posts gives an idea of our explorations of a varied set of volumes as they appear in CBW’s records.
On Collective Biographies of Women
Collective Biographies of Women has seen decades of development with support of both the Scholars’ Lab and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). The “1919” effort began before the DH Center joined these two groups upon IATH’s migration to the Library’s budgetary and HR organization. The database and schema for narrative analysis were greatly indebted to Worthy Martin and Daniel Pitti of IATH along with Doug Ross, Cindy Girard, and Shayne Brandon. Rennie Mapp served as project manager until 2016, followed by Lloyd Sy relying on Rennie’s documentation.
See CBW About. The project helps users access information about (with digitized text where available) 1274 books, some issued centuries before and after the project’s focus dates, 1830-1940. These are not encyclopedias, not researched full-length biographies, but appealing books for general readers with several chapters of documentary entertainment about an assortment of women. These books were often written by men, and inevitably have a Eurocentric and upper-class bias.
Beyond the queens, writers, and celebrities who predominate in such books, many more ordinary women were deemed significant enough to be placed among Notable Women in History. A closer look across the spectrum of the books in CBW (not solely 1914-1921) shows that the reason a woman made a name is related to upheavals of war. War, of course, often relates to race and religion as well as territory and resources. Of approximately 8,000 women identified in CBW’s texts, 140 appear in a search for any of four of our terms for persona types: “soldier,” “military,” “heroine of war,” or “role in revolution.” Searching by other person types–“adventure, physical feat or survival,” “assassin,” “expatriated, exiled person,” “pacifist,” “patriot,” “nationalist,” “model of race,” or “representative of nationality” turns up 604 names. There are 34 female subjects of short biographies in these collections identified as “spy,” while 399 are labeled “nurse.” In short, this genre helps to dislodge the assumption that women are simply the victims of war and that they typically eschew politics. Women as agents of history do not necessarily frequent courts or theaters or salons of Europe or North America.
This series of blog posts gives an idea of our exploration from different angles of a varied set of volumes as they appear in CBW’s records. Each book, with its bibliographical data and its chapters and their human subjects, is organized in a relational database that offers us varied kinds of comparative data.
Users can search persons by various criteria including type from the “backend” pages of CBW: Persons. Email me, Alison Booth if curious to learn more ways to search and sort by person or collection type, publication data, and so on. For more on this genre, see my book, How to Make It as a Woman, University of Chicago Press, 2004.