Abstract
The geographical and political distance from America of World War 1 meant that it could not affect American women in the same way that it did their European sisters. But it should not be thought that they were untouched by it. Many American women visited or lived in France during a War which left thousands more bereaved: although ‘the American dead from wounds and disease amounted to only two per cent of the troops engaged compared to nearly 25 per cent of other nationalities, the Americans were in action for only slightly over a year. Thus their losses were still alarmingly high’2 The War changed American women’s perception of themselves, of men and of the future relationships between the sexes, and American women writers charted the change.
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Notes
Vachel Lindsay, ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’, II. 29, in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1913) p. 100.
Peter Aichinger, The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880–1963: A History of Attitudes Towards Warfare and the Military Establishment (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975) p. 10.
Dorothy Canfield, ‘Some Confused Impressions’, in her The Day of Glory (New York: Henry Holt, 1919) p. 120.
Temple Bailey, The Tin Soldier (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1918) p. 170.
Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3–September 8, 1914 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915) pp. 58–9. Hereafter referred to as A Hilltop.
Grace S. Richmond, The Whistling Mother (New York: Curtis Brown, 1917).
Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France (New York: Henry Holt, 1918).
Edith Wharton, Fighting France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919) pp. 234–5.
Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1917) p. 217.
Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923) p. 145. Hereafter referred to as A Son.
Mabel Petter Daggett, Women Wanted: The Story Written in Blood Red Letters on the Horizon of the Great World War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918) p. 110. Hereafter referred to as Women Wanted.
Dorothy Canfield, ‘What Goes Up …’, in Raw Material (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923) p. 42.
Gertrude Atherton, The White Morning: A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1918) pp. 7–8. Hereafter referred to as The White Morning.
Mildred Aldrich, On the Edge of the War Zone (Boston, Mass.: Small, Maynard, 1917) pp. 34,135. Hereafter referred to as On the Edge.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, ‘Salvage’, in More Tish (New York: A. L. Burt, 1921).
Mildred Aldrich, The Peak of the Load: The Waiting Months on the Hilltop from the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes to the Second Victory of the Marne (Boston, Mass.: Small, Maynard, 1918) p. 117. Hereafter referred to as The Peak.
Mary Lee, ‘It’s a Great War!’ (Boston, Mass., and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), pp. 300–1.
Anon., ‘Mademoiselle Miss’: Letters from an American Girl Serving with the Rank of a Lieutenant in a French Army Hospital at the Front (Boston, Mass.: W. A. Butterfield, 1916) p. 4. Hereafter referred to as ‘Mademoiselle Miss’.
Frances Wilson Huard, My Home in the Field of Mercy (New York: George H. Doran, 1917) p. 70.
Dorothy Canfield, ‘In the Eye on the Storm’, in A Harvest of Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956).
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© 1993 Editorial Board, Lumière (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Goldman, D. (1993). ‘Eagles of the West’? American Women Writers and World War 1. In: Goldman, D. (eds) Women and World War 1. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22555-2_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22555-2_11
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