Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan Zeiger. In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 211. $37.50.

In the midst of United States participation in World War I, Dr. Ruth Lighthall faced prosecution in Chicago for actions made criminal by the Espionage Act (1917). Lighthall's arrest was prompted by her unwillingness to support the fundraising efforts of neighborhood children who were selling thrift stamps for the Red Cross, and by the explanations she offered for her actions. In conversations with the children, and later with their parents, Lighthall was accused of voicing her opposition to the war and of criticizing a local mother for sending her son to the war. Responding to the war emergency in an entirely different way, Carrie Hall left the United States to serve as chief nurse at Base Hospital No. 5 in France during the war. While Lighthall opposed the war and chastised those who offered it even indirect support, Hall served the war effort directly. Indeed, as a nurse serving in France, Hall's work was understood by her contemporaries as the closest thing to soldiering available to women.	1
On the surface, these women seem to have had little in common. The two superb monographs on American women during World War I in which their stories appear, by Kathleen Kennedy and Susan Zeiger, although focusing on two very different groups of women, allow us to discover notable similarities in the wartime experiences of women as divergent as Lighthall and Hall; both books make significant contributions to our understanding of the complex relationship in the United States between gender, war, citizenship, and the state in the early twentieth century.	2
About twenty of the cases leading to convictions under the wartime emergency laws involved women as their primary defendants, and it is the arrests and trials of these women that Kennedy explores in her very important investigation of the relationship between antiradicalism and definitions of women's citizenship during World War I. In recent years, historians have proven attentive to the role of class and ethnicity in wartime antiradicalism. Kennedy's book complements this work, addressing the largely neglected role played by gender in shaping the wartime repression of women accused of subversion and demonstrating persuasively that this role was extensive. Sophisticated in its analysis and masterfully written, Kennedy's work is deeply grounded in extensive archival research in sources ranging from Department of Justice and United States Military Intelligence records to the private papers of defendants and the records of left-wing and peace organizations, as well as several contemporary periodicals and newspapers. Knowledgeable in the broadest range of relevant secondary literature, Kennedy succeeds, too, in relating her work in meaningful ways to issues in fields ranging from women's history to legal history, from political history to literary criticism, social history, cultural history, and gender studies.	3
Kennedy introduces the reader to the prewar debates about the nature of women's citizenship, noting in particular the ascendance of the notion of patriotic motherhood in the period preceding American entry into the war. In this construction of female citizenship, a woman's primary duty to the nation involved her production of patriotic citizens, including sons ready and willing to serve as soldiers. Kennedy argues that it was this understanding of a woman's responsibilities that shaped definitions of subversion as they were applied to women once the United States became a belligerent. From here, Kennedy engages in the thoughtful and captivating analysis of a series of wartime subversion cases, powerfully convincing the reader that the application of the wartime emergency laws was deeply gendered in the cases of female defendants.	. . .