Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914–1918?

Abstract

Abstract This article considers why those Australian women who were active in the pro‐war voluntary organisations of World War I have been marginalised in the historiography of the war, despite their high level of activism. The reasons for this neglect may be found in the general discounting of the value of voluntary work, in the adoption by feminist historians of masculinist definitions of the war effort, and, more particularly, in the ideological premises of historians who, in contrast to patriotic women of 1914–18, have seen 'patriotic feminism' as retrogressive, and militarism as incompatible with feminism.