'God, country, home and mother': Soldiers, gender and nationalism in Great War America

This dissertation explores the intersection of gender and nationalism in Great War American propaganda and soldiers' popular culture. While other studies have emphasized gender shame, a desire for a great adventure, or a need to shore up masculinity as motivating factors in turn-of-the-century male involvement with war, this study argues that the entire gender system was involved, with figures of men and figures of women playing complementary roles in imagining an army of national sons and allowing soldiers to give meaning to their experience. While race played a pivotal role in the construction of nationalism at the turn of the century, this dissertation examines the important and complimentary role played by gender in supporting and furthering the nationalist project in Great War America.;Within propaganda, figures of women and of soldiers-as-knights expressed official idealism through a discourse of chivalry and an army of national sons. Within doughboy culture, gender disciplined men into nationalism service—through gender-based shame—yet also provided soldiers with claims to a special masculinity. War welfare workers used figures of women to influence the morale and morals of the soldiers and to appeal to doughboy idealism. For their part, the doughboys called on a language of gender as a way of understanding their service, mixing home protection with the official and idealistic justifications for the war advocated by the Wilson administration and its middle-class allies. In these ways, nationalism and gender acted as mutually supportive discourses during the Great War.