Psychological burden of the war on French women. Few French women were able to escape the psychological repercussions of World War I. As their men departed for battle, women were left with the stresses of tending to the farm or joining the industrial workforce to make ends meet. Through the war, hundreds of thousands of women were forced to cope with the sadness of losing a loved one.
The departure of husbands and sons for the front has often been portrayed as a sort of celebration, in which women proudly sent off young warriors and men eagerly embarked on a great masculine adventure. In truth, however, mobilization caused more agitation and nervousness than enthusiasm. Although most soldiers and their families thought the war would be over quickly, as the Franco-Prussian War had been, that assumption did not allay concerns. Women worried not only about their husbands’ safety, but also about their own well-being and their ability to provide for their families.
On the home front, women faced difficult decisions and stressful tasks. In what was a predominantly agrarian society, many French women were left to run the farm. Along with children and the elderly, women finished the harvest of 1914, but they hoped that their men would be home before the next season. At first, separation allowances paid to households whose men had gone to war helped families to survive and maintained morale. Over the course of the long war, however, economic tensions increased. The rising cost of living drove some women out of the fields and into jobs at factories. Women substituted for men in civilian industries and helped to expand the workforce in war manufacturing. Economic frustrations continued to escalate, however, and in 1917, those frustrations drove many men and women workers to strike (Becker 1985).
With the exception of Red Cross nurses, few French women had a direct role to play in the war zone. Nevertheless, many women, especially those in northeastern France, experienced the war firsthand. Within the invaded territory, rumors abounded of German atrocities, including mutilation, rape, deportation, and forced labor (Darrow 2000). Anxious women behind the approaching front lines were forced to choose between remaining with their homes and protecting themselves and their children by journeying toward the country’s interior.
Those who chose to flee packed up their family and what few belongings they could manage, and either crammed onto trains or lined congested roads. The exodus brought its own travails. For a small number of women, the physical and psychological strains of the journey were unbearable. Mademoiselle D., a seventeen-year-old from northeastern France, left her town with family and other townspeople in August 1914. During the long journey toward Paris, one family member began to suffer convulsions; other members of the group were crushed by a train. By the time Mademoiselle D. reached the capital, the stresses and strains of the war and the flight from the front had overtaken her. She was taken to a psychiatric facility, where she was excited and incoherent, with severe mood swings and flights of ideas. Committed to a mental asylum, her condition gradually improved only after months of rest (Imianitoff 1917, 57-59).
For evacuees of the invaded territory, France’s capital turned out to be no safe haven. Air raid sirens frequently sent Parisians scrambling to safety in cellars and underground metro stations and brought civilians directly in contact with the war. Most French women avoided artillery barrages, but few eluded the grief produced by losing a loved one. As of 1920, the war had produced more than 600,000 French widows, plus more than 750,000 fatherless children and more than 1.3 million bereaved parents (Smith, Au-doin-Rouzeau, and Becker 2003, 70). Added to these numbers should also be the millions of extended family members and friends who were touched by grief (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002). During the war, the black clothes of mourning were ubiquitous.
Widows were supposed to suffer stoically, but for some, hearing the news that their spouse had given his life for the country was an incapacitating blow. One thirty-one-year-old widow was picked up by police near a lake in 1915 as she contemplated suicide. Her husband had been killed in action a few months earlier. Taken to a medical facility, her doctors found her suffering from profound depression, despair, and anxiety. She admitted that had not eaten in a week. "Since I didn’t have the will to drown myself, I had decided to let myself die from hunger" (Imi-anitoff 1917, 92-93). Attempts at suicide were certainly rare reactions to the loss of loved ones, but the story reminds us that civilians were in no way immune to the psychological strains of the war.
