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II Sessione: ZONE DI GUERRA 181

Women in WW1. An Austro-Hungarian perspective

Col. M. Christian Ortner 1

he First World War marked a special turning point in the use of women in
T military service. Although women had been engaged in the voluntary medical
service and in other auxiliary services already in earlier wars, they constituted a
markedly small percentage of the total number. This was to change in the course
of the First World War. Women were used in almost all kinds of positions related
to the war effort. They were labourers in the armaments industry, were active in aid
initiatives for the care of sick and dispelled people, worked in medical services at
the front and in the rear and promoted patriotic aspirations.
However, it has to be pointed out that the involvement of women in daily life
as well as charity activities did not only start with the mobilization in July/August
th
1914 but had come about in the second half of the 19 century as a consequence
of ongoing industrialization. Above all, it was material need, which forced women
to work, whereby apart from the traditional work on farms they were predominant-
ly employed as day labourers, factory workers and domestic servants. Therefore,
the traditional gender roles associated with bourgeois concepts of the 19 century
th
identifying men as “workforce” and women as being restricted to the domestic
sphere had already been subjected to a transformative process. 2
When the mobilization started in 1914 thousands of men had to leave their
working places in industry, agriculture and the public service and so replacements
were needed. Besides streamlining measures realized in the industry, women were
increasingly expected to step in. However, in the beginning the intention was only
to draw more heavily on women in occupations which already at this point of time
were thought to be appropriate for women. But in the course of the war these
limitations dissolved gradually as the war dragged on for an ever longer period
of time and the losses of soldiers increased. Therefore, in the last year of the war
women substituted men in every branch of the economy and even in the public
administration. While considered as a curiosity at first, female tramway conductors,

1 Director of the Austrian Museum of Military History.
2 Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft. Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Welt-
krieg. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 84, Göttingen 1989, p. 116.

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