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Men of war: masculinity and the First World War in Britain

and defeat at war’s end. Another topic explores post-war reconciliation through contemporary assumptions of American exceptionalism, a viewpoint brought over to Europe by ordinary soldiers convinced of the righteousness of their mission and reinforced in newspapers and broadsheets. Eerily similar to some of today’s discussions around the war-on-terror, one component even justified the war and post-war occupation as a way to transform German ‘Kultur’, which was said to abuse women. Turning to transnational activism, Kuhlman follows the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and its U.S. and German branches. From its archives and publications, she juxtaposes the members’ first-hand knowledge of wartime conditions with official diplomats’ isolation as they negotiated treaty articles in Paris. She also details these women’s expansive gender and pacifist visions as an alternative blueprint which, as she explains, was thwarted partly by contradictions in their own rhetoric. The final theme innovatively compares women’s labour force participation in the Great War in Germany and America, including the expectations and realities these women faced during the transition to a peacetime economy. This section also looks at the welfare and social services available to those who had fought during the war and the commemorative practices honouring wartime sacrifices. Although, the cumulative data presented (including a useful map and deftly analysed cartoon illustrations) confirm the triumph of patriarchy, a number of analytical shortcomings mar the arguments. For instance, Kuhlman employs ‘modernity’ (a twentieth-century enlightened, egalitarian defence of rights) as a metric against which to assess historical patterns, but its use seems simplistic, teleological, and defied by the complexity of historical change (pp. 5, 8, 40). Too often, she relies on rhetorical paradoxes as causal explanations for feminist shortcomings – as if a better logic could have assured a more favourable outcome in the challenge to gender–power relations. Thus, while the book makes a persuasive case for the return to patriarchy after the war, it neither adequately confronts alternative evidence nor assesses what the granting of female suffrage meant for women’s own life experiences and consciousness. In spite of this, however, Kuhlman successfully sustains the transnational analysis throughout the study. The book is appropriate for upper level undergraduate thematic courses in war and peace and methodological courses exploring international and transnational themes. In addition, as the centenary anniversary of the Great War approaches, its rich empirical evidence, unusual focus on unofficial peacemaking and attention to women’s place in national reconciliation could broaden its appeal to the general interested reader.