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‘Boredom is the enemy’: the intellectual and imaginative lives of Australian soldiers in the Great War and beyond

boundaries. However, war widows could lose benefits and privileges on remarriage or for ‘immoral’ conduct. Dishonourable discharge terminated a widow’s right to compensation, ‘tethering a wife inextricably to the conduct of the man she married’ (p. 81). In any case, as Kuhlman shows, their status as recipients of state benefits cemented widows in their gendered role of economic dependency while often failing to provide sufficient means for a sustainable family life. Kuhlman also explores the relationship of widowhood with concerns about declining populations in France and Germany. She argues that this preoccupation with the low birth rate, often blamed on women’s ‘selfishness’, shifted attention away from other major causes: staggering wartime casualty figures, deaths among prisoners of war and displaced persons, and epidemic diseases to which war-weakened populations succumbed. She also shows how the reproductive capacity of the soldier became an extension of his military duty and led to intense government involvement in the previously private sphere of sexual and reproductive behaviour. Many war widows developed a sense of identity that transcended the nation state, placing their own experiences in the context of an international community of suffering regardless of ‘defeat’ or ‘victory’. In a chapter on the transnationalization of war widowhood, Kuhlman shows how an individual’s war experience could clash with the one that governments sought to commemorate. She draws parallels between past and present, stating that even in today’s context where women increasingly take on combat roles and 90% of war casualties are civilians, ‘the nation state continues to prescribe how survivors interpret warriors’ deaths’ (p. 158). Kuhlman’s detailed and wide-ranging study, aimed primarily at an academic audience, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the experience of women widowed by the First World War. Sparingly illustrated with evocative images, it is written in an accessible style that will prove both appealing and readable to students of history and cultural studies at all levels, as well as researchers from any discipline in the field of First World War Studies. As Kuhlman states, ‘telling the story from the widows’ perspective upsets conventional wartime temporality’ (p. 25) and the periodization that deems a war to be over with the cessation of violence. Clearly, the widows’ war continued long after the guns had fallen silent.