WWI Women III Welcome! You are encouraged to register with the site and login (for free). When you register, you support the site and your question history is saved. Two historians of the First World War both depict women as taking up roles previously reserved for men, but they differ slightly in the significance they describe to these unprecedented but temporary wartime duties. Gail Braybon describes the war as a liberating experience for many women. Although women working in munitions factories were subject to new dangers, such as explosions and trinitrotoluene poisoning, they were mindful of and proud of supporting the war effort, whether or not they considered the broader significance of their actions. Joshua Goldstein too describes a sense of freedom in women but emphasizes that it was short-lived. Although the war bent gender roles, it did not lessen hostility to women in traditionally male jobs, increase the value of female labor, or uproot the notion that home life was a strictly female responsibility. Braybon might reply by noting that, while other changes were slower in coming, some women suffragists supported the war and women's role in it to further their cause, and this position may have contributed to the advent of women's right to vote after the war, even by Goldstein's account. Perhaps more central to Braybon's position is that the liberation that women experienced during the war was one of sentiment and therefore made no less real by the lack of accompanying widespread reform. Furthermore, even though the spirit of liberation must have faded with the end of the war, it might have lived on in a latent form and ultimately contributed to the formation of the women's movement. With which of the following characterizations of Braybon's interpretation of the significance of women's roles in the First World War would the author of the passage be most likely to agree? Braybon interprets women's participation in the First World War according to popular feminist theory. Braybon interprets women's roles in the First World War in terms of an idea of liberation that merits further clarification. Braybon has characterized the significance of women's participation the First World War by using women's voting rights as a frame of reference. Braybon has explored perspectives about wartime responsibility and liberation that were previously ignored. Braybon has applied recent historiographical methods to the question of how women's participation in the First World War shaped women's rights. Review Answer