Changing Ideographs of Motherhood: Defining and Conscribing Women’s Rhetorical Practices During World War I

Abstract

This essay uses Michael McGee’s concept of the ideograph to discuss the ways that <motherhood>was used both by and against women in World War I. Regardless of whether women sided with the peace or the preparedness movements, their participation was defined by their status as mothers (either actual or metaphorical). Their participation was also conscribed by societal and governmental ideals of motherhood, conveyed through a shifting ideographic definition. Women’s rhetorical practices during the war were, therefore, both constrained and defined by notions of motherhood.

Notes

¹ This paper has had a long life and many readers, all of whom I would like to thank. In particular, Rhetoric Review readers Shawn Parry Giles and James Kimble provided thoughtful and insightful input and encouraged the draft. Early readers Vicki Tischio, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Suzanne Bordelon also provided thoughtful feedback.

² Ideographs are generally set apart with angle brackets to provide clarity. I have followed this convention here.

³ Later renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the organization still exists today.

⁴ Approximately eight hundred cases resulting in convictions stemmed from the Espionage and Sedition Acts. About twenty of them involved women (Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers xv).

⁵ While the peace activists were ridiculed as naïve, the relief workers were likewise ridiculed for being so. Peace activist Katherine Anthony claimed that knitting in response to war was a “peculiarly infantile form of patriotism” (qtd. in Alonso 297).

⁶ O’Hare was actually accused of saying that American women were “brood sows” producing “fertilizer” for France, although she denied using those exact words (Kennedy, “Casting an Evil Eye” 106–107).

⁷ Steinson notes the irony in Graves’ work and statements, given that her son was the secretary of the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League (“The Mother Half” 279, n37).

⁸ The Espionage Act has been revised but remains a US law. The Sedition Act was repealed in 1920.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Mastrangelo

Lisa Mastrangelo is an associate professor of English and the Director of Composition at Centenary University of New Jersey. She has written about and presented extensively on rhetorical practices during the Progressive Era, and has published in journals such as College English, CCC, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs. She is pleased to be publishing this work on women’s rhetorical practices during World War I in 2017, since it coincides with the one-hundred-year anniversary of the United States’ entrance into the war. She can be reached at [email protected].