Abstract
One of the ways in which nations make the transition to peace is by ensuring that there will be no more war. Postwar military occupations provide a means of securing a cease-fire so that in a relatively stabilized environment, politicians can begin to work out a peace agreement. In the post-Great War occupation, women helped midwife the needed social stability, in part, by creating domesticity with U.S. occupying soldiers. German Fräuleins formed romantic and sexual bonds with doughboys by collaborating with them to thwart the U.S. military’s ban on fraternization between soldiers and German civilians, leading ultimately to the lifting of the ban; this in turn encouraged other collaborative efforts between the two former enemies to control female sexuality and achieve social stability in the Rhineland.
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Notes
Akira Iriye, “The United States as an Occupier,” Reviews in American History 16, no. 1 (1988): 72; John Willoughby, “The Sexual Behavior of American GIs During the Early Years of the Occupation of Germany,” Journal of Military History 62, no. 1(1998): 174; a revised version of Willoughby’s article appears in his book Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The Social and Geopolitical Impact of the Post-War American Occupation of Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 29–47; little information exists on soldiers’ homosexual activity during or after the First World War, except accusations of the rape of German boys by French colonial soldiers by Germans during the “black horror on the Rhine.” See Keith L. Nelson, Victors Divided, 177–78, and Chapter 2 of this volume; Under the Yoke of Foreign Rule: Sufferings of the Rhineland Population (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1923), 1:4.
J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press), 19.
Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4, 5–6; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 31.
David M. Edelstein, “Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail,” International Security 29 (2004): 53–54.
Susanne Rouette, Sozialpoltik als Geschlechterpolitik: Die Regulierung der Frauenarbeit nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), 33–36; Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 245; Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredeth Turshen, “There is No Aftermath for Women,” in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, ed. Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredeth Turshen (London: Zed Books, 2002), 9.
Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20.
Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976; repr. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3.
David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, 1918–1933: The Reluctant Occupiers (New York: Berg, 1991), 48, 49, 58–59.
Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 155; Nelson, Victors Divided, 26–30.
Edwin L. James, “The Allied Armies in Germany,” Current History 9 (January 1919), 16; Dickman, Great Crusade, 213, 212.
Elbert F. Baldwin, “The American Forces in Germany,” Outlook 122 (August 1919): 635–36, noted that the doughboy’s biggest complaint was the anti-fraternization order; Williamson, British in Germany, 58.
Quoted in Bagby, The American Representation in Germany, 1920–1921, 2:46.
Frederick M. Strickert, The Lorelei (Baltimore: AmErica House, 2002), 365–66, 341–42.
Glenda Sluga, “Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender ReReading of ‘The Apogee of Nationalism,”’ Nations and Nationalism 6 (2000): 498–99.
See Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51–52, for a summary of economists’ and historians’ varying assessments of the treaty.
Ferdinand Czernin, Versailles 1919: The Forces, Events and Personalities that Shaped the Treaty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 352–58, provides Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau’s responses to the treaty; Nelson, Victors Divided, 53.
Sally Marks “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice, and Prurience,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297–334.
Sandra Mass, “Von der ‘schwarzen Schmach’ zur ‘deutschen Heimat,’” Werkstatt Geschichte, 32 (2002): 55.
Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, The Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 25; Center for Military History, United States Army in the World War, 204; Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 20.
H. S. Grier, Officer in Charge of Civil Affairs, June 22, 1920, reproduced in Bagby, American Representation in Germany, 2:55–56 (emphasis Grier’s); ibid., 50.
Spencer C. Tucker, ed., The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1996), 173.
Frau Dr. N. N., “To an American who is Fond of German Women,” (1921?), Folder 4, Box 615, American Relief Administration—European Operations Records, 1919–1923, European Children’s Fund, Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 110, quotes German activist Martha Harnoss’s evaluation of women’s politicization through their wartime experience.
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© 2008 Erika Kuhlman
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Kuhlman, E. (2008). American Doughboys and German Fräuleins Securing Patriarchy and Privilege in the Occupied Rhineland . In: Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612761_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612761_2
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