The Baby in the Gas Mask: Motherhood, Wartime Technology, and the Gendered Division Between the Fronts During and After the First World War

Abstract

In 1916, Marie Donnay published La Parisienne et la Guerre in order to pay tribute to the contributions of Parisian women to the war effort. Like many such efforts, this small pamphlet aimed to record and promote the accomplishments made by real French women and girls to war work. She called attention to the ‘sublime’ efforts of mothers who sacrificed their sons and to all women who helped France endure, even though they could not engage directly in military action on behalf of their beloved nation. In the same short text, Donnay also highlighted one of the war’s new heroines, 13-year-old Denise Cartier, who asked those caring for her not to tell her mother that her injuries were serious, despite being gravely wounded by an aerial attack upon Paris in September 1914. Thus, in the early years of the war, Donnay witnessed a transformation in women’s relationship to war and the toll exacted specifically upon them. Owing to military technology such as air power, women no longer experienced war merely through damage done to other bodies, through sacrificing their sons. As the example of young Denise Cartier illustrated, wartime technology now brought war home to injure the female population — women and children — directly, well beyond the battle lines.¹