Women In The Home Front Summary

The book looks into the “home front” in Vienna during WWI, examining the breaking down of the boundary between military and civilian spheres in the Great War. While the home front had been believed as a safe, peaceful, stable port of last resort, the book reveals how in the actual war, there were enormous tensions going on among different social groups in the everyday-life of Vienna.

Because the social-historical perspective leads the author to focus on the common people and everyday-life (food in particular), women played a key important role in his book. The significance of women in the “home front” is also due to the particular political situation in Austria: the lack of a strong formal institution of wartime mobilization leads to the state’s heavy reliance on the family, which bestows a
By examining institutions representing a female unity like the Frauenhilfsktion Wien, Healy shows us how the relationship between the “ladies” and the working women reduplicates the capitalist-bourgeois mode of production, a class relationship that fundamentally challenges the transcendental female love that was supposed to combine them together as one unity. Although this capitalist structure had always existed to differentiate women in different class, Healy pointed out that the working class women during the war in particular “resented the depiction of their labor as ‘coming from the heart,’ originating in feminine selflessness,” (176) which disguised the exploitation reality. This clash between class and gender has a much deeper implication not only in WWI, but also throughout the century. In Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, 1972), for example, the homosexual love among the three women was deeply entangled with class inequality and the impossibility of