ABSTRACT
Women were a continuous and significant feature of Australian newspaper propaganda throughout the Great War. This essay investigates the role women played as the targets and subjects of Australian newspaper propaganda. It argues that Australian mainstream newspapers paradoxically represented women as being both valuable and peripheral to the war effort, regardless of their actual experience. Australian women’s importance in sustaining the soldiers and the war effort through emotional, motivational, and material support was frequently lauded by the country’s print media. Their efforts offered an example of how the home front should operate, with all citizens playing a part in the war effort. Comparisons between women, who were helping to win the war, with male conscientious objectors and “shirkers,” were frequently published. These reports called into question the masculinity of such men, who were being outdone in their contribution to the war by women. Warnings of the threat posed to Australian women, should the Central Powers prevail in the conflict, were also frequently published. The result was a form of newspaper propaganda that represented women as being active in the war effort or potential victims of the conflict, in an attempt to compel men, either through shame or protectiveness, to enlist. Women also became a focus of pro-war propaganda. In one of the first countries to give women the vote, in the lead up to the 1916 and 1917 conscription plebiscites, women were frequently targeted by newspaper propaganda pushing for the introduction of a national draft. Although such campaigns outlined the significance of women’s work at the time, it was made clear that the most important action they could take was to send unwilling men into combat. Their role in these conscription plebiscites was pivotal. Similarly, women’s war work was regularly contrasted with the sacrifices being made abroad by Australian soldiers. Such different propaganda aims meant that women’s efforts were praised as vital in some reports and portrayed as being of marginal importance in others (often within the same newspaper). The result was that contradictory representations of women in Australian mainstream newspapers depicted them as being powerful and potential victims, masculine and feminine, vital and dispensable.
