ABSTRACT
In Africa, as tensions mounted among German, French and British colonisers, for instance, African men were subject to forcible conscription and women were not immune from being used as forced labour. Perhaps the most vivid example of how the First World War affected women’s lives can be found not in their wartime mobilisation but in their wartime experience of both traditional and new kinds of warfare. Many Frenchwomen found themselves separated from their male heads of households, and most suffered economic deprivations that were more severe than those felt in the rest of the country. Less controversially and dramatically, like other inhabitants of the occupied zones, women suffered from shortages of food. The most famous of the battalions was that of Bochkareva, who like a few other exceptional Russian women, such as Marina Yurlova, had already fought in the war with a male unit.
