by Lisa M. Budreau, Ph. D.

“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy!” went the highly popular anti-war song in 1915.[i]  Time would soon prove this to be quite untrue. With Europe already at war and America’s involvement likely, such pacifist sentiments would come to be seen as weak and a potential threat to the nation. World War I was a total war and if victory was to be gained, full support and compliance from all was critical. Whose opinion was more crucial than that of mothers, providers of warriors since time immemorial?

Sheet music for When A Boy Says Good Bye To His Mother, and she gives him to Uncle Sam, Words & Music By Jack Frost, McKinley Music Co., Chicago, 1917-1918. (Tennessee State Museum, 2001.63.22)

Sheet music for So Long, Mother, published in 1917 by Jerome H. Remick & Co., Detroit and New York (Tennessee State Museum collection, 1998.3.109)

Men were needed to fill the ranks once America joined the allies in April 1917 and women were asked to step into their shoes. In Tennessee, and across the nation, women made enormous contributions to the war effort by serving overseas as telephone operators, ambulance drivers, canteen workers, and in numerous other capacities. World War I was the first conflict in which women were allowed to enlist in the United States armed forces (Navy, Marines, Army Nurse Corps), further enhancing their value to the national war effort.

Many women also chose to work on the home front by conserving food, participating in Victory loan drives, serving as Red Cross workers, rolling bandages and knitting socks. Still others filled factory jobs or found work such as trolley car drivers, all roles that had previously been considered “men’s work.”

To supervise this huge national mobilization, the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense was created by Congress in 1916, with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw as Chairman. Dr. Shaw had previously served as president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the less radical, more moderate organization of the women’s suffrage movement. In November 1914, the group held their convention in Nashville where Dr. Shaw addressed some of the most prominent women in the nation. Before this large gathering, she proclaimed:

“‘It is said that 300,000 of the flower of Europe’s manhood have been killed in the last nine weeks of the war.  I can’t grasp the thought of that many dead men but I can look into the face of one dead soldier and know that he had a mother.  . . .  And then that boy was called by his country and soon he was dead—he was in the happy peace of glory and she was facing the empty years of agony.  Then they ask what a woman knows about war!  . . . Women ought to have the ballot during war and during peace, for we know that if they had had it in all countries this war would not have occurred.’”[ii]

Universal suffrage appeared to be within reach, when suddenly the war had threatened to tear the movement apart. It required each of the nation’s women’s organizations to decide which platform they would choose. Many supported peace on behalf of mothers who were no longer willing to see their maternal efforts squandered by war. But the movement for peace was destroyed once America entered the war and women who continued to agitate for a peaceful resolution, did so at tremendous cost to themselves. Some, like Carrie Chapman Catt, abandoned their position with the controversial peace movement only to resume it after the 19^th Amendment passed.

This banner belonged to the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association (TESA), which used it during the August, 1920 session of the Tennessee General Assembly.  Anne Dallas Dudley served as President of TESA, and then as the third Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). During her presidency, Dudley, helped bring the National Suffrage Convention to Nashville in 1914, it was one of the largest conventions ever held in the city at that time.

NAWSA gave in to the rising tide of patriotism and abandoned its pacifist stance since women’s war service encouraged many Americans to view suffrage more favorably. It also gave women a better chance to win the vote.

Three years after Anna Shaw’s 1914 Nashville speech before the NAWSA audience, Mrs. Louise D. Bowen, a wealthy socialite and chairman of Chicago’s Women’s Committee of the State Council of Defense, proposed a gold star as a substitute for black mourning dress in memory of the American war dead. Bowen’s appeal was launched in a New York Times editorial, just as reports of the first American deaths were reported from France in November 1917. She claimed that the “glory of the death should be emphasized rather than its sadness.” Bowen, a widow with no children, wrote that the psychological effect of “multitudes in mourning” was not good for the country. . . . “There is no better death than this and none so good,” she wrote, “and manifestation of its glory rather than of a private grief becomes the patriotic citizen.”[iii]

Grieving mother at the grave of Claude Kent Montgomery, of Henderson County, Tennessee, who died at sea of pneumonia on October 5, 1918. (Tennessee State Library and Archives, Gold Star Records)

Soon, the White House was receiving myriad letters from women across the nation who wrote seeking a meaningful alternative to painful mourning. “We should not dare to mourn, lest those seeing our insignia and knowing of that supreme sacrifice, might think we felt it a precious life thrown away,” wrote Caroline S. Read, another prominent New York society widow.[iv] 

President Woodrow Wilson undoubtedly recognized an opportunity to gain a public endorsement from women for their extraordinary support and unity to the cause. In May 1918, he wrote to Dr. Shaw and the Council of National Defense, suggesting that her group publicize its advice on mourning to other women. He urged the committee to promote service badges “upon which the white stars might upon the occurrence of a death be changed into stars of gold.”  Wilson confided to Shaw that it would be unwise for him to “make any public utterance in this delicate matter,” since it might appear that he was suggesting high death tolls. He therefore urged the committee to publish his ideas through its own voice, which it did.[v]  

On May 26, the New York Times published an endorsement letter from the president that stated, “American women should wear a black band on the left arm with a gilt star for each member of the family who has given up his life for the nation.” Soon, a service flag or window banner was appearing in homes across the United States.

This banner belonged to the family of Ernest Eugene McLemore, 504 West Seventh Street, Columbia, Tennessee. It commemorated McLemore’s service in World War I. (Tennessee State Museum collection, 2006.101)

The president had initially evaded the issue of the suffrage amendment then, he followed by endorsing state action for woman suffrage. By early 1918, he publicly declared that he favored granting women the right to vote through a federal constitutional amendment. He argued that this action was “essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.” With Wilson’s support, the 19th Amendment passed Congress in June 1919 and was referred to the states for ratification.[vi]

Suffragists later credited women’s war work as essential to gaining the president’s support, but perhaps his guarded covert bargain with the mothers of the nation, to publicly support the war, was equally powerful. This would not be the last time women would use motherhood to their advantage. More than a decade after the war, the persistent, effective lobbying of mothers and veterans, successfully gained President Calvin Coolidge’s signature on the Gold Star Pilgrimage legislation of 1929. It enabled over six thousand women to travel, at government expense, to the graves of their loved ones buried overseas, each summer from 1930 to1933. The Gold Star Mothers (and families) organization remains a robust alliance today as young men and women continue to go into battle, their emblem a reminder that even with the vote, mothers have still not succeeded in preventing wars.

I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."