Earlier wars had mostly been fought by professional armies while civilian life carried on behind them. This one demanded everything. Total war means a state mobilizing its whole society, economy and population for the war effort, until the line between soldier and civilian blurs. Governments took control of industries, railways, food supplies and newspapers on a scale never seen before.

Mobilizing people

Continental powers such as France and Germany had peacetime conscription and called up millions of reservists in 1914. Britain relied at first on volunteers, and well over two million men enlisted before compulsion arrived. Britain introduced conscription in early 1916, through the Military Service Act. About 16,000 British men registered as conscientious objectors, refusing to fight on grounds of conscience. Some did noncombat work; others were imprisoned, and a few were treated brutally. Their stand raised a question free societies still debate: how far can a state compel a citizen to kill?

Governments also gave themselves sweeping new powers. In Britain the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 allowed censorship, control of factories and even limits on pub opening hours. In the United States the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were used to punish criticism of the war. The socialist leader Eugene Debs received a ten year prison sentence for a speech against the draft, and he ran for president from his cell in 1920, winning nearly a million votes.

Women's work

With millions of men at the front, women moved into jobs from which they had largely been shut out. They drove buses and ambulances, worked on farms and in offices, and above all made weapons. Hundreds of thousands of British women worked in munitions factories, filling shells with explosives. Workers handling TNT were nicknamed "canaries" because the chemical turned their skin yellow, and hundreds were killed by poisoning or explosions. Women also served as nurses near the front. The British nurse Edith Cavell became famous when the Germans executed her in 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium.

The war's effect on women's rights is debated. Many women were pushed out of industrial jobs when the men came home. Yet Britain gave the vote to most women over 30 in 1918, and Germany, Austria, Canada, the United States and others extended women's suffrage between 1917 and 1920. Historians disagree about how much this was a reward for war work and how much it was the result of decades of campaigning that the war merely sped up.

Hunger and the blockade

The British naval blockade cut Germany off from imported food and fertilizer. In the hard winter after the poor potato harvest of 1916, many Germans lived largely on turnips, and that hungry winter of 1916 to 1917 became known as the "turnip winter". Malnutrition weakened civilians and fed strikes and anger. Britain itself introduced food rationing in 1918, after U-boats had sunk so many supply ships. Historians still argue about how many German civilians died because of the blockade; figures in the hundreds of thousands were claimed at the time, but they are disputed.

Propaganda

Every government worked to sustain its people's will to fight. Posters urged men to enlist; Alfred Leete's 1914 image of Lord Kitchener pointing straight at the viewer became one of the most copied designs in history. Stories of German atrocities in Belgium spread widely. Some were true: German troops shot thousands of Belgian and French civilians in 1914 and burned the university library at Louvain. But Britain's 1915 Bryce Report mixed real atrocities with exaggerated and unverified tales. When those exaggerations were exposed after the war, many people grew skeptical of atrocity reports in general, a skepticism that later made some slow to believe early news of Nazi crimes. In 1917 the United States created the Committee on Public Information, which promoted the war with films, posters and thousands of volunteer speakers, under the journalist George Creel.

Worked example: a munitions worker in 1916

Consider a young woman who leaves domestic service, where she earned little and had almost no free time, for a shell filling factory. She now earns perhaps two or three times as much, lives in a hostel with other women, and watches her skin slowly turn yellow. She is proud of her work and frightened by the explosions she hears about. Newspapers praise her patriotism, while some critics complain that young women now have too much money and freedom.

Now ask the historian's questions. Did the war liberate her? In some ways, yes: higher wages, independence and a powerful argument for the vote. In others, no: dangerous work, lower pay than men for similar tasks, and in many cases dismissal in 1919. Her experience shows why historians avoid simple verdicts about social change. The same event can open doors and close them at once, depending on who you are and when you look.