Women on the Australian Home Front in WW1

Part of the NSW Stage 5 History syllabus (the 'Australians at War' study) includes a dot point highlighting the role of women in WWI and WWII. I was led down a rabbit hole while researching this for WWI in particular and came up with the following lesson, which seemed to work well with my class last week. 

Anyway, here's the lesson:

1. Start with a definition activity for the word 'home front'. I actually do this for nearly all of my classes - History and English alike; I feel that improving metalanguage and general vocabulary is one of the key building blocks for learning. There's a lot of research in literacy that suggests that the best way to teach a new word is to get the students to use it in context, so I simply chuck the word up on the board and tell students to put it into a sentence, any sentence that makes sense, and I try to walk around checking on individual students to see how they've gone. It's a good settling routine.

2. After reinforcing the idea of the home front and what it is, have the class contribute to the construction of a mindmap that covers the lives of pre-war women in Australia. Branches of this mindmap could include things such as:

• Division of labour - men worked, women ran the household. In poorer families, women helped with work. It was considered important to keep the father well-fed as he was the only 'working' parent a lot of the time. 
• Women were housewives and their workload was intense - nearly all food was made from scratch and lots of clothes were too. Discuss things like the lack of refrigerators and how this might impact on home life, what would happen if clothing ripped, what a washboard was, etc.
• Women were mothers - it was common in this era to have an average of 10 to 12 children.
• Women's rights - women had gained the right to vote, state by state, only quite recently. The last state that established the right for women to vote was in 1911, only 3 years before the war broke out. 

This can then pivot into a class discussion of how the above might have changed once all the men went off to war. How would women have been impacted by this? 

3. Organise a lottery =- students draw letters (A to L) out of a hat or box [you'll need to just write these onto little slips of paper]. Students then search for their corresponding description in the following document; The Role of Women in WWI. After finding out what 'their' role might have been as a woman in WW1-era Australia, students should read the accompanying detail and respond to the following questions:

4. The Role of Women in World War I

A. What role did you get?

B. What was your role in World War I?

C. How did your role come about?

D. How helpful do you think you were in comparison to the other roles that have been listed?

E. How appreciative do you think people in Australia were of you at the time?

F. If there was a war like WWI today, do you think you would be needed in the same way? Why or why not?

G. Create a poster that advertises your role's contribution or belief. 

The above questions start at the simple and then move into the evaluative and empathy-based, with explicit regard given to context, thus highlighting continuity and change over time. 

I didn't plan it this way but this activity was timed well to coincide with ANZAC Day!

We will remember them. 

Lest we forget. 

Metropolis: Context

New York, circa 1924, when Fritz Lang saw it.

Teaching context is one of my favourite things. I know I have a lot of favourite things but I'd like to think that having several favourite things helps to make me a reasonably well-rounded individual. Hopefully that gives you some context to this blog post. 

See what I did there?

As I've mentioned several times before, the most difficult thing about teaching context is knowing where to start and where to end. As any decent student of history should know, the points where a historical narrative begins and finishes are often up to interpretation. Did WWI start with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Or was it the so-called 'blank cheque' that Germany had given to Austria, meaning that they would support their ally in war no matter the circumstances? Or was the rampant tendency towards imperialism that infected many European nations in the latter half of the 19th century to blame for the War to End All Wars? You can backtrack through the chain of cause and effect forever.

The same is true of English texts. How much detail do we need in order to understand the situation that birthed a text? Is it enough to know what the composer went through, and what they intended? Should we also look at the culture that created this individual? The larger events that were shaping the world at the time of the text's construction also bear examination too. An English teacher can get lost in trying to get to the bottom of where a text truly comes from. 

In coming at Metropolis, I put together a PowerPoint presentation that would help students situate their understanding within a three-tiered model examining the world context, German context, and Fritz Lang's context (in that order).

The presentation below encourages students to pick the three most significant ideas out of each slide. Discuss as a class as you move through the PPT, and then - once you get to the end - have the students consolidate their understanding into the Context Organiser sheet.

Fritz Lang is almost always pictured wearing the monocle, which helped to contribute to the stereotype of a tyrannical German director that others found hard to work with.

Significant factors to consider during discussion while getting students to formulate connections between context and text:

Slide 2: World Context

• World War I took place 1914 and 1918, wreaking the most war-related devastation that the world had ever seen up until this point.
• The nature of WWI - with its strategy of attrition and the use of shocking new technologies such as gas and tanks - had quite an affect on the lowest strata of Europe's social hierarchy (the workers) as they were the ones who were conscripted and enlisted to fight on the frontlines.
• The old order of governance in Europe, the monarchies, were collapsing after facing increasing pressure from 'below' (the soldiers and workers).
• England and America became increasingly industrialised during this period, giving rise to capitalism and liberal trade as the bourgeoisie gained power in Western societies.

Slide 3: World Context

• The workers of Europe were inspired during the early 20th century by Marxist ideology, which promised equal distribution of land and wealth.
• The first Marxist state was born in Russia in 1917 through a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', with the aim being that the workers would control the state.
• The key figures of the Russian Revolution in 1917 had been Lenin and Trotsky, both politicians and activists who fought to put the workers in power. By 1927, at the time of Metropolis' release, the leader of the new Soviet Union was Joseph Stalin, a bureaucrat who would rise as a godlike dictator.

Slide 4: Germany

• The German people felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles that as it laid all of the blame of WWI at their feet. They, in turn, blamed their own government and Kaiser - leading to the deconstruction of the German aristocracy and the rise of the Weimar Republic.
• Berlin was wrecked by the rioting lower classes in 1919, and Germany faced crippling poverty after WWI. 

Slide 5: Germany

• Early capitalists such as Hugo Stinnes took advantage of the situation in Germany to gain control of Germany's economy. By 1922, he owned and operated more than 60 German newspapers, and had so much influence that he introduced the idea of the 8 hour work day to increase productivity. Think Joh Fredersen in Metropolis.
• Workers' unions in Germany began to form to represent the interests of the downtrodden workers, and tensions emerged between the classes in response to poor working conditions.
• German culture saw a renaissance of sorts in the 1920s, with German cinema in particular adopting the moody style of expressionism to reflect the economic depression that had followed WWI.

Slide 6: Fritz Lang

• Born as a Jew, Lang was brought up as a Catholic by his mother (she converted through marriage).
• Lang trained in civil engineering and art, both of which are reflected in his concepts for the city in Metropolis. He also fought in WWI alongside the workers.
• Lang co-wrote all of his films in the 1920s with his wife, who eventually developed Nazi sympathies. They would later divorce.
• Lang fled Germany in the early 1930s due to the rise of the Nazi Party.

Slide 7: Fritz Lang

• Lang visited New York in 1924 and was awed by its size and industrial nature.
• Lang's concept for the city in Metropolis was also influenced by the gangster and prostitute-riddled Chicago, the 'city of sin'.
• Both New York and Chicago were symbols of capitalism; representing the best and worst that it could offer.
• The idea of liberalism encouraged industrialists and capitalists to accumulate as much power and wealth as possible (as a means to promote economic growth).  

Slide 8: Fritz Lang (Catholic influence)

• The Garden of Eden = The Eternal Garden.
• The Tower of Babel = alluded to the film through both Maria's sermon and Joh Fredersen's towering office.
• John the Baptist = Maria.

Slide 9: Fritz Lang (Catholic influence)

• Christ the Redeemer = Freder.
• The Whore of Babylon = Robot-Maria and her incitement of the bourgeoisie.
• The Seven Deadly Sins = the symbolism seen in Freder's hallucinations.

Resource: Metropolis Context PPT
Resource: Context Organiser sheet

Why Germany Lost WWI

Although credited with the strategy that kicked off Germany's invasion of France, Alfred von Schlieffen died at the age of 79 one year before the outbreak of WWI.

About a year and a half ago I was fortunate enough to see Richard Evans speak at the University of Sydney. The focus of his talk was on the rise of Germany's Weimar Republic in the 1930s and how it was able to last so long. Flipping the usual historical approach in which Modern Teachers ask the driving question, "Why did it fail?", Evans posited the approach of "Why did the Weimar Republic last as long as it did?" It was a fascinating talk and it reminds me of another talk I saw, a bit later, given by Dr Bruce Dennett about Germany and WWI, this time asking the question "Why did Germany lose the war?" 

It's a different way of looking at the turning points of WWI, shifting the narrative focus from the entry of America and withdrawal of Russia to a collection of cumulative factors that contributed to Germany's eventual collapse in 1918. This approach encourages students to think of the bigger picture when it comes to WWI; about which events were most significant, why people might contest the significance of certain events as contributing factors to German failure, and how the chain of cause and effect can be interpreted.

Here's a resource that summarises this approach.

The main reasons given include:

• The failure of the Schlieffen Plan. This was a strategy that was dependent on France and England being beaten within 40 days. That didn't happen, partially due to General von Moltke making changes to the plan, and the fact that the plan required already demoralised soldiers to march an unreasonable distance.
• The Germans were fighting a war on two fronts - France and Russia. The fighting on the eastern front prevented the Germans from sending enough troops to win in the west.
• The nature of trench warfare meant that the defending side always had the advantage. Neither side had the weapons or numbers to punch their way through to victory. 
• The British naval blockade of the Germans meant that shortages on the German homefront were exacerbated further.
• German generals could not break free of the 'war of attrition' mindset that had them believe the only way of winning was to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers of foot soldiers. Germany's strategy relied on the Allied armies running out of men before them, something that became increasingly unlikely as the war dragged on.
• Germany unwittingly encouraged U.S. entry into the war through their ordering of unrestricted U-boat attacks on neutral ships.
• The German homefront faced so much hardship that war weariness had set in by 1917-1918, something that would almost lead to German socialist revolution.
• Germany's allies (Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary) were weakening, and required German resources and troops to 'prop them up' on the southern front.

Students can read through the resource and then answer the following questions, which involve them engaging with the material in a variety of ways, such as describing, evaluating, and analysing - hitting the History Continuum in terms of Significance, Contestability, and Cause and Effect:

1. Outline the reasons historians most commonly give for Germany losing the war.
2. Rate these reasons in order of your agreement with them in terms of their significance.
3. Why is your top reason the correct one?
4. List the ways in which the Germany army's moral was breaking down.
5. Why did General Ludendorff decide to ask for an armistice?
6. Make explicit reference to Source C to describe the events leading up to the armistice of 11 November.

Source Analysis: The Grammatical Approach

Art by the blogger, modeled on a photo of soldiers in the trenches.

At the time of writing (though this may change with some of the proposed changes to the incoming new syllabus), Modern History's HSC Core Study is WWI, with a focus on source analysis. 

Studying the 'Great War' is a gift of sorts as it's such an intensely source-rich area of history due to continuing interest from the public. It is, however, a rather large and unwieldy beast that can threaten to swallow historians whole. Thankfully, the current syllabus is focused enough to reign things in, and the decision to make this topic a source analysis one seems almost a relief to the teacher.

That is, until you take the sources into a mixed ability classroom. 

Over the years I have found the concept of teaching source analysis to History students a bit of a double-edged sword. Whilst it can be incredibly useful to students who have the requisite ability to skim, scan, deconstruct and evaluate texts, it can also be a very daunting task for students with lower literacy. Acronym approaches such as OCMAP (Origin Context Motivation Audience Perspective) and COMBAT (Content Origin Motivation Bias Audience Tone) can be overwhelming for these students, and only serve to push them further into disengagement.

I have found instead that taking a grammar-styled approach can be a more useful way in for these students. By attacking the paragraph at word- or sentence-level, students can build up a whole-text understanding of the source piece by piece, and then evaluate it afterwards. 

Step 1

Give the students the Resource below; an English translation of a German soldier's letter about the trenches. The source is relatively short but has been spaced out so that students can annotate the sheet. Read through the text as a class first, explaining any tricky words the students may be stuck on.

Step 2

The first question on the sheet asks the students to create some text chains. This means that they need to find and underline a word and then join it with an arrow to a later word that refers to the same thing. Some examples from the source:

• Somme > here > front line.
• One shell crater > next > one continuous trench.
• Terrible > dreadful > chilled through, dead tired and mentally crushed
• We > company of people

Step 3

With a highlighter, students identify any adjectives that describe verbs or nouns. The three main examples are "dead", "mentally", and "continuous".

Step 4

Students then look at three adjectives (most likely the ones above) and describe what they mean.

Step 5

The last three questions are more traditional content-related questions. These questions should, however, hopefully be a bit easier for the students to engage with now that they've unpacked the source. 

This approach can be replicated for any written source, and can be extended in other ways - noun identification, verb identification, how many simple or complex sentences have been used and why, etc. Once a student grapples with these 'mechanics' of the language they will then feel like they have a more in-depth understanding of the text and can begin to look at the wider meanings behind the combinations of words. 

I've found it to be a really empowering way of making history accessible to students of all abilities.

Resource: Trench Source Analysis