Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List

Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until May 13, 2025

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

The Labor Army of Tomorrow: Masculinity, Allied Rehabilitation, and the First World War

Powell, Julie McClain
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9111-1934
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1586261542237109

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History.
This dissertation examines the creation of large-scale national systems and international organizations for the rehabilitation of disabled Allied ex-servicemen in the First World War. It seeks to understand: 1) the socio-cultural conditions under which rehabilitation came to be accepted as the best means to deal with the millions of working-class men disabled by war; 2) how some of the same socio-cultural conditions that allowed rehabilitation initiatives for the war disabled to flourish likewise limited the expansion of such initiatives for the benefit of civilians and the industrially disabled; and 3) how such conditions both encouraged and frustrated international community building and the reimagination of political belonging during and after the Great War. By examining cultural ephemera, military, state, and organizational records, correspondence, medical literature, and artificial limb diagrams and descriptions, I argue that the growth of rehabilitative practice in Italy, the United States, France, and Great Britain was a result of the unique confluence of: social reformism, traditional paternalist notions of care, the movement for workers’ rights, wartime patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, and the influences of nationalism and internationalism. I suggest, moreover, that the wartime patriotism and nationalism that were so critical to securing care for ex-servicemen worked against, respectively, the extension of services to disabled civilians and the imagination and constitution of a truly international society.
Alice Conklin (Advisor)
Bruno Cabanes (Advisor)
Christopher Otter (Committee Member)
337 p.
History
First World War; World War I; Rehabilitation; Prosthetic; Artificial limb; vocational training; gender; masculinity; manliness; disability; class; Britain; France; Italy; Belgium; United States; Inter-Allied; transnational; international; re-education

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Powell, J. M. (2020). The Labor Army of Tomorrow: Masculinity, Allied Rehabilitation, and the First World War [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1586261542237109

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Powell, Julie. The Labor Army of Tomorrow: Masculinity, Allied Rehabilitation, and the First World War. 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1586261542237109.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Powell, Julie. "The Labor Army of Tomorrow: Masculinity, Allied Rehabilitation, and the First World War." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1586261542237109

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1586261542237109
© 2020, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.