This book examines the gendered dimensions of vulnerability, care, and humanitarianism before, during and after the First World War. It explores how war disrupts societal structures, transforms care relationships, and reinforces or challenges gendered hierarchies. It analyses how wartime welfare and care work—carried out by individuals, charities, and state institutions—reflected power structures, formed identities and influenced post-war political activism. This book uses interdisciplinary approaches and creates conversations across national and disciplinary borders, covering Western, Central and Eastern Europe. Topics include auto/biographical studies of care-givers, showing how their wartime experiences fed into their post-war identities and how they shaped understandings and structures of care work. By foregrounding care and welfare as central to wartime experiences, it provides new insights into the long-term social and political impacts of war, offering historical perspectives relevant to contemporary global conflicts and crises. This book therefore identifies emerging questions and directions within First World War Gender Studies, as well as reflecting on continuities and changes within contemporary theories of how gender is bound up with militarism, warfare, and conflict resolution.

Ingrid Sharp is Professor of German Cultural and Gender History at the University of Leeds, UK.

Heidrun Zettelbauer is Professor of Cultural and Gender History at the University of Graz, Austria.