![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, even where divorce was allowed by law it was often out of reach of many couples for financial reasons or for reasons of stigma. As Martha Hanna notes, the number of married couples who divorced at the end of the war – in those jurisdictions where civil divorce was permitted – did indeed increase but overwhelmingly married men returned home to their womenfolk and children. With some degree of adaptation, the bonds of marriage and kinship, even if they had been alternately burdensome or solacing in the pre-war world, generally endured and provided a framework for reintegration into normality afterwards. War, Family, Authority, and Normative Assumptions ↑Īny consideration of the question of the war’s impact on authority relationships within Europe’s families should begin by recognizing the basic resilience of the family as a social unit and a focus of attachment in the face of the upheaval of war and during its uncertain aftermath. Nonetheless, with its brute egalitarianism, the war coarsened norms and implicitly marked out categories of expendable lives. Wartime humanitarianism provided a counterpoint to these trends. In a fifth and final section we consider the subtle ways in which the transgressive violence of the First World War, as Heather Jones terms it, in turn altered norms concerning the punishment of military indiscipline, anti-imperial agitation, and revolution. As well as being an economic reality, “ profiteers” were also a symptom of a sense of unfairness. Relations between consumers, the private market, and the state also had their own norms of fairness which we consider in a fourth section. In a similar vein, the valorisation of self-restraint – in what one consumed, drank, or even smoked – is at the heart of the third section which shows how this resonated well with the volunteer ethic of wartime, especially in Britain and Ireland. Separate but related moral panics occurred with regard to armies, prostitution, and venereal disease. The second section is also concerned with the growing autonomy of youth in wartime and how this impacted the sexual mores of youth and other social groups. We begin by considering the disruption of family life and its ripple effects on parental authority, on the social codes of behaviour for children and how the absence of many fathers affected this. Habitus, thought of as the web of explicit and implicit assumptions inhabited by individuals and social groups, provides a framework within which this essay considers five major themes, ranging from sexual ethics to acceptable forms of violence in society. The concept of habitus elaborated by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) can help to understand such an ebb and flow of norms and values in First World War Europe. Structural factors such as class, gender, political ideology, and religion helped and hindered values change. As this survey of the major European combatant powers shows, the war affected perceptions of the “transgressive,” from the fighting front to the home front. ![]() The effects of the First World War on the norms and values of civilians, combatants, and social groups that made up belligerent nations in wartime were multiple and ambiguous. ![]()
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