ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

“Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain?”: Gendered and Juvenile Imagery in U.S. Foreign Aid Publicity, 1914-1920

In World War I, U.S. citizens donated cash, goods, and time to the war effort. They sacrificed not only for their own nation, but also for European civilians. Between 1914 and the early 1920s, millions of Americans gave money to relieve European refugees, children, and wounded soldiers. Thousands volunteered overseas to feed and aid civilians through organizations such as the American Red Cross and the American Relief Administration. Many saw international humanitarian assistance as nothing less than a new moral obligation. But how did the citizens of the United States, a nation traditionally committed to political isolationism and non-intervention, come to believe it was their duty to support anonymous French, Italian, or Polish civilians an ocean away? My paper argues that U.S. philanthropists, charities, and government officials relied on visual representations of mothers and children to encourage international humanitarian commitments. Such maternalist imagery was ubiquitous in posters, pamphlets, and other wartime publicity. Images of foreign mothers and children aimed to engage potential donors by appealing to their curiosity about the suffering of exotic others. Simultaneously, however, they depicted civilian victims as sympathetic and deserving enough to demand American concern. Only by saving allied children, such media suggested, could Americans ensure peace in coming generations. By examining these gendered and racialized fundraising images and the pronatalist messages their designers hoped to convey, my paper analyzes the visual tools that U.S. Americans employed to define novel international responsibilities for their nation and to rationalize its status as a new global power.