Utah Women in World War I from the UHQ (S4 E10)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. It's my job. I try really hard, and I hope this podcast reflects it, that we offer you the most interesting, the most accurate history about Utah. We want to make it accessible to the widest audience. We hope that there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix.
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Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere. Finally, if you have an idea or someone who you think would be appropriate for us to interview on Speak Your Piece, would you please contact us at askahistorian at utah.gov. That's askahistorian, all one word, at utah.gov. In this episode of Speak Your Piece today, Dr. Cassandra Clark, State History's public historian and coordinator of its Women's History Initiative, will be joining me in a discussion about a Utah Historical Quarterly article authored by longtime Utah Historical Quarterly editor, Miriam B. Murphy, entitled, If Only I Shall Have the Right Stuff.
Utah Women in World War I, published in the fall 1990 issue, which we'll link to in our show notes in today's episode. Hello, Dr. Clark, glad to have you back.

**Cassandra Clark** (1:47)
Hello, thank you. It's great to be back.

**Brad Westwood** (1:49)
So, Dr. Clark, we have so many different articles that are available related to the history of politics and religion, but I'm surprised how few are about women in general. And that's beginning to change.
But how so? How is it changing?

**Cassandra Clark** (2:10)
I think that the more that we see, the more that we try to create a larger history of the United States and kind of dig into things that are beyond just the political or military realm, and look at things like cultural history and social history and gender history, all of these different types of other perspectives that we can use, the more of the better of the story that we get of the past, which includes women's participation.

**Brad Westwood** (2:35)
And that's what the Women's History Initiative is all about, which you're coordinating.
I think there's some real possibilities for Utah in general to understand just how important that kind of equity is in our historical story, in our narratives. And I guess that's what this is all about today. We're going to dig into a period of history around World War I, which is for Europe, it's 1914 to 1919 For America, it's 1917 to 1919
Would you frame up this main theme of Miriam Murphy's article? Maybe you could even give the title again. And what's the main theme?

**Cassandra Clark** (3:22)
That's a great question to start with, because the theme overall, I think, is really helping us to understand how war plays a role in women's lives and how women play a role in war in general. So her title, If Only I Shall Have the Right Stuff, which is a quote, and then Utah Women in World War I, is this the theme behind it, is just how did women, Utah women participate in World War I? Like, what did they do during the conflict to help the war effort, or to assist in the war effort? And overall, she gives, Murphy gives these, like, stories of a broader context of women in World War I, what World War I and what the conflict was, why it happened, and just different Utah women and how they participated. What I find, what I took away from this, too, is that World War I is one of the most, I think it's studied, but not necessarily most, and I hate to use the word popular, but like popular efforts like that, because people know, always love to hear things about Civil War. World War II is always a huge topic.
Korean, Vietnam is controversial, and so there's usually a little bit less, and a Revolutionary War is usually a discussion that's given to about male participation in it. World War I kind of gets sandwiched in between all of these conflicts, and in this case, women's information about their participation in World War I is not as significant even when you run basic research, than it is if you look at women's participation in, say, World War II or even the Civil War.
So this article really tries to place on the map a much more detailed version of what went on during World War I in Utah and in the world in general, and how all the participants interacted with one another.