This book analyses the strategies of female physicians, nurses and "women at arms", who linked military service with the opportunity to achieve professional and civic goals.
Since women became armed to defend the state and could also defend themselves, the author argues, Americans began to focus on women's relationship to violence - both its uses against women and their own uses of it. The author shows how female thinkers and activists wove wartime choices into long-standing debates about female suffrage, violence against women, gender based discrimination, and economic parity. The case is presented that women's involvement in the obligations of citizens to defend the state validated their right to full female citizenship.