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If challenging gender stereotypes is a major component in theorizing about androgyny, then few events provide a more concrete and historical instance of such need for revisioning than the Great War. Many modernist writers were preoccupied with gender and the War, not unusual obsessions given that during this period Western society was struggling over where to draw the boundaries between masculine and feminine identity and was, for the first time, engaged in a technological war that required both the sacrifice of enormous numbers of men on the battlefield and sustained cultivation of public support on the homefront. As Theodore Roszak observes, "Compulsive masculinity...echoed through the political rhetoric" at this time, when women were obviously trespassing on "men's" places, rights and roles (92). By the 1910s, greater numbers of women than ever before were attending colleges, earning wages in industries and professions, receiving access to birth control information (and sometimes contraceptive devices) and demanding (and in some states exercising) the right to vote and hold political office (see Filene; O'Neill; Woloch). Coinciding with this time of "crisis" in gender identity, the war in Europe was promoted by preparedness advocates and propagandists as the chance for men to establish their masculinity by serving in combat (something women were not permitted to do). As Sarah Benton notes, "The manliness cult, c. 1880s-1915, prepared the way for war and in turn was organized as a military virtue" (151). Thus maintenance of sexual order or hierarchy became directly associated with organized, authorized violence (Roszak 96).
One way to subvert or undermine the predominant representations of gender difference was through the figure or concept of androgyny, a strategy skillfully employed by modernist American writer Djuna Barnes, whose literary career began in the years just preceding the war and whose interest in androgyny probably arose from her early experience in a non-traditional family. Born in 1892, she grew up on a Long Island farm with a patriarchal but in some ways "effeminate" father and a protective, but possibly sexually abusive grandmother (see Scott, Women 14, 17). Wald Barnes, her father, devoted his energy to composing operas and playing musical instruments, leaving his mother, Zadel Barnes Gustafson, to assume the "male" role of provider. By the 1910s Barnes's mother Elizabeth had left Wald...