The role of the women's foreign missions in Serbia during the Great War: Transfer of medicalized technologies and the birth of biopolitics

Abstract

This paper is theoretically and methodologically limited to one narrow aspect of the First World War - to the role of the women's foreign missions. The case of Serbia in this context is of particular importance not just in terms of the weight, dramatic and tragic consequences of the Great war, but because the international engagement of women in foreign missions served as a latent social mechanism - the transfer of medicalized political and social technologies and practices that at the time did not existed. In this paper we analyze the conditions and causes of the changes in social roles of women that were related to their activism, professionalism, mobilization and engagement in medical and humanitarian missions during the Great War. This historical event was also the turning point in regard to the social participation of women as well as the milestone for the changes in the culture of gender relations. The Second front as the front of missionary struggle with epidemics, contagious diseases, the sick, the wounded, poverty, hunger, refugees and orphans took more than a third of total war victims in Serbia. We conclude that social events on this front, especially with the help of the medical campaign, represented the transfer of medicalized technologies of control, medication and prevention over the population. Those were the strategic needs of Serbia at the time but also the foundations of the new biopolitics.

Keywords

• First World War
• women's missions
• Serbia
• health policy
• medicalised technologies