"The Smithsonian Institution's commemoration of the First World War Centenary will include a book provisionally entitled "Cutting a New Pattern: Uniformed Women in the Great War." Twenty international historians and museum curators discuss the significance of large numbers of women wearing uniforms during the Great War. This ground-breaking project moves women's uniforms to center stage and expands traditional historical techniques with material culture studies. Scholars in recent decades have begun to pay a great deal of attention to the mobilization of women in the Great War, but why so many women, civilian and military alike, wore uniforms is a question that has scarcely been asked, much less answered. The book's purpose is to bring this question to the fore and show why it matters. Of the many ways the Great War divided the past from the future, few were more significant than the reordered place of women in society. Although women's new status clearly had prewar roots, it just as clearly derived from their wartime participation in uniform. Not only did tens of thousands of women for the first time become members of the uniformed forces, many tens of thousands more wore uniforms as members of an enormous variety of paramilitary or quasi-military services, civilian relief and welfare organizations, and as workers.

Uniformed female workers and volunteers for wartime service in such large numbers were unprecedented. Why did so many women wear uniforms and what did it mean? Uniforms had multiple meanings both for the organizations that demanded them and the women who eagerly donned them. Among the most important was that the uniform-whether that of the armed forces, of paramilitary organizations, or of civilian agencies-served to visibly display women's service and thus to make a forceful symbolic claim to full citizenship"--.