The Right to Bear Arms : INTO THE BREACH American Women Overseas in World War I<i> By Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider(Viking: $24.95; 315 pp., illustrated) </i>

Women may hate war, but from the moment of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by Bosnian terrorists at Sarajevo, they flocked to Europe in order to be near it. Upwards of 25,000 American women--mostly nurses, but also canteenieres, telephone operators, secretaries, translators, administrators and journalists--operated on fronts from France to Siberia. The years between 1914 and 1918, argue military historians Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider in “Into the Breach,” gave American women the chance to test their mettle during crisis, express their patriotism and have fun.

The volunteers, frequently affiliated with service organizations, came mostly from the upper or middle class. The opportunity to serve during wartime attracted, for example, graduates from Wellesley College as well as celebrities such as Edith Wharton and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. In a sense, the women were members of a tacit sorority, frequently connected by profession, college training and love of adventure. Their accounts of the war in letters, diaries, novels and newspaper articles speak of trenches and mud, but many women echoed the sentiment of one YWCA worker who, in describing the Russian Revolution, said she “would not have missed it for a farm.”

How American women came to be tolerated in the male arena of war lay, the authors write, in women’s shifting social roles. Since the Civil War, women began entering the workplace in large numbers--8 million of them by 1910. In addition, they began filling posts in community volunteer agencies. By 1914, “there had evolved in the collective mind an image of ‘the independent American girl,’ who could engage in work and play unthinkable to her European sister, associate freely with men, and remain a ‘nice girl.’ ” The typical American female volunteer, in her mid-20s to early 30s, was tailor-made for a war that President Woodrow Wilson eventually regarded as a self-sacrificing endeavor.

Impressively, the Schneiders cite scores of primary sources to detail women’s entry into institutions such as the American Red Cross and the U.S. armed forces. The Schneiders also are adept at describing the sexism that dogged some of the women’s efforts. Librarian of Congress Dr. Herbert Putnam, for example, worked to keep women librarians out of Army libraries (the books, he maintained, were heavy). In the case of wartime telephone operators employed by the U.S. Army, the women managed to claim veterans’ benefits only in 1977--when the youngest “Hello Girl” was nearing 80.

Interesting for its anecdotal value, “Into the Breach” nonetheless offers little historical context. While the authors refer to battles such as Verdun, the Marne and the Somme, they never actually explain the origins of the war. They do not discuss the political philosophy, notably progressivism, that contributed to the American idea of self-sacrifice and that ultimately involved the country in this “war to end all wars.” Nor do they speculate about America’s de facto involvement through the munitions trade to Allied and Central Powers between 1914 and 1917.

Nowhere do they evaluate the effect of Germany’s submarine war on American shipping--a hostile act that might explain why American women volunteered so rapidly to serve in countries like France and Serbia instead of Germany. Finally, several paragraphs describing the pacifist feeling before the war and the shift to military intervention in 1917 would have made the section on the women war protesters more comprehensible.

What “Into the Breach” becomes, unfortunately, is a rah-rah Festschrift for the very able female workers and organizers. Tales of women who “proudly” handled telephone systems and stood “shoulder to shoulder with their brothers-in-arms” reflect the language of street rallies, not serious scholarship. The excessive use of exclamation marks alternately indicates the authors’ outrage or amusement, but does not reveal the devastation brought about by four years of gas, submarine and trench warfare: While American women were experiencing “zest” and “excitement” and “heartache,” about 8 to 10 million Europeans were being killed and three empires--Czarist, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman--fell.

Maybe “special interest” histories must be written to fill the breach left by most war histories. As the Schneiders put it: “The alleviation of suffering and misery earns scant attention in the histories men write, but it matters.”