One of the biggest women's organsations, the "Patriotic Women's Association" (Vaterländischer Frauenverein) called upon the women of the Reich to join the men in the struggle and sacrifice for the Nation. Since it was a ver conservative association, they of course did not want them to fight alongside the men, but to mainly serve as nurses and caretakers to the wounded.

And that call was heeded by thousands of young women which volunteered in the Red Cross and similar institutions (especially Christain orders). In total these organisations had 11.400 nurses, 6.000 of which belonged to the Red Cross. As demands were bigger than that, there were crash courses in assistant nursing where 20.000 women were trained in the first year of war alone.

Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, a personality of the bourgeois women's movement saw it as "our military service" and even expressed sadness that women could not "give their whole being to the fatherland".

Ordinary women were a psychological crutch for their men, especially through letters to the front. The leaders of the nationalistic women's movements reminded their members of the necessity of the war and prepared them for eventual sacrifices they would have to make (i.e. that their men might not make it back).

Apart from that the many men that were missing in their workplaces now had to be replaced. In the summer of 1917, 3,6 million women worked in places that were considered vital to the war effort. In 1918 it was 4 million, 750.000 of which worked in the arms industry. That makes 12% of German women which worked in places vital to the war effort, compared to about 30% of men which served in the military.

The view of the war effort itself apparently developed much like with the German men. Volker Ullrich said the following*:

Between the war-weariness at the front and home existed a close interdependency: Soldiers on break carried the ill-feeling of the army home and came back to the front even more tired of war. [...] An ideal place for rumours was the train cabin: Here, the women that searched the land for food met with the soldiers on break. And here the most outrageous stories were told of the debauchery of the officers behind the frontlines and the excessive pleasures of the war profiteers and venturers. Such rumours found open ears because they tied in with the unequalness that was for all to see. This unequalness was where war-weariness fed from continuously.

*I only have the source in German, this is my own translation.

Main source: Wolfram Wette: Militarismus in Deutschland. Geschichte einer kriegerischen Kultur, 2008.