Introduction

The cries of wretched mothers, that in vain Lament their fate, and mourn their children slain;

The virgin’s shriek, who trembling in the dust,

Weeps the pollution of a ruffian’s lust;

The mangled infant’s wail, that as he dies,

Looks up in vain for pity to the skies.1

Thomas Day’s poem The Desolation of America (1777) about the War of American Independence presents a view of women in wartime that, for all its melodramatic eighteenth-century diction and sentiment, is recognisable to us today, over 200 years later. Women still suffer as bereaved mothers and as victims of rape. They continue to endure the loss of their husbands and brothers as they look on from the sidelines. Yet their experience of armed conflict extends beyond that of tortured observers. This chapter will illuminate the ways in which women have not only been implicated in the European wars and revolutions of the past three centuries, but have also often actively participated in them, both as militarists and as pacifists.

War, according to Clausewitz, is ‘nothing but the continuation of policy with other means’ and is fought either to eliminate the opponent’s political independence or to obtain favourable terms of peace.2 Military histories traditionally have been concerned primarily with the strategies, battles and settlements of the wars and revolutions that have embroiled Europe in the past three centuries. They have, for the most part, been written from a doubly masculine perspective, that is, men writing about male actors, men valorising the suffering of soldiers and men seeking to learn lessons for future military strategy. As such, women’s place in these armed conflicts has been largely ignored. Yet as camp followers, soldiers, munitions workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, war refugees, grieving widows and mothers and peace activists, they are as important to the historical record as politicians, officers and soldiers. They have been the victims of wartime violence and, at times, the perpetrators of it. History is replete with evidence to contradict the assertion that women, by virtue of their biological ability to bear children, are naturally life-affirming and peace-loving. We have examples of female combatants who were more than prepared to use the swords and guns they so readily

Took up; of female concentration camp commandants who sadistically inflicted torture on prisoners; and of female warmongers who zealously urged and even shamed men to fight on their behalf.

Women have been as enthralled by war as men.3 Some longed to be active participants in war for many reasons: adventure, proximity to soldier-lovers, economic necessity and defence of home and family. They also wanted to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship and equal rights, for if to be a full participatory member of a society is to be willing to defend and ultimately to die for one’s country, then how are women, barred from the field of battle, supposed to demonstrate such willingness? As Angela Woollacott has argued, ‘it should hardly surprise us that women have followed the same roads and embraced the same symbols in pursuing citizenship that men have.’4 Although the personal yet passive sacrifice of a son, husband or father to battle has at times been accepted as an alternative prerequisite of citizenship, more often than not it is military service that ‘has acted as an unofficial litmus test for public leadership capabilities.’5

The idea of women soldiers has both disturbed and fascinated society. In the eighteenth century, when the divisions between ‘home’ and ‘front’ were far more fluid, some women were able to disguise themselves as men and actively engage in combat as soldiers and as sailors. When their secret was discovered, often after they were wounded, public fascination with these cross-dressing ‘Amazons’ made them into folk heroines. Yet their actions were never seen as a true alternative for females. They were anomalies, pets, even freaks to be wondered at and entertained by. Although the nineteenth century was not devoid of disguised women soldiers or of male impersonators who took to the stage in music halls and theatres, women’s place in the scheme of war changed. The female warrior gave way to the exemplary lady who performed the auxiliary tasks of nursing and philanthropy. The nurse, as personified by Florence Nightingale, became the accepted military service role for women, while patriotic organizations founded during the Napoleonic wars, and which proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, were outlets for females to voice their own bellicosity without donning a uniform. The notion of separate spheres dictated that men fought and women urged. The twentieth century saw a breakdown of these separate spheres with the explosion of auxiliary services in both the First and the Second World Wars and the integration of women into the military proper. The demands of ‘total war’ were not gender-specific. Yet the anxiety over women’s participation in combat has never fully been quelled, despite striking acts of heroism and strength which are well documented and which link the women soldiers of the late twentieth century to their eighteenth-century counterparts.

Other women have never been comfortable with such martial interests, arguing that that the heroic ideal, the glorification of the soldier and the definition of masculinity as a ‘readiness to risk death in battle in order to defend the defenceless homeland’ as just a few of the reasons why war continues to be acceptable as a normal, if regrettable, activity.6 Those who eschewed war and became activists for peace defined themselves as feminists, but some did not. While the pacifist Mrs F. S. Hallowes asserted in 1918 that ‘women equally with men have a passionate love of mother-country’, Virginia Woolf responded to the question ‘How are we to prevent war?’ by arguing that patriotism is one of the reasons why war prevails and declaring ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country.’7 The peace movements of the past three centuries have been as gendered as military service, for just as there was resistance to women’s involvement in the arena of war, so too were male pacifists keen to perpetuate the separate spheres of influence within their own organisations.

An examination of how women in modern Europe interacted with and against the machine of war and revolution can lead us to some conclusions about whether or not the arguments about ‘women and war’ as a selective area of academic and historical debate are now obsolete. This chapter will consider what may be divided into three areas of women’s involvement in the wars and revolutions of modern Europe: those who actively participated outside the norms of accepted female behaviour, those who participated within these norms and within gendered divisions of labour and those who campaigned against all forms of complicity in armed conflict. Particular themes recur. All nations have their version of the patriotic female, embodied in the figure of the mother or the soldier’s wife. All have propounded at various times that women’s role in national conflict is to keep the home fires burning after selflessly and strenuously encouraging their men to fight. Such a demand and its attendant iconography cut across national boundaries and across the objectives for which each war or revolution was undertaken. Again and again, women were called upon in times of national need to take on active roles, be they extensions of their domestic responsibilities (cooking, cleaning, laundry, nursing) or more combative, less feminine activities from actual soldiering and insurgency to transport, munitions-making and espionage. Yet time and again, when peace came, they have been told by those who called upon their patriotism to return to their homes and their pre-war occupations, often without due recognition or reward such as citizenship or the suffrage. The contributions of women in national crisis have, until recently, been left out of the historical record. ‘How could all that great mass of history have been written with hardly a mention of women?’ asks Sian Reynolds.8 Reynolds argues perceptively and persuasively for the ways in which the gender debate has destabilised old narratives. Once women are added to the narratives of war, the interpretation of that narrative changes irrevocably.