Historiography

Until recently, rarely have the indices of military histories included ‘women’ as a subject. Second-wave feminism and the rise of women’s studies courses have demanded that female participation in the wars and revolutions of the past - as in other areas - be rediscovered, analysed and woven back into the fabric of history. Large-scale encyclopaedic texts on warfare, such as the Oxford Companion to Military History, now contain separate entries devoted to women and highlight other female-dominated topics such as nursing and auxiliary services. It is relatively easy to gather information on women’s participation in the wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. The First and Second World Wars, in particular, have inspired numerous academic studies and general-interest books. The early modern period is perhaps the most problematic for historians of women’s history, given the fluidity of roles in the decentralised military organisations as well as a lack of printed and archival material. Nevertheless, studies such as Piers Compton’s Colonel’s Lady and Camp Follower: The Story of Women in the Crimean War (1970); Elizabeth Ewing’s Women in Uniform Through the Centuries (1975); and Barton C. Hacker’s ‘Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance’, Signs (1981) go some way to redressing the imbalance.

They have contributed to larger-scale surveys (and celebrations) of women’s participation in war from antiquity to the present, including Julie Wheelwright’s Amazons and Military Maids: Women who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (1989); Linda Grant de Pauw’s Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (1998) and Kate Adie’s Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War (2003).

The subject of women’s participation in warfare and in the peacetime military has elicited varied and heated arguments. In addition to lauding the achievements of women soldiers, pilots and sailors, John P. Dever and Maria C. Dever’s Women and the Military: Over 100 Notable Contributors, Historic to Contemporary (1995) takes the view that ‘the whole notion of “allowing” women into combat is disturbing. “Allowing” women to do or not to do something is a remnant of a paternalistic society. A grown woman should go as far as talent and hard work allow her to go.’9 On the other hand, John Laffin’s Women in Battle (1967), while an early attempt to counter the tendency of historians to resent ‘the intrusion of women into what clearly should be the one impregnable male bastion’ by recognising the achievements of women in armed combat, is ultimately a platform for the author’s objections to such active participation by women. He even concludes with a ‘jocular’ assertion that women are meant for the bedroom not the battlefield.10 Martin van Creveld takes a similar, yet more outspoken and unequivocal stance in his Men, Women and War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line? (2001):

Women must be excluded from war not so much because they are necessarily incapable of participating in it but in order that they may better appreciate the feats of men who are engaged in it. . . Women’s participation in war will take away one of the cardinal reasons why men fight, which is to assert their own glory.11

He believes that ‘feminization equals decline.’12

A more objective exploration of how our ideas about gender and warfare are constructed by various conflicting and complementary forces is provided by Joshua Goldstein’s study War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (2003), which brings together the theories of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and physicians. Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her ground-breaking work Women and War (first published 1987, revised 1995) argues that the ‘Ferocious Few’ have in fact been overshadowed by the ‘Non-Combatant Many’ who represent our more traditional images of women and war: ‘the woman fighter is, for us, an identity in extremis, not an expectation.’13

The participation of women pacifists, however, has not been neglected in the search to uncover the female warriors of the past or the efforts to posit the future of women in the military. The ways in which females devoted themselves to the pursuance of peace have been the focus of such important studies as Heloise Brown’s ‘The Truest Form of Patriotism’: Pacifist Feminism in Britain 1870-1902, Cynthia Enloe’s Maneouvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Sybil Oldfield’s Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900-1989, Sara Ruddick’s contribution ‘“Woman of Peace”: A Feminist Construction’, to The Women and War Reader edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin and Eileen Sowerby’s On

War: Men, War and Women. All of these in their fashion point to the directions the feminist peace movement may take in the future.

Biographical and literary studies, too, help to fill in the gaps of women’s experiences of peace and war. Large-scale biographies of such notable figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, Florence Nightingale, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf complement the life stories of lesser-known women found in such encyclopaedic works as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Anthologies such as War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, edited by Claire M. Tylee and Agnes Cardinal and critical texts such as Jane Potter’s Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print highlight women’s literary interpretations of war and peace. The breadth and variety of books, historical and literary, fiction and non-fiction, polemic and imaginative, mirrors the spectrum and enormity of women’s experience of conflict over the past three centuries.