History and Memory of Female Military Service in the Age of World Wars

During the First and Second World Wars, women’s wartime service became increasingly important for the functioning of the home front and battlefront in Britain, Germany, Russia, the United States, and other war-powers. Hundreds of thousands of women served in the militaries of the belligerents during World War II. Scholars estimate that the percentage of women in the Allied armed forces reached up to 2–3 percent. The number of women in military service in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was especially high, but only in the latter were they officially enlisted as soldiers. Despite their numbers and importance, until recently, mainstream historiography and public memory have largely ignored women’s military service. This chapter takes a closer, comparative look at women’s wartime service in the Age of the World Wars in history and memory and explains the paradox that while it was increasingly needed, it has long been downplayed and overlooked in public perception and memory in all war powers and across the ideological divide of the Cold War.

Gender, Slavery, War, and Violence in and beyond the Age of Revolutions

A definition of war limited to fields of battle orchestrated by monarchs or nation-states elides a primary form of state-sponsored violence at the heart of European wars of empire—slavery. It involved the forcible conversion of persons to chattel through the legal and military arms of the state—a conversion secured through the subjection of sexual, productive, and reproductive labor and the erasure of genealogies and family ties. In this sense, slavery could be seen as a protracted state of war. Armed conflict fueled the slave trade, slave revolts blended into “official” wars, and enslaved people sometimes spoke of slavery as a state of war. Soldiers and the state march front and center in the archives, their presence camouflaging the gendered implications of warfare for women, families, and statecraft. Yet armed conflict in the Age of Revolutions spilled beyond the battlefield, constructed distinct pathways to emancipation for men and women, and enshrined new, gendered forms of citizenship. These interrelated themes are the focus of this chapter.

The “White Man,” Race, and Imperial War during the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter explores the transnational formation of the gendered and racialized figure of the “white man” in the constitutive relations of colonial conquest and imperial rule across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The self-styled bearer of a “civilizing mission” to indigenous peoples, the white man became a perpetrator of violence and atrocity as imperial rule and colonial settlement encountered continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare. In the process, the older ideal of moral manliness gave way to a more modern conception of masculinity characterized by toughness, aggression, and a capacity to use firearms to “pacify the natives.” Defined by power, even as he was haunted by his vulnerability, the white man engaged in systematic denial and disavowal, evasion, and euphemism and narratives of nation-building that justified his right to rule.

Imperial Conquest, Violent Encounters, and Changing Gender Relations in Colonial Warfare, 1830s–1910s

The period between the 1830s and the 1910s is significant for the rapid expansion of the British and French Empires in particular and fierce interimperial rivalries, as well as the late rise of non-European empires. The warfare that characterized imperial expansion and indigenous resistance, as sparked by imperial invasions and gradual conquests of colonial territories, including the suppression of uprisings, was often diffuse and chaotic. This chapter considers how the contact zones of aggressively expanding colonialism were structured by violence, in places ranging from the British settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to Crown colonies of various European empires, including British India, the Netherlands East Indies, and French Indochina. It assesses the intersections of gender and militarized violence on frontiers and in the daily life of colonial societies.

War and Gender

This chapter provides an introduction to the intertwined histories of gender and war from the end of the Age of Revolutions in the early nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the opening section, it offers a reconsideration of the notion of Europe’s post-Napoleonic century as an “era of peace” and of key concepts that historians have used to make sense of pursuits of war and military force during this time period, such as total war, imperialism, and militarism, and nationalism. It then offers a panoramic view of the major wars waged from the 1830s to the 1910s, paying special attention to the often porous and fluid boundaries between national, colonial, and imperial armed conflicts. Next, the chapter surveys the peacetime militarization of the “Western world” before the era of the two world wars, analyzing it as part of the movement of politics, society, culture, and economics in what was by the mid-nineteenth century a global age. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the intersections of war and gender and a reflection on the state of scholarship.

War and Gender

The chapter focuses on the development from the Global Cold War and anticolonial struggle to the global conflicts of the post–Cold War period. It first provides an overview of the complex features of a period that starts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the challenges of the aftermath of the conflict and a post war reordering of economies, societies and national and international politics, and continues with the rise of the Global Cold War and the spread of the Wars of Decolonization in Asia and Africa that led to the decline of European empires. Then it explores the consequences of the collapse of communism, the end of the Global Cold War, and the proliferation of Wars of Globalization along with new forms of humanitarianism and peacekeeping. In the last section, it discusses the research by gender scholars from different disciplines on the Global Cold War and the Wars of Globalization and their attempts to rewrite mainstream narratives.

History and Memory of Army Women and Female Soldiers, 1770s–1870s

The chapter addresses the ways women were involved in warfare on both sides of the Atlantic in the time between the 1770s and 1880s as camp followers, officially recognized auxiliaries, nurses, and cross-dressed female soldiers and how their active war support was perceived and remembered during the nineteenth century. Collective memory of these women represents a complex picture. Camp followers and officially recognized auxiliaries were long forgotten. The small number of cross-dressed female soldiers, too, fell into obscurity, especially if they survived the wars. Yet by the latter half of the nineteenth century, some of these women were rediscovered, and their public image became more positive. Their public portrayal was, however, one dimensional: they were girls and women who rose above the limitations of their sex to defend a “nation in danger.” They now became examples of extraordinary female patriotism.

War, Culture, and Gender in Colonial and Revolutionary North America

The warfare of colonial and revolutionary North America, from European–native conflicts and the Seven Years’ War to the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, has only recently come to be considered in gendered terms. The roles of both women and men in North American warfare underwent enormous changes from the last quarter of the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth. Two major themes are at the center of this chapter: on the one hand, the theme of the contested and changing constructions of military masculinity of Native Americans, British, and French white settlers and the British and French armies that were brought to North America especially in the context of the Seven Years’ War; and on the other hand, the theme of women’s different and changing involvement in warfare, which is related to the contested and changing representations of femininity in the different war societies.

War, Gender, and Society in Late Colonial and Revolutionary Spanish America

Military conflicts and wars shaped Spanish America in the transformative period from the 1780s to the 1830s with its first anticolonial uprisings and the Spanish American Wars of Independence. This chapter explores the impact of warfare and militarization on the social and gender order in the Spanish Atlantic Empire in this transformative period and examines, conversely, how ideas about the gender order shaped society, warfare, and military culture. It focuses on the first anticolonial uprisings, especially the Tupac Amaru Rebellion in the South American Andes and the Rebellion of the Comuneros in New Granada—two of the largest and earliest in the history of Latin America—and the Spanish American Wars of Independence and their aftermath.

War and Gender

The chapter offers a broad overview of the history of warfare in the Age of the World Wars. It first discusses the concept of total war and its usefulness for a gendered history of war. Then it examines some general trends in the development of warfare during the first half of the twentieth century to provide the historical context for the subsequent more detailed analysis of the Age of the World Wars from a gender perspective. In this section the chapter explores the research on some of the major themes of a gender history of military of war of this period, including gender images, war propaganda, and postwar memory; gendered war support, and war experience at the home front; economic warfare, gendered experience of occupation, and forced labor; war service, gender, and citizenship; and finally gender, genocide, and sexual violence.