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1. Introduction: Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
- Indiana University Press
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1 Introduction: Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe Nancy M. Wing¤eld and Maria Bucur Harboring a secret, foreign will I must humbly do my heroic deed; With deadly iron on the ¤eld of war I’m sent to plow a bloody rut. ( . . . ) And the heart, burning, loving angered Foresees the eternal light in pitch-black hell: For the world to come I go into battle, For the life to come I go to death. Poliksena Sergeevna Soloviëva, 19151 The essays in this collection grow out of two fundamental questions: What does it mean to “gender the front”? And why it is particularly fruitful to bring gender to the front in twentieth-century eastern Europe? At the most basic level, gendering the front means deconstructing the notion that wartime heroism is exclusively masculine. More generally, gendering the front means de¤ning war as a historical subject that encompasses more than battle¤elds and “the cult of the fallen soldier.”2 The tragic stories of these soldiers came to de¤ne the drama of the wars writ large. Thus, historians inscribed heroism as exclusively masculine, while broadening its de¤nition across classes. During the last two decades, however , social, cultural, and gender historians of western Europe and the United States especially have expanded and rede¤ned the meaning of war. They have transformed a variety of topics into essential components for understanding war. Among other issues, gender and social historians have analyzed social/class hierarchies, work, social and political activism, the home front experience, and women’s experience. Cultural historians, working to deconstruct essentialist assumptions about social/class hierarchies, have focused on representations of these same experiences. They have challenged the very categories of home front versus ¤ghting front as hierarchically inscribed with historical signi¤cance on the basis of culturally embedded assumptions about heroism and sacri¤ce, both of which have traditionally been gendered masculine, albeit only implicitly. Cultural historians have also looked beyond the immediate causes and consequences of war (questions of “why” and “what”), suggesting that questions fo- cusing on “how” provide great insights into war as a transformative historical event with repercussions across society. We join historians who have challenged this assumption and explore the gender ®uidity of the home and ¤ghting front categories on the eastern fronts during the two world wars.3 Given the enormous English-language literature on the two world wars, it is perhaps surprising how small the share of studies on eastern Europe is. Moreover , the literature of the world wars in eastern Europe has heretofore focused almost exclusively on traditional diplomatic-military questions.4 Only recently have historians of the region turned their attention to cultural and social aspects of war, and gender analysis has remained marginal in this new trend. Yet, the particularities of the eastern European context suggest both the need to incorporate gender into the study of the world wars in eastern Europe and the integration of this region into the broader narrative of war in twentieth-century Europe .The eastern European experience of world wars—where the ¤ghting fronts were more mobile and ®uid than in western Europe during World War I and more brutal during World War II—renders theconclusionshistorianshave drawn based solely upon the western European experience more dif¤cult to sustain. Complicating the effort to gender the front in the east is the overriding centrality of the tension between nationalism and trans-nationalism or internationalism . During the course of World War I many of those who had originally fought for the preservation of Austria-Hungary found themselves moving to support its destruction by the war’s end. Indeed, the war destroyed the two multinational empires—the Habsburg and Ottoman—that hadheretofore dominated eastern Europe,and replaced a third—the Romanov—with a different sort of multinational empire altogether. A series of nominally national states—in fact, often multinational states governed as nation states—replaced these empires in the newly recon¤gured eastern Europe. The violence of World War I affected all citizens of the region as they were forced to shift civic identities virtually overnight from transnational to national, for example, from Habsburg into Hungarian or Romanian and from Russian into Latvian or Lithuanian. The concern of political elites with consolidating the national identity of the nascent states of eastern Europe crowded out most other issues raised by the experience of World War I. Thus, economic, political, and social-welfare projects were framed primarily in ethno-national terms. While women might...