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War and Gender Transformations--Transatlantic Examples
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2001
- pp. 189-195
- 10.1353/jowh.2001.0025
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Journal of Women's History 13.1 (2001) 189-195
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Book Review
War and Gender Transformations--Transatlantic Examples
Sandi E. Cooper
Jeanie Attie. Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. xiii + 294 pp. ISBN 0-8014-2224-8 (cl).
Susan R. Grayzel. Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiii + 352 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2481-8 (cl); 0-8078-4810-7 (pb).
Trudi Tate, ed. Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. 298 pp. ISBN 0-7190-4597-5 (cl); 0-7190-4598-3 (pb).
The gender implications of modern warfare provide a somewhat tenuous linkage binding these three books, two of which are historical monographs derived from recent doctoral dissertations and the last, an anthology of short stories by both female and male authors who had been affected by World War I. The historical works--Attie's chronicle of Northern U.S. women's struggle to participate in the male-managed, public service arena created during the U.S. Civil War and Grayzel's comparative study of the British and French home fronts as sites of essentially unchanged gender relationships--come from a new generation of scholars. Both authors conclude that wars, often cited as major turning points or watersheds in modern history, essentially left prewar gender arrangements intact and capitalized on them for wartime needs. In the cases under study here, women--at least the vast majority of women--remained patriotic, enthusiastic, supportive, and eager to do either a man's job or the female equivalent for victory. As a result, both Attie and Grayzel find most women willing to "stand by their men."
Approximately a decade ago--when both peace history and women's history were new, crusading projects seeking to up-end and rebalance the historical record (largely a Whiggish vision emphasizing macropolitics as the foundation of serious history)--younger investigators sought to locate the outrageous, abnormal, radical, unique, and ignored past and did not celebrate the status quo. Peace historians struggled to imbue traditional political and diplomatic approaches with an alternate vision of international reality; women's historians sought to restore the missing 51 [End Page 189] percent of the population into a narrative that represented the wholeness of human life.
Recent scholarship exploring gender and war has rediscovered those women who remained patriotic, embraced public service or factory work as some extension of their domestic obligations, and wanted nothing more than a return to traditional gender relations when the horror ended. When their personal circumstances--such as permanent widowhood or care for an incurable invalid--devastated dreams of normalcy, women's anguish was muted and they seemed to accept the postwar memorials, commemorations, ceremonies, and statuaries as thanks for the sacrifice. They were a silent, accepting majority yearning for the restoration of normalcy. By ignoring the reality that such normalcy could not be retrieved, scholars might insist that prewar gender relations remained intact. Perhaps what survived instead was the determination of some middle-class groups to foster that belief. This question deserves to be asked.
The argument that war--despite temporary disruptions and startling transformations of prescribed gender roles--left such classic gender prescriptions essentially unchanged appears persuasive and incontrovertible. Indeed, in the case both of the U.S. Civil War and World War I, political and prescriptive propaganda urged women to undertake service to the nation as an extension of their "natural" domestic roles. Indeed, though neither author noted it in their work, even before Italy entered World War I in 1915, there were leaders who argued that Italian women might have to define themselves again as "mothers of a nation"--as they had in the Risorgimento, or the nineteenth-century movement to liberate and unite Italy.
Following a richly woven introduction that addresses the American revolutionary tradition, the discourse over women in a republic, and the power of voluntarism in U.S. history, Attie...