Gender on the Barricades

Review Essays Gender on the Barricades David Barry. Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. London and New York: MacmUlan Press Ltd. and St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996. 208 pp. ISBN 0-312-12947-5 (cl). Janet Hart. New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 19411964 . Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996. 398 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3044-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8014-8219^ (pb). Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers'Movement and World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 288 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-226-39587-1 (cl). Mary Nash. Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War. Denver, Colo.: Arden Press, Inc., 1995. 261 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-91286916 -x (cl). Temma Kaplan Few men or women engage in collective action, so those who do seem to be similar to one another and different from others in their society. They may be driven by need or outrage, hope or a sense of obUgation. They may feel empowered by God, by social circumstances, by political threats, or by anxiety about how to assure the survival of their families and communities. The significance of women's behavior on the barricades, in the streets, and in committee rooms may vary with their motivations. Although meanings may change from culture to culture and incident to incident, comparing seemingly similar activities in different times and places may reveal, as these four books do, why issues of gender emerge so often during wars—particularly civU wars and periods of domestic upheaval . At such times, women of all classes frequently gravitate to the center of attention, and gender and its dispositions become matters of public concern. One reason is that civü disturbances—deep rifts that sometimes lead to armed struggle—cut to the quick of national identity. The disruptions of war bring women of all classes out of their own public spaces into male domains. Strife makes the economic and political work of provisioning families and providing shelter—the work women, especially poor and working class women, perform in their own neighborhoods—a matter of © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 178 Journal of Women's History Autumn public interest. Middle-class women also assume more authority either as mothers or as feminists when the men of their class or political groups are at war. Once the social networks women maintain come into view and women appear in the spotlight, the continuity of their behavior becomes a matter of pubUc concern. No matter how necessary the changes in women's public life are to sustaining the nation, their assumption of new positions disorients men of all groups because gender hierarchies are usually mainstays of male social identity. Women engaging in collective action either as mothers or as individuals , or both, effectively challenge the need for men to protect women . Sometimes, when the men are busy at war, women activists on the barricades, at the fronts, behind the lines, or in committee rooms deny their own authority and claim to be expressing the interests of groups identified as male. Some women, while fighting for their communities alongside men, also demand recognition as fuU citizens. MaternaUst movements tend to make claims for the collective good rather than for themselves ; many others become feminists, frequently raising questions about female education, employment, or health care. AU four books under review here focus on women's movements that are not overtly feminist. Yet by zeroing in on the collective behavior of women, they all raise questions about the gendered nature of collective action. Three of the books, New Voices of the Nation, Defying Male Civilization, and Women and Political Insurgency, focus on left-wing, largely urban working-class and rural women's movements associated with domestic wars in Europe. Although Women of the Far Right also deals with bitter national strife, it seems at first to be the anomaly since it considers women on the other side of the Atlantic and at the other end of the political spectrum: middle-class, reactionary, white, Christian women who tried to promote Nazi interests in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s...