Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity (review)

Margaret Poulos, in her book Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity, explores the intersection of the female warrior, nationalism, and feminism during two centuries: from the "national invention" of 1821 to the "second wave of feminism," almost at the end of twentieth century. It is an ambitious and potentially worthwhile project to write the history of women warriors in Greece, as women not only hold up half of heaven (according to Mao Zedong), but also "half of Greece."

In the first chapter, Poulos reviews Anglo-American feminist theories concerning the relationship among women, war, peace and the nation, and tries to situate the discourses of Greek feminism in relation to these theoretical approaches. The second chapter refers mostly to the emergence of proto-feminist women, led by "the charismatic figure" of Kallirhoe Parren, who aimed to create a "national feminism" grounded in the Greek War of Independence of 1821. This was achieved in part through the images of Bouboulina and other female heroines, in articles published in the feminist weekly The Ladies' Newspaper (Efimeris ton Kyrion), which Parren founded in 1887. But feminism and the national narrative were "unstable alliances" (37–46). Parren was actively sympathetic with the Balkan Wars (1912–13), but when Eleftherios Venizelos prepared for WWI alongside the Allies, Parren, along with her personal and political friend the Queen of Greece, adopted a pacifist stance, until she was finally exiled in 1917.

It is important to take into account (as Poulos fails explicitly to do) politics and particularly the diversity on national issues policy. When Parren stopped promoting the fighter Bouboulina and declared that women were the "Peace Corps of Humanity," there was a conflict raging in Greece between Venizelos and the King, known as ethnikos dichasmos or National Schism. Venizelos, following a pro-Great Britain policy, wanted Greece to enter the Great War, while the King, following pro-German policy, preferred Greece's "neutrality," or, in other words "peace." And Parren had close connections with the Palace and its policies.

After the Great War (1914–1919), Greece had doubled its territory in the north. The Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) led to the end of the politics of the Great Idea (Megali Idea), the irredentist campaign to expand the Greek State into Asia Minor and other areas of historical Greek presence. Before the Second World War, in the interwar period, there was a "first wave" of Greek feminism, firmly located within the liberal Venizelist tradition (50).

Poulos's third chapter discusses the establishing of women's unions. While Parren worked for the Lyceio of Ellinidon on custom and tradition, the League for the Rights of Women targeted legal and constitutional reforms aimed at women's economic independence, education and suffrage. It also participated in the international pacifist women's movement, established after the horrors of the Great War. In 1936, as war clouds covered Europe, the Metaxas dictatorship made all social movements illegal and brought women into the center stage of political life and national discourse by creating a cult of Mother Worship (65).

Chapter Four takes up the question of women's participation, during the Axis Occupation (1941–1944), in the National Resistance Movement (mainly in the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing ELAS), in which a great number of Greek women fought for national liberation and for a "better" world. The Resistance was constructed as the reincarnation of the spirit of 1821: the focus was on national liberation and as the author concludes "the history of the 1940s serves as a poignant example of both the emancipatory and inherent limitations of national movement" (101). Moreover, as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) played a major role in EAM, feminism was considered a bourgeois theoretical preoccupation. According to the KKE, women were partners equal to men and had the right and the duty to fight alongside them. According to the author...