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NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003) 197-202



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Women's Writing on the First World War, edited by Agnes Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman, and Judith Hattaway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 374 pp., $21.95 paper.
Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001, 161 pp., $16.95 paper.
The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism, and the First World War, by Angela K. Smith. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, 214 pp., $27.95 hardcover.
French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front, by Margaret H. Darrow. New York: New York University Press, 2001, 341 pp., $19.50 paper.

As Margaret H. Darrow remarks in the introduction to French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front, the predominant representation of World War I remains that of the trench-fighter: "The trench-fighter's story became the story of the First World War, not necessarily because it was the majority story, but because it was the story that made sense out of the war, that installed its meaning—dehumanizing horror but also patriotic sacrifice—in popular consciousness" (4). Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have challenged this monolithic narrative by recovering and analyzing the forgotten and neglected writing that women produced during the war, writing that restored women's historical presence—as nurses, ambulance drivers, and the like—and that simultaneously foregrounded the gender politics of literary modernism. The books under consideration here complicate the analyses of these earlier scholars even as they continue to expand our understanding of the diverse ways in which women both participated in and represented that participation behind the lines.

Women's Writing on the First World War and Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War focus on women's primary texts produced during or soon after the war, and would be accessible introductions to this period's women's writing in literature, history, or Women's Studies courses. The first covers a wide spectrum of women's writing from the United States, Great Britain, and Europe; the editors note, "It is through this range of writing that we can begin to recognize the significance of World War I both for the modernist idiom and for the new developments in [End Page 197] women's writing this century" (1). In addition to the familiar story of the nurse behind the lines, they include women's accounts of their struggles on the home front, their experiences of becoming autonomous—running businesses, managing homes and farms, learning to manage money, or leaving home to do paid work—and their travels abroad and to the front. Selections span a variety of genres, including journalism; short stories and sketches; and diaries, journals, and memoirs. Throughout, selections "focus on the specific ways in which women saw and narrated the war; they reveal the difference between women's experience and that of men and combatants; they illuminate their different perspectives on common experiences" (2). This range of writing succeeds in challenging not only the monolithic myth of the male trench-fighter, it also challenges what the editors perceive as early feminists' overemphasis on confrontational gender politics.

The selections are arranged in groups that form a roughly chronological overview and highlight differences within commonalities. The early groupings depict women as they attempt to define their relationship to the war. These sections are particularly noteworthy for what the editors term dailiness, "writing which is aptly described as 'history deprived of generalisations"' (3). "The War Comes Home," for example, includes Sarah Macdonald's advice on hygiene and health to women entering munitions work and Dorothy Peel's discussion of "Housekeeping in War Time" alongside artist Kathe Köllwitz's letters and diary entries recording the loss of her son Peter in the war...

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