Blind Spot: Women and the History of War

Heuristics is a fancy way of saying shortcuts. Our brains take them every waking moment. That is how we process information fast enough to outrun saber-toothed tigers. When I tell new acquaintances that my specialization is American foreign relations, I suggest they “think war.” The next shortcut most people take is to “think men.” Stephanie McCurry and Kara Dixon Vuic demonstrate in their valuable new books that the problem with this heuristic is that women have always played roles in military conflict. Napoleon Bonaparte said an army marches on its stomach. So who did the cooking?

It used to be worse. Not long ago, if someone said history, the instant calculation was men. Half of humanity disappeared. Then, around fifty years ago, scholars began writing women’s history, a subset with a secondary status like any subset. There were athletes and female athletes, artists and female artists, politicians and female politicians, soldiers and female soldiers, presidents and, well, presidents. Much as scholars have tried to rebuild the narrative, women’s history remains a lean-to against the house of history.

Doubt my assertion? Consider that in 101 years, the Pulitzer Prize for History has been awarded only once for a book focused on women—on the topic of childbirth: A Midwife’s Tale (1990). In the historical profession, at least to some extent, women remain in their place.

They remain so in the library, too. I discovered this when I recently began research for my first book focused principally on American women’s history and found myself wandering, mystified, in the nether regions of the stacks, far from any reference librarian or computer terminal. At Stanford University, this subject is two floors and a football field away from the traditional Es and Fs of U.S. History. Women, it turns out, are in the basement.

I cannot fault Stanford for this distancing as it is true wherever Library of Congress classification prevails. Across disciplines, regions, and time periods, most books on women are jumbled together under H and J as a topic within the social sciences. So, for example, Linda Kerber’s prize-winning scholarship on three centuries of American law, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies (1998), is next to a reporter’s analysis of politics inside the beltway today. Books on Peruvian feminism and women of ancient Rome reside nearby. It is as if some primordial cataloguer had no idea what to do with “women’s studies” and so tossed it all in a cosmic junk drawer.

Stephanie McCurry and Kara Dixon Vuic hope to change the assumptions behind such segregation. Women’s experience, they show, is the American experience. McCurry, whose slim, muscular book sits among the traditional Es in the library, insists women are central to comprehending the Civil War. Vuic’s book vividly documents the strategic support role female civilians played in every U.S. conflict of the twentieth century. It is less successful in breaking free of library gendering, however, and rests amid the hodgepodge Js near an anthology on rape in wartime and others that evaluate Medea’s role in Greek tragedy and female poetry of the Spanish Civil War.

McCurry is aided by a stellar track record of reviving stories of massive population groups long conjured out of scholarship. Her previous prizewinning book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010), demonstrated a new way of analyzing the Confederacy’s downfall by factoring in the other two-thirds of the people on the ground: poor white women and the enslaved. The approach seems obvious in retrospect, but it took a century and a half for someone to figure it out. In her new book, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War, McCurry adds three new chapters to her Homeric epic...