Polish and Ukrainian Female Legionnaires in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War (original) (raw)
Related papers
Women and War: Militarism, Bodies, and the Practice of Gender
Sociology Compass, 2008
Women around the world, in various geographic spaces, social and cultural contexts, as partners, wives, sisters, daughters, mothers, mourners, and victims experience war. Women's experience of war and their participation in it, either as actors or resistors, victims or perpetrators (Moser and Clark 2001), cheerleaders or critics, are always influenced by the construction of gender operating in and around their lives. While constructions of masculinity and femininity are always circulating in and around militarism and war, women's bodies are sometimes primary considerations for military and state leaders; this creates a visibility/invisibility/ hyper-visibility problem for women in wartime. In this essay, women's participation in war as soldiers, refugees, prisoners, jailers, activists, and suicide bombers and the accompanying shift in the practice of femininity and masculinity is explored. Sometimes it looks like women are becoming more like men; if being militarized is the same as being masculinized. But I think similarity is not what is simply happening here but rather that the constructions of gender are being more fully diversified and essentialized simultaneously (Eisenstein 2007, 2). Gender discourses remain constitutive of our understanding and knowledge of war. These discourses are so tightly imbricated in and replete with other discourses-sexuality, religion, imperialism, torture, race, rape, visibility, and targeting-that we do ourselves a disservice if we hold to the possibilities of untangling them in their entirety (Kinsella 2007, 227). Women around the world, in various geographic spaces, social and cultural contexts, as partners, wives, sisters, daughters, mothers, mourners, and victims experience war. Their experiences of war and their participation in it, either as actors or resistors, victims or perpetrators (Moser and Clark 2001), cheerleaders or critics, are always influenced, not only by race, class, sexuality, ability, and nation but by the construction of gender operating in and around their lives. Cultural norms about gender have a profound impact on how women are regarded in relation to war, what they are expected to do, and the strength of the repercussions suffered for acting outside the accepted gender boundaries within particular spaces.
Women and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework
Women and Wars, 2012
This is a book about the relationships between women and wars: the impacts wars have on women, the ways women participate in wars, the varying political stances women take toward war, and the ways in which women work to build peace. There is an old story about war. It starts with war being conceived of as a quintessentially masculine realm: in it, it is men who make the decisions to go to war, men who do the planning, men who do the fi ghting and dying, men who protect their nation and their helpless women and children, and men who negotiate the peace, divide the spoils, and share power when war is over. In this story, women are sometimes present, but remain peripheral to the war itself. They raise sons they willingly sacrifi ce for their country, support their men, and mourn the dead. Sometimes they have to step in and take up the load their men put down when they went off to fi ght; they pick up the hoe, or work in a factory producing goods crucial to the war effort – but only as long as the men are away. To the men in battle, they symbolize the alternative – a place of love, caring, and domesticity, and indeed, all that is good about the nation which their heroic fi ghting protects. The gendered reality of war is far more complex than this old story portrays. War itself is more complexly gendered than this masculinized story allows, and women's role in and experience of war is far more integral and varied. In this book, we will show that one cannot understand either women's relation to war or war itself without understanding gender, and understanding the ways that war and gender are, in fact, mutually constitutive.
Women and War: an introduction
Kurdish Studies, 2018
In this introductory article to the special issue Women and War in Kurdistan, we connect our topic to feminist theory, to anthropological theory on war and conflict and their long -term consequences, and to theory on gender, nation and (visual) representation. We investigate Kurdish women’s victimisation and marginalisation, but also their resistance and agency as female combatants and women activists, their portrayal by media and scholars, and their self-representation. We offer herewith a critical perspective on militarisation, women’s liberation, and women’s experiences in times of war and peace. We also introduce the five articles in this issue and discuss how they contribute to the study of women and war in two main areas: the wide-reaching effects of war on women’s lives, and the gendered representation and images of war in Kurdistan.
On May 8, 1967 the national contest for written memoirs concerning women's participation in the WWII was announced. The organisers were three official institutions represented the women, the army, and the war veterans; respectively the National Council of Polish Women, the Polish Army Political Board, the Main Board of the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy. Soon more than 200 time witnesses, mostly women, responded to the announcement. The large number of memoirs should have been no surprise, as memory of war was still an important and meaningful part of personal experiences, and the public discourse on the national identity of Poles. It was not without significance that memoirs contests had in Poland a long tradition and the pattern of making personal recollections a part of the public memory, what has been, in words of Paul Thompson, a unique feature of the Polish memory culture. 1 In the aftermath of the contest, two years later (on the 25th anniversary of the end of the war) the Ministry of National Defence published a book " Woman in the battle " with collection of chosen memoirs. The collection is 2 a good example of role and significance of gender in the Polish memory of war. The book demonstrates how women constructed their self-identities by telling their war stories, how the official memory used women's participation in WWII, and how the gender order framed Polish collective memory? Here is a quite representative excerpt from an anonymous introduction to the collection describing in a very grandiloquent 3
Gender and WWII: framing new approaches
2014
Traditionally WWII studies focused on the military activities and political history. Today researches are coming up with new areas of study, new topics, new objects and subjects. In my paper I will talk about three relatively new research fields where WWII and gender studies overlap. They are: the Holocaust and women studies; everyday life of women-refugees in Siberia during WWII; and everyday life on the Western front after liberation by Allies, particularly by the USA army. In my paper I would like to examine how the ethical aspects, challenges of the traditional male-dominated society, and switches of gender roles were reflected in the works by Katherine Jolluck, Mary Roberts, Dorota Glowacka, Amy Shapiro, and Myrna Goldenberg.
Women soldiers in frontline war rooms: Protecting the nation on the backstage of war
Female Fighters in Armed Conflict Listening to Their Own Stories, 2023
Chapter no 7 - in an edited volume. This book explores the why and the how of women's participation in armed struggle, and challenges preconceived assertions about women and violence, providing both a historic and a contemporary focus. The volume is about women who have participated in armed conflict as members of an armed group, trained in military action, with different tasks within the conflict. The chapters endeavor to make women's own voices heard, to discover the untold stories of women as perpetrators and facilitators of military violence, and the authors do this through the use of personal interviews and the study of primary documents. The work widens the geographical perspective of feminist security studies to discover in what ways the historical, political and social context has motivated the women to participate in military action, and presents new case study data from Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Cameroon, India, the Philippines, Vietnam and Latin America. Temporally, the chapters cover almost two centuries, from the late 19th century to the present day, touching upon a wide variety of examples of armed conflict, from wars of independence to the Second World War. Bringing together approaches from politics, history, anthropology and area studies, the chapters are informed by the fundamental insights of feminist research and address such pivotal questions as hegemonic masculinity in the armed forces and the relation between women's armed violence and female agency. This book will be of much interest to students and researchers in gender and security studies, armed conflict and history.
Baltic Worlds, 2017
This paper examines women’s contribution to war and the perceptions of that contribution by comparing experiences of women in the Red Army during the Second World War and in the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the conflict in the Donbas region. Through comparative analysis, the paper argues that in both cases structural gender discrimination was ingrained in the military, which accepted women’s contribution to war in times of need, but treated that contribution as subsidiary, thereby distorting men’s and women’s experiences of warfare and facilitating the instrumentalized militarization of women. The article can be accessed here: http://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/BW\_4\_2017\_OLESYA\_KHROMEYCHUK\_pp58\_70.pdf
Twenty-five years at the front line: Gender and War in retrospect
History Australia, 2020
This article provides a retrospective study of Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi's 1995 edited volume Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century. On the eve of the book's twentyfifth anniversary, such a study offers an opportunity to recapture some of the vibrancy that attended its publication. Gender and War spoke both to the opportunities for new histories that unfolded with the tools of gender analysis and to the re-energised examination of Australian experiences of war that was then occurring. Well attuned both to the international and local contexts to which the volume was contributing, the contributors to Gender and War grasped a unique opportunity to develop more complex and fruitful insights into the effects of war on Australian society. In so doing, it also furthered the extant project of critiquing the phenomenon so much at the heart of academic inquiry into Australian war history: the Anzac legend. Armed with its new questions and new analytical demands, gender history opened up the study of Australian experiences of war and the meanings attached to themin ways that are still playing out productively today.