Gender, Sex, and War in the European Twentieth Century
Mary Louise Roberts, United States Military Academy
“Women have always and everywhere been inextricably involved in war, [but] hidden from history. . . During wars, women are ubiquitous and highly visible; when wars are over and the war songs are sung, women disappear.”
War has its own unwritten rules. One is that war is fought for women not by them. Another dictates that sexual violence is permissible in times of conquest. We will explore how such imperatives shaped the experience of the two world wars in Europe. Some questions we will ask are: What happens when the industrialization of war enables women to fight in combat roles? How do the lives of women change with the disappearance of a “homefront” in the Second World War? What challenges did women face when participating in resistance movements? Why are prostitution and rape more common in large-scale wars? How and why does the possession of women’s bodies mark spheres of power in the male contest for territory? To answer these questions, we will probe memoirs, diaries, and oral histories as well as historical narratives.