Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.

In consideration of UN Resolution 1325 (which called for women's equal participation in promoting peace and security and for greater efforts to protect women exposed to violence during and after conflict), this volume takes stock of the current state of knowledge on women, peace and security issues, including efforts to increase women's participation in post-conflict reconstruction strategies and their protection from wartime sexual violence.

The changing role of women in warfare, a neglected aspect of military history, is the subject of this collection of perceptive, thought-provoking essays. By looking at the wide range of ways in which women have become involved in all the aspects of war, the authors open up this fascinating topic to wider understanding and debate. The discuss how, particularly in the two world wars, women have been increasingly mobilized in all the armed services, originally as support staff, then in defensive combat roles. They also consider the tragic story of women as victims of male violence, and how women have often put up a heroic resistance, and examine how women have been drawn into direct combat roles on an unprecedented level, a trend that is still controversial in the present day. The collection brings together the work of noted academics and historians with the wartime experiences of women who have remarkable personal stories to tell. The book will be a milestone in the study of the recent history of the parts women have played in the history of warfare.AuthorsDr Juliette Pattinson, Professor Mark Connelly, Georgina Natzio, Christine Halsall, Jonathan Walker, Major Imogen Corrigan, Dr. Halik Kochanski, Dr T.A. Heathcote, Elspeth Johnstone, Mike Ryan, Grace Filby, Dr George Bailey, Tatiana Roshupkina, Leicester Chilton, Paul Edward Strong, Celia Lee, John Lee

The Civil War is remembered as a war of brother against brother, with women standing innocently on the sidelines. But battlefield realities soon challenged this simplistic understanding of women's place in war. Stephanie McCurry shows that women were indispensable to the unfolding of the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars.

Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference. In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.

Women everywhere have long struggled for recognition as equal, productive members of society, worthy of taking part in the political process. These struggles become even more pronounced in times of conflict and war, when the symbolism and myths of womanhood are used to stoke nationalistic ideas about the survival of the state. Yet for all the rhetoric that takes place in their name, it’s men who generally make decisions regarding war. Women and War examines how women respond to situations of conflict. Drawing on both traditional and feminist international relations theory, it explores the roles that women play before, during and after a conflict, how they spur and respond to nationalist and social movements, and how conceptions of gender are deeply intertwined with ideas about citizenship and the state. As Kaufman and Williams show, women do more than respond to conflict situations; they are active agents in their own right shaping political and historical processes. Their conclusions encourage us to rethink the prevalent assumptions of international relations, history and feminist scholarship and theory.

There are few moments in history when the division between the sexes seems as "natural" as during wartime: men go off to the "war front," while women stay behind on the "home front." But the very notion of the home front was an invention of the First World War, when, for the first time, "home" and "domestic" became adjectives that modified the military term "front." Such an innovation acknowledged the significant and presumably new contributions of civilians, especially women, to the war effort. Yet, as Susan Grayzel argues, throughout the war, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity survived, primarily through the maintenance of--and indeed reemphasis on--soldiering and mothering as the core of gender and national identities. Drawing on sources that range from popular fiction and war memorials to newspapers and legislative debates, Grayzel analyzes the effects of World War I on ideas about civic participation, national service, morality, sexuality, and identity in wartime Britain and France. Despite the appearance of enormous challenges to gender roles due to the upheavals of war, the forces of stability prevailed, she says, demonstrating the Western European gender system's remarkable resilience.