2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel presents new research on women, military, and war. The focus is on the effects of the new modes of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth century, from national and imperial wars to industrialized mass warfare. One major theme will be the “totalization of warfare.” The far-reaching structural consequences of the universal mobilization for war reached a new magnitude in the twentieth century— a new quality of erasing the lines separating the military and civilian realms —, which was most clearly marked by the blurring of gender lines. Civilians became a major target of violence and genocide, and this violence encompassed sexual violence in various forms. Women were increasingly needed for war support, for work in war administration and industries, war charity and war nursing, and for service in the military itself. One core element that defined in this situation of blurred gender lines the gender differences was the human “power to injure” and the human “vulnerability to injury”. The ability and the right to exercise organized and armed violence has been connoted as “masculine” since Antiquity, but in the imagined gender order of the modern nation states, this male right—and, in wartime, duty— to kill was at the very heart of the gender line that differentiated men from women. The female complement to this was responsibility for charity and nursing. Only in the “emergency situation of war” women were asked and allowed to fulfill this patriotic duty and other necessary forms of war support outside the home.