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

June 01 - 04, 2017

Despite the more conservative gender ideologies promoted by the conservative and fascist regimes of Central and Southern Europe in the period between 1918 and 1945, the radicalized political atmosphere offered women many opportunities to defy the gendered expectations of proper “feminine” behavior  and to demonstrate their loyalty to their country through participation in or perpetration of politicized violence. While women’s perpetration of violence offered expansive opportunities to engage in the process of state- and nation-(re)building in periods of national crisis, it  also tested the limits of how far women could safely deviate from the feminine ideal of wife and mother, before they became a challenge to the state and social order that had to be disciplined.

This panel explores the activities and representations of women perpetrators of (political) violence in order to understand how violence functioned as a source of social and political inclusion and exclusion for women. It also examines how the perpetration of violence challenged or reinforced gender hierarchy and ideas about appropriate “feminine” roles, behaviors, and attributes. Finally, it examines the gendered dimensions of extraordinary legal processes that arose in periods of state crisis to trace points of continuity and disruption in legal institutions’ methods of grappling with female violence and representations of “violent” women in periods of political transformation.