Spanning the 20th century, this collection of accessible and very readable essays explores the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare.

To date, the history of military and war has focused predominantly on men as historical agents, disregarding gender and its complex interrelationships with war and the military. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 investigates how conceptions of gender have contributed to the shaping of war and the military and were transformed by them. Covering the major periods in warfare since the seventeenth century, the Handbook focuses on Europe and the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia. Thirty-two essays written by leading international scholars explore the cultural representations of war and the military, war mobilization, and war experiences at home and on the battle front. Essays address the gendered aftermath and memories of war, as well as gendered war violence. Essays also examine movements to regulate and prevent warfare, the consequences of participation in the military for citizenship, and challenges to ideals of Western military masculinity posed by female, gay, and lesbian soldiers and colonial soldiers of color. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 offers an authoritative account of the intricate relationships between gender, warfare, and military culture across time and space.

Human displacement has always been a consequence of war, written into the myths and histories of centuries of warfare. However, the global conflicts of the twentieth century brought displacement to civilizations on an unprecedented scale, as the two World Wars shifted participants around the globe. Although driven by political disputes between European powers, the consequences of Empire ensured that Europe could not contain them. Soldiers traversed continents, and civilians often followed them, or found themselves living in territories ruled by unexpected invaders. Both wars saw fighting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and few nations remained neutral. Both wars saw the mass upheaval of civilian populations as a consequence of the fighting. Displacements were geographical, cultural, and psychological; they were based on nationality, sex/gender or age. They produced an astonishing range of human experience, recorded by the participants in different ways. This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience.

Women, Warfare and Representation considers the various ways the American servicewoman has been represented throughout the 20th century and how those representations impact the roles she is permitted to inhabit. While women have a relatively short history in the American military, the last century shows an evolution of women's direct participation in war despite the need to overcome societal sex-role expectations. The primary focus is on the American case, but Emerald Archer also introduces a comparative element, showing how women's integration in the military differs in other countries, including Great Britain, Canada and Israel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws on military history, theory and social psychology to offer a more complete and integrated history of women in the military and their representation in society.

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics. Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered? Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.

Women's lives changed more in the Twentieth century than in any previous century. It was a period of transformation, not only of the political realm, but also the household, family and workplace. Ranging widely over Europe, this fascinating account is one of the first comprehensive surveys of its kind.

This handbook brings together recent and emerging research in the broad areas of women and gender studies focusing on pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russian Federation. For the Soviet period in particular, individual chapters extend the geographic coverage of the book beyond Russia itself to examine women and gender relations in the Soviet ‘East’ (Tatarstan), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Within the boundaries of the Russian Federation, the scope moves beyond the typically studied urban centres of Moscow and St Petersburg to examine the regions (Krasnodar, Novosibirsk), rural societies and village life. Its chapters examine the construction of gender identities and shifts in gender roles during the twentieth century, as well as the changing status and roles of women vis-a-vis men in Soviet political institutions, the workplace and society more generally. This volume draws on a broad range of disciplinary and methodological approaches currently being employed in the academic field of Russian studies. The origins of the individual contributions can be identified in a range of conventional subject disciplines – history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies – but the chapters also adopt a cross- and inter-disciplinary approach to the topic of study. This handbook therefore builds on and extends the foundations of Russian women’s and gender studies as it has emerged and developed in recent decades, and demonstrate the international, indeed global, reach of such research

“This volume is interesting both because of its global focus, and its chronology up to the present, it covers a good century of changes. It will help define the field of gender studies of humanitarianism, and its relevance for understanding the history of nation-building, and a political history that goes beyond nations.” - Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History and ARC Kathleen Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia This volume discusses the relationship between gender and humanitarian discourses and practices in the twentieth century. It analyses the ways in which constructions, norms and ideologies of gender both shaped and were shaped in global humanitarian contexts. The individual chapters present issues such as post-genocide relief and rehabilitation, humanitarian careers and subjectivities, medical assistance, community aid, child welfare and child soldiering. They give prominence to the beneficiaries of aid and their use of humanitarian resources, organizations and structures by investigating the effects of humanitarian activities on gender relations in the respective societies. Approaching humanitarianism as a global phenomenon, the volume considers actors and theoretical positions from the global North and South (from Europe to the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia as well as North America). It combines state and non-state humanitarian initiatives and scrutinizes their gendered dimension on local, regional, national and global scales. Focusing on the time between the late nineteenth century and the post-Cold War era, the volume concentrates on a period that not only witnessed a major expansion of humanitarian action worldwide but also saw fundamental changes in gender relations and the gradual emergence of gender-sensitive policies in humanitarian organizations in many Western and non-Western settings.

The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military is the first examination of the interdisciplinary, intersecting fields of gender studies and the history of the United States military. In twenty-one original essays, the contributors tackle themes including gendering the "other," gender and war disability, gender and sexual violence, gender and American foreign relations, and veterans and soldiers in the public imagination, and lay out a chronological examination of gender and America’s wars from the American Revolution to Iraq. This important collection is essential reading for all those interested in how the military has influenced America's views and experiences of gender.