Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives 9781350390102, 9780230280946, 9780230280953

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List of Illustrations 6.1 Mr W.J. Bond and Mr A.E. Atherman breaking the 10-mile walking record for limbless men. 10.1 Donut Dolly Charlene McClintic distributes Christmas gift bags to a line of American soldiers at the Nashua Fire Support Base in December 1967. As Donut Dollies continued a history of women’s morale-building services, their feminine appearance and holiday cheer contrasted sharply with the war. Photograph by Bob Woodbury. 10.2 Soldiers at Rach Kien are treated to a program given by Donut Dollies Eileen Conoboy and Robin Brown. The Red Cross and the US military intended the women to provide soldiers with a reprieve from the war, even as they lived and worked in a militarized environment that literally surrounded them. Photograph by Mark Stevens. 10.3 Eileen Carney chats with soldiers from the 1st Air Cavalry division at An Khe in October 1967. Donut Dollies struggled to balance their charge to provide friendly conversation, even as the racial makeup of the armed forces complicated the use of women as sex symbols. Photograph by Mark Stevens. 10.4 In her short skirt and sunglasses, this Donut Dolly exudes the youthful femininity idealized in the Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas program. The expectation that Donut Dollies serve as objects of heterosexual desire, however, often placed the women in a precarious position among an army of men who frequently misunderstood their purpose in the war.

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Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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List of Contributors

Lois S. Bibbings is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics in Medicine at the University of Bristol. Although her home discipline is law she researches in a range of fields in the Social Sciences and Arts. Her work focuses upon crime, human rights, healthcare, ethics and military conscientious objection. However, her primary focus is on gender. Her book Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War was published in 2009. Her next monograph, Binding Men: Nineteenth Century Criminal Cases and the Policing of Masculinity, will be published by Routledge-Cavendish in 2013. She is currently working on two projects. The first examines the use of fiction in legal scholarship. The second entails researching the meaning of ‘conscience’. As well as researching and teaching, Lois undertakes widening participation work with local schools and colleges. She is also the Domestic Violence Legal Trainer for Women’s Aid. Ana Carden-Coyne is Co-Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War, University of Manchester, and co-founder of the Disability History Group, UK/Europe. She has published on the cultural history of the body, war and sexuality, gender and commemoration. Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009), will soon be followed by The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power (Oxford University Press, 2012). Edited volumes include ‘Enabling the Past: New Perspectives in the History of Disability’ (European Review of History, co-edited with Julie Anderson, 2007), and Cultures of the Abdomen: A History of Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (with Christopher E. Forth, Palgrave, 2005), and she has published several book chapters and articles (Journal of War and Culture Studies, European Review of History, Humanities Review, Journal of Australian Studies. The Guardian newspaper published her booklet on Wounded Visionaries (November, 2008). Hazel Croft a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her thesis investigates war neurosis and mental health among civilians in Second World War Britain, analysing the way ‘war neurosis’ was constructed and theorized in medical and psychiatric thought and the social, political and medical contexts in which it was applied to civilians. She completed her M.A. in Medicine, Science and Society: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives at Birkbeck in 2008. viii

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Laurie R. Cohen has researched and taught at the University of Innsbruck since 2004, having received her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 2002. Her field of expertise is nineteenth- and twentieth-century European cultural, social and political history. She is currently writing a monograph on gender conflicts in the light of transatlantic women peace activists and peace movements between the First and Second World Wars. Publications include a critical volume on the first woman Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner (author and editor, Braumüller, 2005), three entries on women in The International Encyclopedia of Peace (Oxford University Press, Winter 2009), as well as essays on the Nazi-German occupation of Smolensk (Secolo, 2005), on Mohanda K. Gandhi (Braumüller, 2007) and on Suttner’s gendered reception by American suffragists and pacifists in 1912, in L’Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft (February, 2010). Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. She is the author of 13 books, among them Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Maneuvers: the Militarization of Women’s Lives, and Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. Phoebe C. Godfrey is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She has published in the areas of education, gender, race, sexuality and ecofeminism. Her most recent publications are ‘Ecofeminist Cosmology: Genesis Farm, Ecofeminism and the Search For Sustainable Solutions’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (2008) and ‘The ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Desegregation of Texan Public Schools’, Equity and Excellence in Education, (2008). Susan R. Grayzel is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, having received an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of two books: Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and Women and the First World War (Longman, 2002), a global history, and also of shorter pieces in collections of essays and journals, including The International History Review, The Journal of Modern History and 20th Century British History. She recently co-edited, with Philippa Levine, Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (Palgrave, 2009). Her current research focuses on the cultural meaning of aerial warfare in Europe from the Hague Conventions (1899) through the Second World War, with an emphasis on Britain and France. Gabriel Koureas is a Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes on representations of trauma, gender and national identities in relation to conflict and reconciliation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His monograph Memory, Masculinity and National identity in British

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Visual culture, 1914–1930, was published by Ashgate (2007). Other publications include ‘ “Desiring Skin”: Eugenics, Trauma and Acting Out of Masculinities in British Inter-war Visual Culture’, in F. Brauer and A. Cullen (eds.), Art Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); ‘Visualising an Open Wound: Nicosia, a Divided City in an Expanded Europe’, Peter Martin (ed.), City in Art, (Warsaw: Institute of Art, Polish Academy, 2007), 215–226 and ‘Simplicity, Uniformity, Class and Discipline in the Commemoration of the First World War’, in Szulakowska U. (ed.), Power and Persuasion, (Warsaw: Henry Moore Foundation and the Polish Institute of Art, 2004), 155–174. Jessica Meyer is a research fellow in the School of History, University of Leeds. She researches in the fields of masculinity, warfare, medical care and popular culture. She edited the volume, British Popular Culture and the First World War (Brill 2008) and co-edited Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publication 2009) with Heather Ellis. Her monograph Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. Libby Murphy is an Assistant Professor of French at Oberlin College. Her research interests centre on French literature and culture of the First World War, the history of French journalism and theories of the novel. She has published articles on print culture and the First World War, on literary representations of the French Infantryman or poilu, and on the reception in wartime and post-war France of the films of Charlie Chaplin. She is writing a book-length cultural history of the First World War that develops the literary mode of the picaresque as a conceptual framework for understanding the ways in which French novelists, journalists, graphic artists and cultural critics attempted to make sense of the Great War. Lucy Noakes is Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. She has published two monographs: War and the British: Gender and National Identity 1939–1991 (London: 1998) and Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex 1907–1948 (Oxford: 2006). Recent publications on war and gender include ‘From War Service to Domestic Service: Ex-Servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919–1922’, Twentieth Century British History (22/1, 2011), ‘The BBC’s ‘People’s War’ Website, in M. Keren and H. Herwig (eds) War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration (North Carolina: 2009) and ‘Demobilising the Military Woman: Constructions of Class and Gender in Britain after the First World War’, Gender and History, (19/1, 2007). She is currently researching a project on death, mourning and commemoration in Second World War Britain. Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University. He has published widely in the field of modern European, and especially modern German, history and has recently edited a special issue of the journal Immigrants and Minorities, with the theme Captivity, Forced Labour

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and Forced Migration During the First World War. His own monograph British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914–18, appeared with Manchester University Press in 2008. He is also co-editor, with Ingrid Sharp, of the volume Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), and is currently working on an AHRC-funded project with Ingrid Sharp on international women’s organizations during and after the First World War. Kara Dixon Vuic is Associate Professor of History at High Point University. Her research focuses on questions of gender and militarism in the twentieth century. Her book, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) examines the intersection of changing gender norms with the US military and nursing profession in the midst of a divisive era and war. She is writing a book about the use of women in recreation programmes for US soldiers in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and recent wars in the Middle East.

Introduction Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Ana Carden-Coyne

This volume arose from two questions. First, what can we learn from scholars in different disciplines similarly concerned with gender, conflict and war? Second, does time change these gendered experiences and meanings during and after conflict? We want to think further about the continuities and shifts in the gendered frameworks of militarism in societies and wartime practices. This volume argues that an interdisciplinary approach will enhance our understanding of the complex relationship between gender and conflict. It brings together social and cultural historians, sociologists, legal scholars, visual culture and art history specialists and literature scholars. Contributors have drawn on a range of different disciplines to probe questions about time and place, and to think with greater depth about the impact of gender on conflict and vice versa. Indeed, as Lisa Lattuca reminds, the disciplines – their methods, specialized language and conceptual apparatuses – are also subject to change over time, and ‘continually break their own rules of scholarship’.1 This volume argues that historical and interdisciplinary perspectives can, together, create new conversations about gender and conflict. The volume also provokes discussion about the past and the present contexts of war and conflict, and their gendered significance at the political, social, cultural and personal level. For the majority of contributors to this volume, 1914 appears as a turning point. As the first modern, global conflict, the First World War was prosecuted with new weaponry such as high-powered artillery and aircraft that inflicted mass casualties, and new fear technologies, such as gas warfare. The mass scale of the war also drew together conscripts and volunteers from across the world to fight in the name of imperial power and brotherhood. Equally as significant was the mass mobilization of whole societies, the inclusion of women in paramilitary and auxiliary organizations that supported the ‘war effort’, merging the frontline and the home front. As well, millions of wounded 1

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and disabled men returned home often to be cared for by women, inciting an extraordinary arsenal of gendered discourses, practices and beliefs in political, military and medical circles, yet also within the family and wider society, and indeed with veterans’ own identities. Since 1914, however, other significant conflicts as well as global wars have followed, which continue to affect the social construction and lived embodiment of gender. Through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this history has been marked by gendered forms of war and conflict that stimulate discussion about the past and the present, the flows and continuities between different wars, but also the radical changes that certain wars occasioned. The theme of the past and the present begins with the First World War, however, the Second World War and the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the anti-colonial independence struggles in Cyprus are treated as important conflicts with significant gendered consequences. Thinking about the past and the present has also led many of the contributors to reflect on the ‘War on Terror’, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though the volume is structured more or less chronologically, it is absolutely crucial that historical time is not seen as linear or seamless. By considering the past and the present together, the volume unsettles temporal assumptions of progress and modernity in the construction of gender roles and attributes. With the approaching centenary of the First World War, the volume notes how the trajectories of gender and war have involved ruptures, continuities and great complexities between 1914 and 2014. The chapters explore different themes across different periods, such as gender as a weapon of war, and the construction and mobilization of both male and female combatants, terrorists, civilian internees and auxiliary personnel (Godfrey; Murphy; Koureas; Stibbe; Grayzel and Noakes; Dixon Vuic). The chapters also discuss gender as a crucial mode in both supporting and resisting militarism and violence, especially in international conflicts (Bibbings; Murphy; Grayzel/Noakes; Cohen; Dixon Vuic). A further concern is the gendered meaning of bodies in war and the impact of physical and psychological disablement on gendered experiences and representations, including the powerful affect of military medicine in its gendered approach to diagnosis (Carden-Coyne; Croft; Meyer). As well as the cultural and social phenomena of war’s impact on gender, the gendered and sexualized pressures of military culture itself is seen in individual lives, especially when soldiers become civilians and undergo often difficult periods of adjustment and transformation, as suggested by Phoebe Godfrey’s discussion of an American female military intelligence officer, and Jessica Meyer’s discussion of British soldiers who suffer post-war traumatic symptoms. While Godfrey looks at the change in gendered and sexual identity in the transition from female officer to civilian, Meyer shows the complexity of gender relations and representations in traumatized veterans. Hazel Croft also reveals the extent to which war-related mental illness is underpinned by longstanding psychiatric and social ideas about gender. At the end of each chapter, we have ventured to think about the longer-term implications of gendered stories, discourses and experiences, to consider the new and old gender dynamics at play in war, and the fundamental impact of conflict on gender roles, social relations and the political and rhetorical mechanisms of

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war itself. The volume highlights how the threads of the past and present are continually renegotiated in different war zones, cultural contexts and historical periods.

Thinking about Gender This volume is written for undergraduate students, and hence there are some key ideas that should be reiterated. Thinking about gender is not the same as discussing women and girls. Gender is a concept that includes men and boys and the ideas and expectations that impact on their lives. Contributors to this volume are also interested in the interplay between how various masculinities and femininities are constructed in wartime and post-conflict societies. Scholars across many different disciplines have long argued that gender is not a biological fact located in the body that is sexed male or female, but rather a social and political construction of roles, behaviours, attributes and characteristics. As such, gender is shaped by rules, norms and expectations. Yet, gender is very often seen as something natural and innate, yet also oppositional and binary – men are regarded as instinctively aggressive, for example, and women, therefore, as naturally passive. When people do not abide by these seeming laws of nature, they have broken both natural laws and social rules, and may incur censure, ridicule and even punishment. Physicality also plays a role in framing these social perceptions; a person’s body might be shaped and dressed in particular ways in order to display gender norms. Masculinity and femininity are not singular notions, however, and manliness and womanliness are not natural facts. Moreover, as with changes in society, gender constructions are not fixed but mutate in different contexts and periods of time, and under different pressures such as wartime. Many of these gendered scripts have been projected onto ideas about heterosexuality and homosexuality, for instance, to an extent that the systems and structures of sexuality have been called heteronormative, that is based on values that privilege biological and social norms over differences.2 Historians and theorists of the way homosexuality has been gendered have shown how proscriptions about sexuality were based on gender codes – the so-called ‘mannish woman’ and the effete Dandy of the nineteenth century, for instance. In the twentieth century, too, such codes continued to be projected onto men and women who did not conform to bodily and gender expectations; the sporting female, educated woman or men in the performing and dancing arts, for instance. In times of war, such anxieties offered both new possibilities but also renewed suspicions and forms of surveillance.3 Studies into intersexuality and transgenderism have shown the complexity of how we live with gender and what we want from it. Queer theorists have critiqued the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, homosexual/heterosexual, and brought to light the broadest continuum of female masculinities and male femininities, and everything in between and beyond that refuses an easy association between social behaviour, sex organs, hormones, biology and gender.4 The volume debunks essentialized views that gender is located in the sexed body, and that women are naturally peaceful and men naturally violent or more

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interested in militarism and combat than women. In keeping with the spirit of much scholarship that has challenged gender norms and expectations, the volume invites comparison between the gendering of combatants (Godfrey; Koureas) or wounded (Carden-Coyne; Croft, Meyer) and non-combatants, both real, as in conscientious objectors and pacifists (Bibbings; Cohen), and imagined, as in the sexualized fantasy of the female combatant in French literature (Murphy). Gender norms serve to regulate, control and punish men and women whether they are militarized or not, while also placing gender in the service of the normalization of violence under the institutions of nationalism and state power. These cases offer insights into the social and political codes that underpin gender expectations, and in constructing identities such as the terrorist, the hero or the heroine, the malingerer and the coward. This volume promises greater insights into the workings of masculinities and femininities – an interlocking relationship of ideas, discourses, behaviours and identities – across different cultural and national contexts, different temporal periods, and even different life courses. As powerful and sustaining as many gender ideals and practices are, they are also seen to be changeable and shifting through different formulations and contexts in times of war and peace. War and conflict – and post-war peacetime – present important moments in which gender ideals are disrupted and tested, reinforced and bolstered, fragmented and reformed. Gender in wartime is not secure or fixed – it is often unstable, flexible, anxious and uncertain. The volume engages with the groundbreaking texts of historian Joanna Bourke, on masculine bodies at war (Dismembering the Male, 1994), the pleasure culture of militarism and combat (An Intimate History of Killing, 2005), and the gendered politics of military rape (Rape: Sex, Violence, History, 2007). It also complements a large body of historical work on gender and the First and Second Wars, and sexuality and militarism, such as that by Susan Grayzel, Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, and Sonya Rose.5 In taking an interdisciplinary approach to different historical periods, its follows on from two still important volumes: Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias’s, Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory (1990) and Billie Melman’s collection, Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (1998). Moreover, the seminal work of sociologists like Nira YuvalDavis (Gender and Nation, 2008) and scholar of feminist international relations, Cynthia Enloe has grounded much of the thinking. In Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000), Enloe argued that militaries create dominant ideologies of masculinity and femininity whilst mobilizing the labour of men and women. In Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007), Enloe revealed how feminists can challenge the global military and industrial war machine. Similarly, Gender and Conflict Since 1914 continues this challenge by moving across time and disciplines to consider further how gender operates as a dominant tool in militaries and their allied institutions (such as military prisons, internment camps, civil defence, military medicine and veteran charities). Yet, it also highlights how individuals negotiate their way through the minefield of gendered power structures. In this minefield, we will also find signs

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of personal struggle, individual agency, resistance to, and re-articulation of, the gender norms that war and conflict expose, disrupt and intensify. Masculinities in war and conflict have been seen in relation to class, race and ethnicity rather than as one monolithic category, such as in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (2004). As well, Paul R. Highgate (ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (2003) has examined the diversity of masculinities in the British army, and recently investigated how ‘enforcement masculinities’ in private security firms working in conflict zones actually strengthen gendered and racialized hierarchies in their deployment.6 Sociologist Robert Connell’s pioneering work on masculinities has shaped some of the work in this volume, alerting scholars to the role of both hegemonic and subordinate formulations. Contributors also draw on the seminal work of Judith Butler, who has explored questions relating to the subjectivity and ritualized ‘performativity’ of gender.7 The volume concentrates on particular aspects of masculinity and femininity, such as when attributed to disabled soldiers and male conscientious objectors in the First World War (Carden-Coyne; Bibbings) or female ‘Donut Dollies’ in the Vietnam War. However, a comparative gendered perspective is included when discussing the different attitudes accorded to both men and women, such as Godfrey on the gender expectations of men and women in the contemporary American military, Grayzel and Noakes on male and female civil defence workers, and Croft on the gendering of trauma in men and women. While the study of masculinity is one of the major fields of research into war, conflict and militarism, the body wounded in war has only begun to be considered in the history of disability.8 The political aspect of the gendered meaning of wounded bodies – and the gendering of medical treatments and rehabilitation – is addressed in Carden-Coyne’s chapter, linking the context of the First World War to current social attitudes to men and women disabled in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Meyer also discusses the representation of the war disabled, drawing together archival and cultural sources from the First World War to the present day to argue the case for a need to critique social and political attitudes to the disabled, but also the implications of heroic models of military masculinity on those who cannot live up to its mythologies. Hazel Croft’s chapter on trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) captures the shifts and continuities in gendered ideas about war-related mental illness over the century. While much has been written on this subject, no author has examined masculinity and femininity together as a working construct in diagnosis, or explored psychiatric attitudes to combatants, servicewomen and civilians over time. War has the capacity to break down gender rules, which can result in both opportunities for change but also in their strident defence and reinforcement. In contemporary studies, the categories of victim and perpetrator are increasingly troubled, especially as armed conflict and political violence alters relations between men and women.9 We can see aspects of this in both men and women’s experiences in civilian internment (Stibbe), but also in the way

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militaries strategically mobilize gender norms to reinforce their dominance and occupation authority (as Godfrey suggests in the case of female officers in Iraq). The breaking down or reinforcing of gender roles can also be seen on the home front, and scholars have critiqued the distinction between home fronts and frontlines, challenging assumptions about heroism and sacrifice embedded in the gender order, as Lucy Noakes has shown in her previous work on British national identity, and other scholars have shown in Eastern Europe.10 Moreover, in Susan Grayzel’s previous work, she has emphasized the role of soldiers and mothers in the gendering of national identities.11 Focusing on the upheaval of the two world wars and the ‘totalizing’ of civil society, historians have explored the way the military informed gender relations and how gendered imagery was shaped by war, but also while men and women participate in wars, their respective meanings can be distinct, as both Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum have shown in Germany, and Sonya Rose has discussed in Britain.12 In their co-authored chapter for this volume, Grayzel and Noakes explore men and women’s defence roles at home in British during the First and Second World Wars. They rethink the construction of the active and passive citizen in Britain, critiquing the way in which gender is implicated in total war in the twentieth century and comparing that to the ‘War on Terror’. Current migration studies have produced in-depth analysis of the gendered aspect of social marginalization and cultural dislocation, usefully drawing upon feminist analysis to critique the separation of the study of war from that of refugees and forced migrants.13 Historians have connected forced migration and internment, and questioned the image of female internees as passive victims.14 They have increasingly seen internment as a gendered experience, and highlighted the fluid gender boundaries operating within internment camps.15 In this volume, Stibbe explores how the impact of internment on occupied populations during the First World War blurred conventional boundaries between combatants and non-combatants, and shows how this historical example offers critical insight into current practices of persecution, detention and internment legitimized under the political armoury of the ‘War on Terror’. Scholars working on current war zones have pointed out the collapse of distinctions between battlefield and home, as state and domestic security breaks down.16 Researchers have studied female combatants, sexual violence and the gendered dimension of peace processes and reconciliation, observing the fundamental level at which gender operates in the conduct and consequence of violent conflict, but also in post-war development.17 As well, the role of women – and the political use of gender roles – has been pinpointed as a key element in nationalism and collective identities, and in the sustaining of conflicts, further complicating the way in which women are seen as victims of armed conflict and structures of violence.18 Scholars have critiqued the representation of women in conflict zones, highlighting women’s activism and resistance to political oppression.19 While some arguments suggest a historical and cross-cultural continuity of women’s exclusion from combat, universalism and biological determinism requires greater critique, as Joshua Goldstein has argued.20 Indeed, Dixon Vuic’s study of Red Cross women who provided comforts to soldiers in the Vietnam War, so-called ‘Donut Dollies’, shows how femininity could be exploited and

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mobilized through traditional gender and race roles, and offers historical lessons for understanding the production and integration of feminine roles in conflicts since then. By contrast, while assumptions about innate femininity could be used by the warring state and associated welfare agencies, Laurie R. Cohen shows women peace activists drawing on similar notions of femininity only to support anti-war organizations. Feminist literary criticism has engaged with feminist theories of conflict, critiquing gender as a structure and system of war, and examining gendered constructions in narratives and literary canons that have shaped myths and cultural memories of war, as literary scholars have consistently pointed out in their analysis of cultural sources and textual representations.21 Military violence as both performance and narrative genre – articulating and enacting militarist fantasies – has been a sustained topic of interest in historical and literature studies.22 Murphy’s examination of the masculinized figure of the female combatant in literature challenges the assumptions about women’s roles in First World War France, and reveals the fear and fantasy evoked in the image of women fighters. This is an important addition to numerous studies into gender constructions and transgressions in this period, but also serves as a way of exploring the construction of the female combatant in subsequent wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To return to the interdisciplinary framework of this volume, it should be noted that scholars rarely have the opportunity or disciplinary encouragement to probe the question of continuity and change, or to imagine the deeper and longer patterns of gender and conflict operating in a particular social, national and cultural context. Yet disciplines such as sociology and anthropology often pose questions in ways that are wholly stimulating, aiming to reveal and comprehend from within communities and mindsets, rather than from the distance of time, place and privilege. Similarly, in history and literature, groundbreaking questions have been raised about femininity, masculinity and the cultural impact of war on society, the family and cultural life.23 While acknowledging the ‘promises and pitfalls’, as sociologists and anthropologists have argued, of bringing the humanities and social sciences together, scholars have reconsidered the social and political in relation to the representational and discursive – the world of signs and communications invokes power systems, implicating class, gender and embodied experience, but is also the substance of creativity and a resource for personal identities.24 Scholars are demonstrating that cultural analysis complements these important categories for grappling with the impact of war on gender as much as the gendered meaning of war. In many ways this volume is a tribute to the scholars of gender and war across numerous disciplines who have gone before us, but especially to Cynthia Enloe, for her significant body of work on gender, conflict and militarism. As a group of scholars, we feel quite fortunate to have her comments as an Afterword.

Structure and Contents The volume begins with the period 1914–1918, and the issue of governments imprisoning civilians in camps or interning populations, often redefining citizens

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as enemies. Matthew Stibbe presents the lesser-known case of communities living on the borders of two countries at war – Habsburg Austria and Italy – during the First World War, how men and women caught up in the prosecution of that war were interned, and how those experiences were gendered. Working with historical, sociological and feminist theoretical sources, Stibbe’s historical insights have a telling resonance with the experiences of and attitudes to refugees and displaced persons, especially women, in the world today. Several critical lessons are offered in the conclusion, demonstrating why history matters to the gendered politics of waging war on people and communities. Internment is shown as a gendered institution of modern war, but also an enduring one. While the internment of civilians aimed to guard national security, civil defence was a similar instrument of modern war and nation-building that redefined citizenship. We are fortunate to have the contributions of two leading historians in the fields of gender and war, Susan Grayzel and Lucy Noakes. Making use of history, sociology and political theory they discuss civil defence, observing that the ideal of the active and passive citizen continued to frame gender roles and the relationship of the citizen to the state, a much-tested relationship in wartime. Domesticity, femininity and civil defence linked the good housewife to female citizenship. Men in the home services were sometime feminized, showing how war affirmed traditional gender constructs. Reflecting on the gendered perceptions of good citizenship, Grayzel and Noakes suggest the continuance of gendered and ethnicized concepts in the ways that Muslim men and women have been targeted during the ‘War on Terror’ in Britain and the United States. Stibbe, Grayzel and Noakes demonstrate that when nations wage war, the identification of national subjects and loyalties is important. In wartime, government anxieties about who constitutes a loyal citizen and who could be marked as resistant or collaborating with the enemy are turned into policies, strategies, surveillance and policing. Social and political persecution is easily institutionalized under the exigencies of wartime ‘emergency’ – this can be seen in the First and Second World Wars as well as the ‘War on Terror’. Ethnic minorities are often targeted, but so, too, are those deemed ‘other’ to a certain national consciousness made usable in war. Resistance to political and military authority comes in many different forms, as seen in Gabriel Koureas’ discussion of ‘terrorists’ and Lois S. Bibbings’ discussion of conscientious objectors. The volume shows how different notions of masculinity can be mobilized to turn men into either revered or reviled figures. This is particularly clear in the case of the male pacifist. Legal scholar Lois S. Bibbings explores examples of what she evocatively frames as ‘Men Refusing to be Violent’ in the period of the 1914–1918 world war. Bibbings provides a clear example of the political weight that militaries and governments can impose on men, and the willingness of the state to enforce gendered expectations of military service and penalize those who resist in the form of conscientious objection. Drawing on socio-legal studies and critical criminology, Bibbings shows the continued significance of gender not just in law, but also in the way that both detractors and supporters of ‘COs’ mobilize military masculinity in idealized concepts of heroism, courage and bravery.

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The First World War provided models of military masculinity at a time when women, too, were being mobilized in auxiliary and paramilitary services. In France, this sparked both anxiety and fantasy about the possibility of the female fighter. Libby Murphy discusses the production of a literary icon known as ‘La Poilue’, the woman warrior or fighter. Though a fictitious character, she was composed by a patriotic female journalist, who, ironically, had access to the front unlike other urban women. At a time when many French women wanted to be more fully militarized, but were denied, the creative imagining in literature of a female fighter revealed much about the social and sexual politics of wartime France. The fantasy of a female disguised as a soldier, displaying courage and hardiness, served multiple political and social purposes such as shaming men, patriotic propaganda, and articulating male soldiers’ sexual desires at the front, and propping up the patriotic spirit to continue fighting. Murphy engages with military and social history, political science, and literary and media studies to analyse representations of female combatants in the twentieth century, and to reflect on current military attitudes to, and cinematic representations of, the female soldier. She provides the insight that while the female soldier was used to reinforce traditional warrior codes, in present times this same ideal could be used to subvert gender expectations and resist the valourization of heroic masculinity. It is particularly interesting that while in 1914 France the female combatant was a figure of male fantasy, and in the Vietnam War that sexualizing kept her in strictly feminine roles of succour and entertainment, as Kara Dixon Vuic argues, in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women in the contemporary military are still expected to mobilize their sexuality, as Godfrey suggests. While the historically masculine enterprise of waging war produces and implements gender stereotypes, peace activists have also drawn on gendered frameworks to rationalize and orchestrate their own resistant practices. Feminist peace activists often essentialized femininity in order to fight for peace during the First World War. Laurie R. Cohen shows that far from class and gender expectations of conformity and civil obedience, these female activists were often courageous and yet there were significant class, ethnic and racial conflicts that existed within the factions of their global network. Emphasizing the flows and connections that feminists fostered outside of their particular nation-states (transnationalism), Cohen compares and contrasts the earlier peace movement with the contemporary feminist peace activism of Code Pink. The feminist peace movement, and its attack on the patriarchal structures of militarism, is a useful counterpoint of discussion to women’s participation in violence and the uses of masculine performativity for women in the military (Godfrey). Feminist pacifism – and its call to an essentialized female peacefulness – can be contrasted with gendered anxieties about male pacifists or conscientious objectors (Bibbings) and yet the simultaneous fantasy of the female combatant (Murphy). Whether male or female militarized identities or those who resist such categories, the gendering process is also often embodied. Men and women who encompass militarization or fail its tests and standards have their minds and bodies as the central conduit through which such judgements and assessments are made. The next three chapters of the volume address this important case of

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both men and women either physically wounded or psychologically damaged by war. In Ana Carden-Coyne’s chapter, physical wounds inflicted on soldiers in the First World War initiated a new system of categorizing body parts and making gendered assumptions accordingly, a system that continues to resonate in the contemporary context. War challenged the secure models of military masculinity, and yet there were also persistent attachment to its formulations through the process of medical rehabilitation and in the media. Charities and voluntary agencies also played a crucial role in constructing gendered ideals. Tracing this persistence in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Carden-Coyne finds both the reinforcements and undermining of military masculinity in programmes designed to reconstruct disabled soldiers identities. Carden-Coyne integrates disability studies, which usually focuses on the civilian disabled, into historical and contemporary study of disabled and wounded soldiers, locating gendered bodily constructs and how they have persistently shaped experiences, policies, representations and identities in the past and present. This discussion of the political meaning of the gendering of war wounds is followed by Jessica Meyer’s chapter on war-related psychological illnesses and their representation over time, discussing the period of 1914 and the present day. Through close study of the documentary film and play The Not Dead, by Simon Armitage and Brian Hill (2007), Meyer explores some of the main themes of the volume, such as the longstanding resonance of gendered military expectations and images of heroism. She also demonstrates the role of the First World War in establishing a set of cultural paradigms through which war and gender have been framed and continue to have meaning, such as in notions of victim and perpetrator, warriorhood and failed military masculinity, the gendered support roles of women, and the continuing significance of wounded embodiment for individuals, families, for the military and for society as a whole. While physical and psychological war wounds are highly gendered, these experiences and representations are fundamentally framed by the institution of medicine. Hazel Croft traces the history of psychological wounds – from shellshock in the First World War to war neurosis in the Second World War to the post-1980s construct of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its current formulations in military medicine. Croft explores three major periods and three major constructions whereby women were seen as emotionally weak and men were seen as frail, gendered assumptions that have underpinned military psychiatry for almost one hundred years. While much has been written about men, this chapter considers women’s psychological diagnoses in wartime. This survey offers a widescreen insight into the persistence of masculinity and femininity in militaries and in medicine, which forms a critical coalition of knowledge and power. While many of the conflicts discussed thus far have been on a global scale, resistance to imperialist nation-states and colonial power was a crucial consequence of the Second World War, when decolonization gained momentum. In the 1950s, military masculinities continued to play a vital role in the propaganda wars of deposed powers, resulting in the deployment of both heroic and abject masculinities. Gabriel Koureas discusses the construction of the hypermasculine terrorist along gendered and ethnic lines during the Cyprus war of

INTRODUCTION

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independence against the British in the 1950s. He shows how this has also played out in museum exhibitions in both Nicosia and London. Koureas makes some important connections between the 1950s and the gendered imagining of ‘the terrorist’ in the ‘War on Terror’ since 2001. Koureas critiques assumptions about the hyper-masculinity of the terrorist, and pursues deeper analysis of violence and power relations, linking the historical case to the current ‘War on Terror’. Students interested in the image of the terrorist in the past and present will find this chapter particularly useful. In contrast to the hyper-masculine terrorist, hyper-femininity appeared in the form of the ‘Donut-Dolly’ in the Vietnam War. Kara Dixon Vuic considers the exploitation of femininity in wartime auxiliary services. The traditional gendered support role of the Red Cross ‘Donut Dollies’ in this period contrasts significantly with women in the First and Second World Wars, who joined paramilitary organizations, worked in heavy industries, defended the home front, and wore quasi-militarized uniforms with parallel ranking systems. Instead of directly serving the state, the hyper-feminized ‘Donut Dollies’ were mobilized to serve the morale of soldiers and to bolster their fighting effectiveness. Their role was to entertain, distract and comfort men on recreation spells while stationed on overseas military bases. Yet, as Dixon Vuic suggests, military models of gender and sexuality infiltrated the American Red Cross agency’s humanitarian aims. In a period defined by the women’s movement and the feminist cause, the exploitation of paid ‘hostesses’ reinforced the gender order, as women served as emblems of home front domesticity. Although under the humanitarian rubric of the Red Cross, the programme’s affirmation of conventional gender roles not only opposed female militarism, but also intensified military goals of motivating men to fight. Although respectability was a concern, women were not necessarily protected from men’s assumptions about their sexual purpose. Dixon Vuic complements historical archives and oral testimony with feminist scholarship in international relations and politics to locate gender as central to the production of in war, militarism and the exportation of US culture during a war of imperial conquest. The volume concludes with the Iraq War, which for many students and scholars represents an important conflict to try to comprehend. Phoebe Godfrey’s chapter provides a close encounter with Jane Jones, a female Military Intelligence officer in the Iraq War. Sociologist Godfrey, working with clinical psychologist Stephanie Smith, reveals the complexities of women performing intelligence and interrogation roles in the military. The interdisciplinary approach allows us to question the gender constraints within which militarized women operate and, then later, must try to assimilate into their new identity as civilians. The title of Godfrey’s chapter – ‘I was one of the better interrogators’ – is a quotation from the principal informant or interviewee, Sergeant Jane Jones (a pseudonym to provide anonymity). It suggests the military identity of the female intelligence officer, but also the themes of the chapter – of internalized and externalized gender identities formulated both inside and outside of the military. Through such a personal history larger historical patterns can be considered, such as the important changes that have occurred in the gendering of

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militarism, while showing the politically-sanctioned capacity for women to perpetrate gendered violence within current military masculinist culture. By taking an interdisciplinary approach – through sociology, psychology, history and gender studies – the gendered categories of victim/perpetrator are questioned, and we gain new understanding about women’s roles in carrying out violence sanctioned by ruling states under the conditions of wartime occupation, while exploring the transformation of the female perpetrator’s gender identity in military and post-military contexts. Though women can undertake combat roles in the Canadian, New Zealand and Israeli armed forces, the US and Australian military are hotly debating this issue on gendered lines. Indeed, in a period of political willingness to reconsider the ban on women in combat, it is fitting that the volume closes with the context of the Iraq War. To conclude with the intimate voice of the contemporary militarized female provides a striking endpoint to the volume’s thinking about gender and conflict since 1914.

Notes 1. Lisa Lattuca, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2001) 245. 2. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5, (1980), 631–60; Warner, Michael, ‘Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet’, Social Text, 9, 4/29 (1990), 3–17. 3. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, (Oxford and New York: New York University Press, 1985); Ana CardenCoyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Duke University Press, 1998); In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, (New York: New York University, 2005). 5. Susan Grayzel, Women and the First World War, (Longman 2002); Penny Summerfield and C.M. Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); C.M. Bird and G.J. DeGroot (eds), A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military (Harlow, 2000); Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–45 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Gender, Citizenship, and Subjectivities, (with Kanning. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). 6. Paul Highgate, ‘Enforcement Masculinities and Men from the Global South: Complex Complicities and Contradictions in the Private Military Security Company’, Watson Institute, Brown University, unpublished paper 2010. 7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender (London: Routledge, 1993); R.W. Connell, Masculinities, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) and ‘Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities’ in M. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, (London: Sage, 2005). 8. David A. Gerber ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War, (Manchester, 2005); Deborah

INTRODUCTION

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

13

Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914– 1939, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Wendy Gagen, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the case of J.B. Middlebrook’, European Review of History, 14/4, (2007), 525–541. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona Clark, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity, 1939–91, (I.B. Taurus, 1997); Meriwether Wingfield, Nancy and Maria Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, (Indiana University Press, 2006). Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, (UNC press, 1999). Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Home/front: The Military, War, and Gender in Twentieth-century Germany, (Berg Publishers, 2002); Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939– 1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Navnita Chadha Behera, Gender, Conflict and Migration, (Sage, 2006). Margaret Brooks, ‘Passive in War? Women Internees in the Far East 1942–5’, in Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener (eds), Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross Cultural and Historical Perspectives, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 166–178. Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin and Angelo Principe, Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad, (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Wenona Mary Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, (University of California Press, 2004). Tsjeard Bouta, Georg Frerks and Bannon, Ian, Gender, Conflict, and Development, (The World Bank Press, 2005). C. Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict, (London: Zed Books, 1998). Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance, (Syracuse University Press, 1995). Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Helen Margaret Cooper, Adrienne Munich and Susan Merrill Squier, Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, (UNC Press, 1989). Aranzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam, eds, Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War, (Rodopi, 2001). Joy Damousi and Lake, Marilyn, Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Don Kalb and Tak, Herman, Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History Beyond the Cultural Turn, (Berghahn, 2005), 1–2.

1 Gendered Experiences of Civilian Internment during the First World War: A Forgotten Dimension of Wartime Violence∗ Matthew Stibbe

I am living in a cow shed. It is cold, the wind and rain come in . . . and water seeps through from under the floor . . . You can imagine what it is like for us. I have a terrible fear that if I have to stay here any longer, I won’t be bringing any of the children back home with me. They have already been through so much. But we have to bear the fate that God has chosen for us! Let’s hope that we will soon be freed and able to see each other again, at least those of us who have survived. In Landegg it was better, as I had double the amount of rations, 2 litres of milk per day as well as wood, and it was warm. But the place we have been sent to now is nothing short of hell on earth. Enrica Gobbo to Giovanni Gobbo, December 1915.1

Writing to her husband from within a refugee camp in Austria, Enrica Gobbo described the dreadful conditions, the painful separation from him, and the fear that her children would die in that ‘hell on earth’. Enrica was from an Italianspeaking family forcibly evacuated from the Austrian–Italian border after the outbreak of war in May 1915. The letter, intercepted by the Austrian military censor, was addressed to her husband, a civilian detainee in a camp for political suspects accused of supporting Italy’s war effort against Austria. Like many other documents held in the Austrian War Archive in Vienna, family correspondence offers insight into the way that the internment of enemy civilians and refugees in wartime disrupts and reconfigures traditional gender norms and male and female identities. Enrica Gobbo was rendered incapable of providing her children with a safe, nurturing environment in which they could thrive, prosper and be educated, and her husband Giovanni was denied his role 14

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as chief breadwinner and family protector. He was also unable to take up arms in support of the cause that he held most dear, namely the right of the Italianspeaking parts of the Habsburg Empire to determine their own future, whether as part of Austria or – as he hoped – as part of Italy.2 This chapter is motivated by Joan Wallach Scott’s argument that gender history challenges us to think about ‘not only . . . the relationship between male and female experience in the past’, but also the ways in which historians can uncover and confront inequalities of power in the present day.3 It also follows the point recently reiterated by Benjamin Ziemann that ‘gender . . . only makes sense as a relational category’, requiring an understanding of masculinity and femininity as clearly differentiated but inseparable entities.4 Alongside gendered approaches to history, this chapter draws on other disciplines to answer its principal concerns with civilian experiences of internment. In particular, political science and international relations theory, and especially the works of contemporary experts on war and gender, Cynthia Enloe and Joshua S. Goldstein, are used.5 The chapter is also influenced by current writers on refugee issues, for the experience of displaced persons and asylum-seekers in camps or immigration detention centres is often gendered in similar ways to the experience of civilian internees in wartime settings.6 As several contributors to this volume demonstrate, 1914–1918 was a defining period in the gendering of modern warfare, both in terms of the war’s totality and deliberate targeting of civilians, and in terms of the new forms of violence, militarization and humanitarian activism this generated. The often hidden implications of these developments for men and women, masculinities and femininities, can only fully be understood through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of war and its impact on individuals, communities and nations. The construction of sexual difference is a crucial, if often overlooked, part of the history of civilian internment since 1914, even if internment today takes place in very different political and cultural contexts than it did one hundred years ago. Interned men, in the past and the present, are often doubly emasculated, as ‘disarmed’ captives, and as fathers, brothers, husbands or active citizens exiled from their families or from political processes at home. The fact that they did not fight could lead to condemnation and a diminished identity. Women in captivity can also feel denied their roles as mothers, educators and nurturers. This reflects a widespread view that, as Goldstein writes, ‘beyond their reproductive roles, women are keepers of a group’s culture, expected to “preserve tradition in the home” ’.7 Finally, for both male and female internees, the end of hostilities opens up difficult questions about rights to national and political self-determination, about masculinity and femininity and, especially for women, about sexual violence or exploitation during captivity and fears of further violence.8 Similar to civil defence preparations in Britain, discussed by Lucy Noakes and Susan R. Grayzel in this volume, internment is an instrument of modern warfare and a supposed means of safeguarding national security. Its gendered ramifications also include the redefinition of citizenship and its obligations and entitlements. The continued relevance of these issues in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be seen in interrogation camps, internment camps, refugee camps and rape camps used in conflicts across the globe, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka.9

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International legal norms have also been violated in the American-led ‘War on Terror’, especially with the special detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, built to hold ‘enemy combatants’ outside the auspices of the Geneva convention and without access to US law courts. Up to 650 Muslim men and boys were incarcerated there in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, including some who were barely teenagers when captured.10 In Britain, too, the children of failed adult asylum-seekers have been routinely detained with their families, even though the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, elected in May 2010, has committed to ending the practice. Among those held at the privately-run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre pending deportation are also ‘many extremely vulnerable women, [including] victims of torture[,] rape [and] domestic violence’, according to one investigative journalist.11 Detainees past and present live beyond what Helen Fein calls the ‘sanctified universe of obligation’ and are often less protected than military prisoners of war.12 Exploring the history of gendered experiences of internment – in relation to war and state power – offers insights into the contemporary scene. This chapter first provides a historical overview of civilian internment, highlighting its gender-specific aspects. Second, it examines the role of governments, national movements and international bodies in framing internment with gendered outcomes, particularly with regard to the complex relationship between individual rights, social exclusion and state sovereignty.

Civilian Internment Although internment camps were used in previous wars, 1914 was a turning point in their global development, with several hundred thousand civilians interned in Europe alone, and 50,000 to 100,000 elsewhere.13 Some of the victims were enemy aliens caught within the jurisdiction of the opposing state at the outbreak of the war; a larger proportion were civilians deported from occupied territories as hostages, forced labourers and alleged resisters. Others were refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) or members of ‘suspect’ nationalities forcibly evacuated from war zones by their own governments on grounds of ‘military security’. Civilians from all the warring states were affected, including men, women and children. In some cases internment led to the wholesale destruction of particular communities, such as the German immigrants who had played a key role in the cultural and economic life of many British industrial and port cities.14 After 1914 internment also lost its previous status as a focal point for transnational feminist, anti-imperialist and humanitarian concerns, such as with Emily Hobhouse’s 1901/2 report on conditions in the South African camps. Instead, it became part of the masculine sphere of wartime propaganda and diplomacy, despite the fact that women continued to play the dominant role in organizing and implementing relief efforts for interned civilians and refugees.15 Warring countries, led exclusively by men, were keen to uphold their perceived right to protect their own state borders and military personnel, particularly from ‘illegal’ combatants, spies and saboteurs. Crucially, each time the opposing side interned or deported enemy civilians this was presented as an affront to international law and ‘civilized’ values, whereas similar action by friendly states was interpreted as

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a legitimate act of self-defence or retaliation. On the other hand, pressure from domestic public opinion, and questions of national prestige, sometimes forced governments to do more for their own citizens in enemy hands, either in terms of material support or diplomatic efforts to secure their early release, such as the two Anglo–German exchange agreements reached at The Hague in 1917 and 1918.16

Gendered Camp Experiences None of this means that civilian internment ceased to be a humanitarian issue, or indeed a gendered one, particularly given the difficult questions it raised about the preservation or reconstruction of male and female identities in wartime. While propaganda distorted reality, letters from internees are a crucial source for hearing the voices of internees and explaining how men and women experienced the camps. Significantly, the depth of their misery was conditioned by gendered humiliations. One Croatian woman, forcibly deported from the war zone to a barrack camp at Gmünd in Lower Austria, wrote to the Austrian Red Cross on 24 November 1915: I am a poor creature, as are my children, a girl of seven and a boy of ten. We go around bare-footed, as nobody will provide us with shoes. So please send us something to put on our feet, as the winter weather has already turned very harsh here.17

Private charities in Germany, such as the Berlin-based Auskunfts-und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland (Information and Assistance Bureau for Germans Abroad and Foreigners in Germany), also regularly received pleas for assistance, such as a postcard from a Russian woman evacuated from the eastern front and interned at the Havelberg camp in Brandenburg province: I humbly beg permission to ask you to send me some clothes. I have been in captivity since August 1914 and have a son aged 2½. I would like to have a dress or a skirt and a blouse, and for my son shoes and a two-piece tunic.18

The deprivation of basic needs such as shoes and clothing resonated with women, not just because it exposed them to the harsh conditions from which they often perished, but because it struck at the heart of gender roles and their fragmentation in the camps. Indeed, some women dealt with the personal and political disruptions caused by internment by adopting a concern for ‘feminine’ clothing and the welfare of children, while leaving other tasks to men. In some cases, such gendered practices allowed charities to position female internees as ‘victims’ without any political or national agency of their own, and therefore without much claim on what were increasingly nationalized humanitarian relief efforts.19 Significantly, British male civilians of military age held in Germany or Austria at the outbreak of the war were treated much better than French, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Serbian or Russian women, having, from March 1915, regular access to food and clothes parcels from home. Their access to political influence

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was also demonstrated by the regular questions raised about their plight in both houses of parliament in Westminster. However, their increased dependence on the charity of the state, combined with their lack of combatant status, made them fear for their masculinity and their image at home. While scholars have understood gender as a social construct and a performance, internees made complex observations about the gendered role play in the camps. Men often felt feminized and diminished, while women at home took up masculine roles in the war effort. One British internee held at the Ruhleben camp near Berlin wrote shortly after his return home in January 1918: It is a feminine part that we have been called on to play – more conventionally feminine than that of our mothers and sisters in England. They see their dear ones march away to war, and they are left to wait and watch at home; but their waiting and watching is not a dumb, inexpressive thing – there is work into which they can throw themselves, work as necessary as that of the fighting men, and which can still their yearnings in the consciousness that they are giving their energies truly and directly to their country. We watch from afar the danger of our brothers but we may not share it, we watch the toil of our sisters and the shame of inactivity falls upon us.20

The inversion of gender roles at home and in the camps often ‘shamed’ men, disturbing their perceptions of masculine selfhood and self-worth. It also fed into male anxieties regarding women’s behaviour during wartime separation, something felt even more strongly in countries subjected to foreign occupation or regular contact with allied or enemy soldiers.21 To an extent, captive men performed this perceived ‘feminization’ in female role-playing and crossdressing in camp theatre productions, a phenomenon observed among civilian internees and military POWs of all nationalities. As Alon Rachamimov has shown, the ‘cult of the female impersonator’ was both normative and disruptive of heterosexual masculinity; it reinforced male–female difference while ‘simultaneously creat[ing] powerful contrary undercurrents that sanctioned forms of homoerotic relations and transgender identifications’.22 In other contexts, men recuperated the gendered meaning of internment by equating it with military service and manly endurance. Giovanni Gobbo achieved his demand for national self-determination when the Italian-speaking parts of Austria were awarded to Italy under the Paris Peace settlement, making his wartime experiences worthwhile. His wife Enrica, however, was unable to claim her gendered self-determination, since the post-war Italian state refused to enfranchize women. Ironically, had her home region remained part of Austria, she would have gained the vote as a result of the revolution of 1918 and the establishment of a new republican constitution which granted citizenship and equal political rights to men and women.

Sexual Violence and Humiliation in War Internment was a ‘deliberate state policy’ during the First World War.23 In occupied territories in particular, violence, including sexual assault, could be used

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against civilian internees to deliberately ‘feminize’ the enemy, symbolizing ‘territorial control and domination’ over a defeated population.24 In the case of French civilians deported from the cities of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing during Easter 1916 and sent to work for the German occupation forces in other French départements (regional divisions), the wider population was humiliated and terrorized, violating traditional class and gender norms. The seizure of women and young girls ‘provoked the greatest fear and resentment’, as rumours of both rape and promiscuity spread to the families left behind. Moreover, as Annette Becker argues, forced gynaecological examinations likened the victims to prostitutes, which made the experience of capture ‘all the more traumatic’.25 Similarly, middle-class women were singled out among the Ruthenian (Austrian–Ukrainian) political suspects from eastern Galicia and Bukovina, deported by the Habsburg military authorities to a camp at Thalerhof near Graz in the autumn and winter of 1914. Two prisoners, later captured by the British, testified: There were no separate latrines for the [women] and they had to use the same as the men. Sometimes the NCOs amused themselves by pushing them into the latrines . . . But the worst torture for them was the bath, because they had to expose themselves before the whole camp, and because . . . there were officers who came especially from Graz to see this and made the unfortunate women pose before their cameras.26

Degrading prisoners involved class and gender humiliation, but the spectacle of being photographed naked in front of male guards and prisoners was a form of sexualized violence that these two witnesses regarded as ‘torture’. In a striking parallel, American military personnel inflicted similar kinds of torture on male Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad (2004). However, in this case, as Pheobe Godfrey suggests in her chapter, the violation of gender norms caused a greater scandal and ended in a number of convictions in US courts-martial, partly because the abuse of prisoners was even more sexualized in content (and deliberately defiled the religious and cultural identities of the Muslim victims) and partly because it involved the ‘hyper-feminization’ of men by humiliating them in front of female guards. In the First World War, the deliberate degradation of women was also a means of shaming and de-masculinizing men, and showing the triumph of more powerful, ‘virile’ forces over a society unable to protect its women. Female internment was thus a powerful tool of war, demonstrating the failure of masculinity. Even so, extreme sexual violence, while clearly evident, was not a universal feature of First World War internment. A competing trend was what Uta Hinz defines as the ‘economic totalisation of war’, driven above all by a rational drive to integrate military and civilian prisoners and evacuees (including women) into national or imperial war economies.27 In this sense it is important not to confuse First World War internment with the terror and extermination camps and the mass starvation of European civilians and POWs in the 1930s and 1940s. What the First World War and its aftermath did do, however, was to link new forms of ‘participatory citizenship’ with gendered notions of national

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self-determination and statehood rather than with values based on the dignity of all human beings. This had important implications for the remainder of the century and beyond.28

State Power, the International Sphere and the Gendering of Rights During the war the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Vatican and various belligerent governments (via their respective ‘protecting powers’) showed some concern for the physical and mental health of internees, and in particular for their daily diet and ability to take physical exercise.29 However, while efforts were made, not always successfully, to ensure that military POWs were fed according to the requirements of international law, there was a tacit agreement that internees could not expect a superior diet to ordinary civilians – especially those in Central Europe suffering the effects of the Allied economic blockade.30 In the case of French women and girls deported from Lille in 1916, German propaganda presented their compulsory labour as a way of ‘making them pay with their own persons’ for the sacrifices demanded of German housewives and mothers.31 This message was intended to boost morale and confidence in victory at home, but it also ensured that nationality and gender remained key determinants of the treatment of both military and civilian prisoners. Internment of enemy men of military age was also a powerful symbol of injury to the fighting capacity of the opposing state. It was best dealt with by diplomacy or retaliation, or, better still, by victory in war. It was also presented in public discourse as an affront to masculine notions of ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’. The patriotic German newspaper the Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne Gazette), for instance, framed the national response to mass internment of Germans in Britain as a masculine duel: Today . . . when England and the English seek to slander the good name of Germany throughout the world, when they trample Germany’s rights under foot, rob German firms and employees in the most perfidious manner, in short when they stoop to the lowest means in order to mistreat and do harm to Germans, then we must finally stop treating the ‘gentlemen’ with kid gloves and instead be resolved to protect ourselves . . . This is all the more important when we consider that the continuance of uncontrolled networks of communication [between England] and the Englishmen living in our midst represents a danger to our national defence.32

Internment threatened masculinity and required masculine responses, such as centralized state-run relief efforts instigated under male leadership. Only a few radical pressure groups were able to challenge the inherent gender bias implicit in this notion of what internment signified at the national and international levels. One example would be the above-mentioned Auskunfts-und Hilfsstelle für Ausländer in Deutschland und Deutsche im Ausland, a charity established in Berlin in October 1914 by the Swiss peace activist and feminist Elisabeth Rotten

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in order to aid men, women and children interned in Germany or abroad. Many of the women affected by German internment measures were German-born, but had lost their nationality upon marriage to a foreigner, becoming enemy aliens in their own country without entitlement to state support or aid from ‘patriotic’ wartime charities. Nevertheless, they chose to remain in Germany, their homeland. Rotten’s cause was therefore not just concerned with the provision of material aid for those affected by internment, but also the female right to national self-determination.33 Similar issues existed for women born in the Habsburg Empire but displaced by war and denied Austrian citizenship after 1918 either because of their own or their husbands’ nationality or ethnic background. Many were cut off from refugee welfare payments or simply expelled from post-war Austria on the grounds that they were now ‘aliens’ and therefore no longer entitled to residency.34 Elsewhere in Central Europe – and significantly for a gendered understanding of the post-war peace settlement – while the great powers were willing to place limits on the sovereignty of the new states in regard to their treatment of minority nationalities, no restrictions were placed on their treatment of women. Instead, as Glenda Sluga argues, women’s rights were defined as a ‘ “domestic” or national concern rather than a universal principle’.35 Citizenship, too, was structured in gendered terms. A woman who married an alien could not retain her nationality, as this might threaten national or communal unity, or (to paraphrase the political scientist Hannah Arendt) challenge the gendered ‘laws by which nation-states exist’.36 Yet, without equal rights in the domestic and national arenas, how could women challenge the ‘implicit masculinity’ of international politics? How could they feel that they had any stake in an international system which denied their self-determination, while holding up a masculinized form of state sovereignty in a supposedly new world order? How could they question the view that imperial expansion and/or the oppression of minority nationalities by their own inwardlooking, male-dominated, militarized governments guaranteed women’s rights? Indeed, who or what else would protect them from the threat of invasion, rape, forced migration, sexual humiliation and mass internment at the hands of hostile neighbouring states determined to dispossess them and destroy their homes, families and livelihoods?37 These questions suggest the complexity of gender constructs and power relations framing internment. For the First World War and the post-war settlement, while ignoring women’s demands for national and personal self-determination, nonetheless made what Sluga calls the ‘privilege of nationality’ as the key to accessing welfare rights, political influence and legal protection for those living or working abroad, or finding themselves in wartime captivity. The Paris peace treaties of 1919–20, which redrew Central Europe’s boundaries on predominantly national lines, also ensured that the idea of nationhood and state sovereignty remained heavily masculinized even as it became more democratized.38 In some countries women were granted the vote as a ‘reward’ for their wartime sacrifices and services to the nation. Elsewhere, women themselves revived memories of their heroic resistance to defeat, foreign occupation, and ‘Bolshevism’, shaming men into granting political concessions, especially in

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populist or right-wing movements for national renewal and rebirth.39 With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, however, refugees and stateless persons became ever more vulnerable to expulsion and internment, and were increasingly feminized and denationalized. Denied autonomy and citizenship, they became ‘natural objects’ for hatred and resentment, as well as philanthropic charity.40

Conclusions and Implications Understanding the gendered meaning of civilian captivity in the First World War provides insight into contemporary forms of internment, such as the extraterritorial facility in Guantánamo Bay used by the US to detain terrorist suspects. Feminist scholars of international politics have recently argued that the ‘political legitimacy of a Western-inspired agenda of liberal rights’ has been damaged by the US-led War on Terror, and not least by Guantánamo Bay.41 Similar points have been made about the West’s inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers, especially the incarceration of women and children in immigration detention centres, pending deportation. But this ignores the fact that most women refugees in the world today are hidden from view in remote camps, often on the borders of conflict zones. Such camps resemble sprawling prison villages with highly marked gendered social spaces and rituals. By contrast, the typical asylum-seeker is a young single man looking for a better life, even if some women are also prepared to make perilous journeys across state borders and international waters in search of freedom and security.42 War, or rather the absence of real peace despite the end to armed hostilities, is often the immediate reason why women end up trapped for years in refugee camps. Male relatives might control their movements as well and restrict their access to education, concerned about female sexual impropriety in times of community upheaval.43 However, masculinized definitions of state sovereignty in international politics also inhibit concerted efforts to highlight women’s suffering in refugee camps or the gender-specific violence and humiliations to which they are subjected. As a result, how women are affected by life in internment or refugee camps, or the relevance of their experiences – as well as the experiences of female relief workers – to contemporary conflict resolution, are subjects rarely raised within international diplomacy. Instead, the chief emphasis is on the potential harm done to ‘masculinist pride’ when one state violates another state’s borders (and its women), or when one particular ethnic, religious or national minority group is singled out for discrimination and deprivation of rights.44 In addition, while Western interpretations of women’s oppression can sometimes be used to legitimize military and political interventions, such as in Afghanistan, peace settlements often ignore women’s rights and instead prioritize masculinist assumptions about the need to uphold existing gender orders at the personal, social, national and international level or face on-going violence and instability. A similar set of gendered beliefs, I would argue, also slowed down progress towards the realization of women’s national and political self-determination in the aftermath of the First World War. In the 1920s, rights campaigners sought to protect first and foremost the special status of male combatants in war through

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the third Geneva Convention, and to a lesser extent, the rights of (male) members of minority nationalities threatened with persecution or internment by their own governments, especially at times of war.45 As with other political utopias, as Chinkin and Charlesworth suggest, national self-determination turned out to be a ‘one-sided vision of the good life that assumes a male subject and excludes women from its ambit’.46 The victor powers were willing to impose (though haphazardly to enforce) Minority Treaties on the newly-created states wishing to join the League of Nations. But they were extremely reluctant to question the sovereignty of the nation-state, and its right to resolve ‘domestic questions’ – including women’s rights and refugee rights – since this threatened the gendered order of the international system itself, including the subordinate work done by official and voluntary humanitarian aid agencies. This supports the observations made by the Norwegian historian Ida Blom about the ‘international character of nationalism’ since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the central role of masculinity in defining ‘public rights and obligations in the nation’, including the duty to perform military service.47

Epilogue: Four Lessons to Consider The interdisciplinary approach adopted in this chapter has shown that a historically-grounded understanding of the gender dynamics inherent in the policy of civilian internment can also help us to understand and challenge injustices in the present, thereby creating a moral and intellectual framework for promoting human rights and gender equality in the future. In particular, four lessons can be considered: 1. Scholars of history, anthropology and international relations need to pay closer attention to the gendered construction and experience of wartime captivity. Indeed, a number of recent studies have broadened our understanding by incorporating families’ experiences of separation and displacement.48 Yet too often the analysis stops at ‘those areas – both structural and ideological – involving relations between the sexes’, such as kinship, sexuality, homecoming and marital breakdown. In this regard, existing paradigms often overlook Joan Wallach Scott’s point that ‘political history [too] . . . has been enacted on the field of gender’. In other words, the arenas of war, nationalism, statebuilding and peacemaking also need to be deconstructed to uncover the ‘implicit understandings of gender [which] are being [repeatedly] invoked and reinscribed’ through such phenomena as wartime internment and opposition to it.49 2. Relief systems and international conventions need to be judged less in terms of the dichotomy between political and humanitarian concerns (or state interest versus universal principle) and more in terms of how far they are willing to challenge the gendered assumptions which legitimize violence against captive women, whether under cover of war and state sovereignty, or communal unity. Use of rape as a tool of warfare has been an indictable offence under international law since the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have both

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specifically included rape as part of the war crimes charges brought against particular individuals, although many women have yet to receive justice in what is regarded as a grave and continuing issue of political and ethnic sensitivity.50 More worrying still, the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), ongoing since 1996, has seen increases in sexual assaults in refugee camps and near UN peacekeeping bases.51 The recent report that a Congolese colonel has been sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for ‘crimes against humanity’ in relation to mass rapes carried out under his command in eastern Congo is a small sign of progress.52 However, as Joanna Bourke shows, under current international statutes, in order for rape to count as a ‘crime against humanity’ it has to ‘take . . . place on a mass scale or [as] part of an orchestrated policy’, so that most men who commit acts of sexual violence in wartime can still expect to get away with it.53 This may also explain why, to date, there has been little progress towards the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, adopted on 31 October 2000, which calls, among other things, for ‘all parties to armed conflict to respect fully international law applicable to the rights and protection of women and girls’; ‘to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence’; and ‘to respect the civilian and humanitarian character of refugee camps . . . [including] the particular needs of women and girls’.54 3. Ultimately protection of internees’ and refugees’ rights, and the upholding of international law, is more easily achieved with the cooperation of states, and humanitarian organizations like the ICRC therefore need to enter into dialogue with state and military representatives if they want to make improvements to women’s lives.55 But history also demonstrates the importance of dissenters within states in challenging internment policies alongside advancing a broader agenda of social and gender equality. Today that broader agenda might include – but by no means be restricted to – making political links between the confinement of women in refugee and internment camps and the confinement of women in terms of domestic and marital roles in the home. It should also involve using international law as a means of imagining a ‘world without moral borders’, and being willing to ‘name and shame’ states and organizations that breach human rights and dignity, including the right of women to live without fear of violence and sexual assault.56 4. Refugees and women and men in captivity do not just need protection of their rights. They need to be empowered to create their own stake in humanitarian organizations by developing their own strategies of self-representation. They also need the opportunity to speak for themselves, rather than being forced to rely on men or on women from different class and cultural backgrounds to do this for them. Thus when former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright informed Afghan refugee girls that women all over the world ‘are all the same, and we have the same feelings’, she was using the language of universal and essential womanhood long familiar to Western feminist and peace movements, as Laurie Cohen identifies in this volume. Yet while this language sits well with the politics of ‘liberal interventionism’, it also contains a view of the world which is arguably less well informed

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about, and also less familiar to, Afghan girls and women displaced and disenfranchised by over thirty years of war, foreign invasion, militarization and tribal conflict in their home country.57

Notes ∗ I would like to thank the British Academy for providing me with a Small Research Grant which enabled me to examine various files in the Austrian War Archive in Vienna. I am also very grateful to Ingrid Sharp for her critical comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.

1. Report of the Italienische Zensurgruppe C, 15 December 1915, in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Armeeoberkommando 1914–1918/Gemeinsames Zentralnachweisebureau des Roten Kreuzes-Auskunftstelle für Kriegsgefangene (ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB), Karton 3737, Zl. 2974. 2. On the experience of Italian-speaking refugees and internees in First World War Austria see D. Leoni and C. Zadra, La Citta’ di Legno: Profughi trentini in Austria, 1915–1918 (Trento: Temi 1995); and F. Cecotti (ed.), ‘Un esilio che non ha pari’. 1914–1918: Profughi, internati ed emigranti di Trieste, dell’Isontino e dell’Istria (Gorizia: LEG, 2001). 3. J.W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, in Scott (ed.), Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 152–80 (here 155). 4. B. Ziemann, ‘Weimar was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic’, German History, 28/4 (2010), 542–71 (here 549). 5. C. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, updated edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); J.S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. C. Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005). See also Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 57. 7. Goldstein, War and Gender, 371. 8. C. Chinkin and H. Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace: The International Legal Framework’, Third World Quarterly, 27/5 (2006), 937–57 (here esp. 941–2). 9. W.J. Gertjejanssen, ‘Sexual Violence’, in J.F. Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, 2nd edition (New York: Grey House Publishing, 2006), 358–64. On war and sexual violence see also N. M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 195–8; T. Iacobelli, ‘The “Sum of Such Actions”: Investigating Mass Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina through a Case Study of Foca’, in D. Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 261–83; and Goldstein, War and Gender, 356–80. 10. Moorehead, Human Cargo, 84. See also V. Dodd, ‘Under-18s held at Guantánamo, says UK lawyer’, The Guardian, 14 June 2005. In total 779 detainees from more than 40 countries are now known to have spent some time at Guantánamo since the first inmates arrived on 11 January 2002, with a mere six being successfully tried and convicted of actual offences. Ten years later, on 11 January 2012, 171 prisoners were still being held there, from 23 countries. Figures taken from E. Pilkington, ‘Guantánamo: Still on America’s Conscience a Decade after the World Woke up to this Photo’, The Guardian, 11 January 2012; and C. Emcke, ‘Obamas Schande’, Die Zeit, 12 January 2012, 11–13.

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11. K. McVeigh, ‘Hunger strike fuels yearning for justice among the women of Yarl’s Wood’, The Guardian, 3 August 2010, 11. See also N. Walter, ‘No refuge for refugees’, The Guardian, 28 July 2011, 30. 12. H. Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979), 4. 13. M. Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–1920’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28/1–2 (2008), 49–81 (here 49). 14. P. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain During the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1991). 15. K. Storr, Excluded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914–1929 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). 16. M. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 137. 17. Report of the Kroatische Zensurgruppe, 22 December 1915, in ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB, Karton 3737, Zl. 3075. 18. A. Bytschko to E. Rotten, 8 May 1916, in Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin, Bestand 51 C III g 1. 19. H. Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action During the First World War’, European Review of History – Revue européene d’histoire, 16/5 (2009), 697–713 (here esp. 708–9). 20. Cited in Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, 176. 21. For two useful case studies in the context of the Boer War and World War II respectively see H. Bradford, ‘Regendering Afrikanerdom: The 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War’, in I. Blom, K. Hagemann and C. Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 207–25 (esp. 217); and C. Twomey, ‘Double Displacement: Western Women’s Return Home from Japanese Internment in the Second World War’, Gender and History, 21/3 (2009), 670–84 (esp. 673–4). For the First World War see also Jones, ‘International or Transnational?’, 704. 22. A. Rachamimov, ‘The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: Trans(Gender) Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920’, American Historical Review, 11/2 (2006), 362–82 (here 364). See also Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, 100–1. 23. T. M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), 204. 24. Goldstein, War and Gender, 363. 25. A. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre: populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1998), 69–70. 26. British intelligence report, 23 June 1916, in The National Archives, Kew, London, FO 383/123. 27. U. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg: Kriegsgefangenschaft in Deutschland 1914– 1921 (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 359. For the Austrian case, see also H. J. W. Kuprian ‘ “Frontdienst redivivus im XX. Jahrhundert!” Arbeitszwang am Beispiel von Flucht, Vertreibung und Internierung in Österreich während des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Geschichte und Region / storia e regione, 12/1 (2003), 15–38. 28. On the notion of ‘participatory citizenship’ see Ziemann, ‘Weimar was Weimar’, 551–2; and on the absence of human rights’ discourses in the post-1918 (and post-1945) world orders see S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). Moyn’s argument that the human rights agenda as we understand it today appeared ‘seemingly from nowhere’ in the 1970s as a ‘moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias’ (3–5),

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

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might nonetheless be challenged by the work of feminist historians like Storr (see note 15 above), who demonstrates that women’s international relief efforts during and after World War I often ‘arose from the belief in the equal worth of all human beings’ (6). M. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States During the First World War and the Response of the International Committee of the Red Cross’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41/1 (2006), 5–22. See also Jones, ‘International or Transnational?’, esp. 708. S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14–18, retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 78. Kölnische Zeitung, 23 October 1914; cited in Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, 38. On Rotten see M. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten and the “Auskunfts-und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland”, 1914–1919’, in A. S. Fell and I. Sharp (eds.), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 194–210. See e.g. B. Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914 bis 1923 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995). G. Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gendered Re-Reading of the “Apogee of Nationalism” ’, Nations and Nationalism, 6/4 (2000), 495–521 (here 511). H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 272–3. These are the questions raised more broadly by Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, esp. 42–64. See Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, pp. 551 and passim; and J. Horne, ‘Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann and J. Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 22–40 (here esp. 31–4). For a more detailed discussion see the introduction and individual contributions to I. Sharp and M. Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 267–90. For some very fine essays on this subject see also F. Caestecker and B. Moore (eds), Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). A. Cornwall and M. Molyneux, ‘The Politics of Rights: Dilemmas for Feminist Praxis: An Introduction’, Third World Quarterly, 27/7 (2006), 1175–91 (here 1176). Moorehead, Human Cargo, 138. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 57. For the same phenomenon during the First World War see P. Gatrell, ‘The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914–1917’, in G. Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 198–215 (here esp. 210). Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 64; Chinkin and Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace’, 953. On the revised, or third, Geneva Convention of 1929, which was ‘dedicated totally to prisoner of war treatment’, see H. Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 336–7. Chinkin and Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace’, 943.

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47. I. Blom, ‘Gender and Nation in International Comparison’, in Blom at al. (eds), Gendered Nations, 3–26 (here 14 and 10). 48. See e.g. Twomey, ‘Double Displacement’; B. Hately-Broad, War and Welfare: British POW Families, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); and H. Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in Germany, 1939–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 49. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, 156 and 174. 50. Goldstein, War and Gender, 368; Chinkin and Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace’, 948; Iacobelli, ‘The “Sum of Such Actions” ’, 266. 51. D. Smith, ‘Congo Rebels in Mass Rape near UN Base’, The Guardian, 25 August 2010, 22. See also ‘Congo’s Rape Gangs . . . Are the Worst Form of Terrorism’, The Observer, 14 November 2010, 18. 52. ‘Congolese Colonel Jailed for Mass Rape’, The Guardian, 22 February 2011, 19. 53. J. Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 2007), 385. 54. Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), available at http://www.un.org/events/ res_1325e.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]. On Resolution 1325 see also Chinkin and Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace’, passim. 55. Cornwall and Molyneux, ‘The Politics of Rights’, 1180. 56. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 1 and 14. 57. Goldstein, War and Gender, 42; Blom, ‘Gender and Nation’, 10–11. On Afghan women specifically see also Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 56–7; and Chinkin and Charlesworth, ‘Building Women into Peace’, 939–44.

2 Defending the Home(land): Gendering Civil Defence from the First World War to the ‘War on Terror’ Lucy Noakes and Susan R. Grayzel

In 1939, the Handy War-Time Guide for the Woman at Home and the Man in the Street offered the following bit of wisdom to its British audience: A nation’s safety and success in war now depend very much on the safety of the home and on the courage and co-operation of those who have to carry on with their daily round of common tasks. When enemy attacks can reach our very homes, ultimate victory is no longer only a matter of arms and of men. It is also a matter of women and even of children. Victory or defeat may depend ultimately on the steps we have taken to protect our homes and our families, on the way in which we tackle our domestic problems and discipline ourselves to face the perils that may beset us.1

The development of new weaponry and techniques with which to wage war in the twentieth century brought about a new type of conflict. From the First World War onwards, the defence of the home in Britain became central, not only to the safety of those within that home, but also to national morale and ultimately, to victory. Civil defence became a central aspect of both preparations for warfare and of warfare itself. As the above quotation suggests, how a society ‘disciplined itself’ to face external threats that hit home would shape the outcome of wars. Civil defence became – and remains – a central means by which the citizen is addressed by the state. It restages the relationship between the individual, who undertakes to participate in civil defence, and the state, which undertakes to protect those living within its borders. As such, this chapter argues that civil defence implicitly entails a renegotiation of citizenship, a renegotiation that must be understood as gendered. The new weaponry that threatened the civilian in wartime extended the war front to the home. For the first time in hundreds of years, British women and 29

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children found themselves the targets of warfare alongside male combatants, dying for their country in the homes and streets of Britain, not on the traditional battlefield. This extension of warfare was accompanied by the development of civil defence, a set of ideas, activities and organizations intended to prepare civilians to face annihilation, to give some protection to civilians in wartime, and to reassure both civilians and members of the military that the home was not being left undefended. As such, it can be understood as part of what Cynthia Enloe has termed the ‘militarization’ of society. Enloe points towards the wideranging and insidious means by which societies become militarized, a process that both shapes and strengthens patriarchy.2 Drawing on Enloe’s work, this chapter begins to trace the complex relationship between discourses of civil defence and gender in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain, arguing that, throughout very different types of war and conflict, and very different conceptions of civil defence, the state has effectively militarized everyday life. Despite utilizing women’s labour for civil defence, the state has maintained, and at times strengthened, existing understandings of masculinity, femininity and citizenship. Civil defence can be understood as the gendered militarization of citizenship; a process extending to women some of the duties of citizenship previously only associated with men – duties such as defending and perhaps dying for one’s country. However, civil defence altered such duties by placing them within the sphere of the home and the domestic. The need to organize noncombatants to defend the home(land) against attack necessitated an articulation of citizenship and its repositioning, as Sonya O. Rose has argued, as ‘active citizenship . . . linked to social responsibility and participation in civil society or in public affairs’.3 The good wartime citizen would have to be willing to not only put the needs of the collective before those of the individual, but must also be willing to risk their life in defence of their family, their community and their nation. Within the planning and organization of civil defence in the 1930s and 1940s for example, civilians were now addressed through policy and via the media as democratic citizens who had a duty to participate in ‘the ordinary duties of citizenship’, such as civil defence. As the Daily Telegraph wondered: ‘what could be more democratic than making national defence the concern of every man and woman in a democratic state?’4 Sociologists and political philosophers have long debated the meanings of citizenship, and there is not one, agreed, understanding of the concept.5 Citizenship can encompass a set of political values, usually associated with membership of a nation state, confer rights upon these citizens, and demand duties from them in return. This chapter, whilst grounded in the discipline of history, engages with recent work on citizenship in political science and sociology, most significantly the concept of ‘citizenship regimes’.6 In particular, it finds the concept of ‘citizenship regimes’ especially useful, because the term recognizes the complex and multifarious nature of citizenship in the modern world, revealing how discourses of citizenship ‘constitute and govern individuals, societies and institutions’.7 Wartime citizenship provides a compelling example of this model of citizenship in action. Such a version of the citizen emphasizes duties over rights, as individual citizens are asked to participate in a collective war effort, putting the needs of the collective above those of the individual, and perhaps giving their

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lives in defence of this collective. However, citizens do not experience the state in a unitary manner. Despite being an ‘equalizing word’, evocative of common privileges, rights and duties, citizenship is both felt and enacted in profoundly different ways by different members of the nation. While British women had been enfranchised first in a limited way in 1918 and on equal terms in 1928, they continued to experience many of the demands and duties of citizenship in a gendered manner. The 1918 legislation both directly and indirectly emphasized women’s roles as wives and mothers alongside their new role as voters. While debate about the franchise, together with legislation like the conscription of men in 1916 and 1939, and of women in 1941, make the gendered nature of wartime citizenship clearly visible, gendered discourses of citizenship also operate in more hidden ways in wartime. This emerged, for example, in the expectation during the First World War that women would undertake a ‘duty’ to the state as wives and mothers; those who appeared to fail that duty might be denounced. Similarly, during the current ‘War on Terror’, women who wore the Hijab were accused of prioritizing a ‘divisive’ cultural identity over a ‘truer’ version of unified Britishness.8 This analysis of civil defence as one of the duties of citizenship explores the ways in which it addressed male and female citizens in a gender-specific manner. Moreover, despite the ways in which new weaponry extended the dangers and duties of warfare from the military man to the civilian woman, the enactment of civil defence helped to reinforce normative gendered identities, with women and children largely imagined as victims and men as defenders of the home. As Matthew Stibbe and Ana Carden-Coyne demonstrate in this volume, underresearched aspects of war and conflict, such as internment, wounding and the targeting of civilians, illustrate the multiple ways in which war shapes gender, and gender shapes war. This chapter provides a brief chronological narrative that traces the development of civil defence in twentieth-century Britain and draws on archival sources, both government and civil service papers, personal accounts, and representations in public media in order to examine the historically situated nature of gendered citizenship regimes in wartime. It makes use of feminist scholarship on gendered citizenship in order to analyse the gendered nature of civil defence, arguing that while civil defence emerged in the twentieth century as a dual social and state institution, it must be understood as gendered. The chapter first explores how the transformation of citizenship via civil defence began when air power made the home a military battleground. Second, it examines how civil defence became gendered in the interwar period and throughout the Second World War. Third, it discusses the relationship between gender and changing practices of civil defence in the Cold War period and finally, the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the legacies of gendered citizenship and the gendered politics of twenty-first century global security.

The Invention of Civil Defence During the First World War, the first news of Britain’s vulnerability to air attack came in a report in The Times detailing an aerial assault near Dover on Christmas 1914.9 By the end of January 1915, British civilians had died in Zeppelin raids

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on England. However, it was not until later in the spring that London first felt the impact of air raids, and it was both the nature and setting of these raids that provoked an outpouring of responses. A raid on London in May 1915 provided the British public with victims that vividly illustrated how war had changed. On the night of the raid, Elsie Legett and her sister Elizabeth were asleep in bed with three other siblings. A bomb fell directly upon their home; their father tried to rescue all the children, and failed, receiving severe burns in the process. Elsie Legett was three years old when she died that night; Elizabeth was eleven when she subsequently died from her injuries. As a newspaper headline explained, this was the ‘tragedy of the Zeppelins.’10 Her age and gender made Elsie Legett a visible and important symbol of the vulnerability of civilians in this new type of warfare. However, the women and children killed by air power in the First World War became something more than victims. Their behaviour was read as heroic, as worthy of public attention, recognition and validation. If Elsie Legett was the first celebrated child victim of this war, she was not the last. Just two years later, the tragedy of the Zeppelin was surpassed by the tragedy of the Gotha, a powerful new German plane. On 13 June 1917, a daylight Gotha raid on London hit an infants’ school in Poplar. Eighteen children, most five years old, were killed. At the public inquest for the victims, the Coroner, the Mayor of the borough, and the local MP all spoke of the tragic and inexcusable nature of the attack. Strikingly, the borough’s Mayor compared the dead children with those who had died for Britain in far more traditional battle zones: ‘these boys and girls have died as truly for their country . . . as any of our men at the front or on the high seas’.11 To claim that these small children had ‘truly died for their country’, suggests a genuinely new understanding of warfare and of those who could be called upon to sacrifice for the nation. These stories of children at war at home reveal a shifting landscape of warfare itself. For during the First World War, nothing had been done in advance to prepare civilians for attacks that might affect them in England rather than some foreign field. The loss of life in the air raids of the First World War carried a great symbolic weight; who was killed and where had a profound impact that forced the British state to take action. The result was the creation of interwar civil defence.

The Gendering of Interwar Civil Defence The air raids of the First World War were Britain’s first taste of one of the defining features of twentieth-century warfare: attacks on civilians from the air. This tactic was intended to destroy morale, both civilian and, significantly, among combatant men who were powerless to defend their families at home. Popular culture in the interwar years reflected a growing pre-occupation with the horrors that any future war would bring, with novels and films providing lurid imagery of the destruction of cities and their inhabitants by incendiary explosives and poison gas. These imaginings were grounded in the experiences of the civilians of Iraq (1920–1932), Abyssinia (1935–1936), China (1937–1945) and Spain (1936–1939), all of whom suffered at the hands of politicians, policy makers

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and military leaders who were determined to use aerial bombardment as a tactic of war. They were also grounded in the experiences of British civilians, and within a decade of the First World War, the British government had created a secret sub-committee of the Committee on Imperial Defence to examine what would become the basis of civil defence. Convened in 1924, the sub-committee on Air Raids Precautions began both to collect data and to develop concrete plans to address the threat of aerial attacks. Throughout these discussions, the new reality that civilians, and not just soldiers, would need to risk their lives in a nation at war shaped policy.12 As global conflict loomed again in the late 1930s, the secret plans became public, first with a circular on Air Raids Precautions in the summer of 1935. Publicity opened up space for British politicians to debate more openly the best means of protecting citizens against the worst effects of aerial bombardment. In 1937, the government passed the Air Raids Precautions (ARP) Act, the first of a number of measures designed to provide an organizational structure for civil defence. Civilians now had a formal defensive role in wartime; alongside the military, they were to undertake the defence of the nation. Significantly, women would take part in this defence alongside men, reflecting the ways in which the threat of aerial warfare broke down the gendered distinction between combatant, who could die for his nation, and civilian, who remained ‘behind the lines’. As a Times leader argued in 1938: The development of the bomber has brought the front line of war to the very doors of a nation which for centuries has been safe from enemies. And the object of the bomber is not to defeat the rival air force but to terrify into submission populations whose women and children and homes are attacked and destroyed by fire, explosive and gas.13

As well as being the targets of aerial warfare, women would be intimately involved in the nation’s defence. However, although this new form of warfare blurred previous distinctions between war front and home front, divisions between the combatant man and the civilian woman were largely maintained through the careful management of the nature of women’s civil defence work. Most strikingly, civil defence was divided into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ branches, with women confined to passive civil defence until 1941. Passive defence encompassed police, air raid wardens, the fire service, first aid and ambulance work, heavy rescue and gas detection. Within these fields, women were not to be employed in heavy rescue, front line fire services or gas protection and were instead primarily employed as first aid workers, where it was estimated that 362,500 women would be needed in a future war.14 Concerns were raised almost immediately about both the numbers and suitability of women who would be willing to volunteer for ARP The Home Office was uncomfortable with the large numbers of women expected to be employed in civil defence, arguing that the nature of the work meant that it could only be undertaken by ‘young and active men’.15 Yet while the Home Office presumed the masculinity of defending the home front, men saw it differently. As war approached, young men proved

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reluctant to join the civil defence services, not just constrained by paid work but more eager to participate in military service. Indeed, the Daily Telegraph noted in April 1938 that many London boroughs had ‘a disproportionate number of women’ in their ranks of ARP volunteers.16 ARP’s links with the defence of the home, the family and domesticity, its position as the passive branch of civil defence and its employment of women also contributed to the reluctance of young men to enrol, one man complaining that he ‘felt a fool’ because he had been ‘put in with a lot of old boys and women’.17 Recruitment for the ARP services attempted to tackle this by emphasizing the ‘masculine’ nature of civil defence. Posters such as Frank Gardner’s ‘Serve to Save’ emphasized the manly nature of civil defence in its depiction of a civilian man sheltering a cowering woman and child behind a shield engraved ARP18 This emphasis on the ‘manly’ nature of ARP work demonstrates the problematic relationship between civil defence and gender: defending the home was regarded as passive rather than active service, was easily associated with the domestic and the feminine, and thus separate from the masculine, active military services. This may also have been strengthened in the public mind by the creation of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) in 1938, initially created to mobilize women in defence of the home and the nation. Press coverage of the WVS contrasts with the recruitment campaign for ARP, with newspapers such as The Times emphasizing the feminine nature of civil defence as ‘care of casualties or of patients in hospital wards is peculiarly the woman’s gift’.19 During the crisis of September 1938, when civil defence had its first dry run, the media extolled the work of female ARP workers under trying conditions. An article in The Star, for example, praised their moral influence in lessening panic, noting that ‘no woman warden has shown the slightest signs of nerves, hysterics or fainting’, as if to suggest that such traits might both be expected of women and yet under the exceptional circumstances of wartime could be overcome.20 The end result was that while citizenship duties expanded to include women in the defence of home and nation, this citizenship was deeply inscribed with traditional notions of gender. Well before the summer of 1939, there was a new sense of urgency in the air. Public air raid shelters began to appear in the streets, blackouts were practised and evacuation plans finalized. Nevertheless, the numbers enrolled for civil defence were still well below Home Office requirements. By the end of March 1939, the Home Office estimated that 1, 118,582 people were enrolled for ARP work against the 1,600,000 it required. Of these, 411,301 were women, mainly enrolled as volunteers in first aid, as ambulance drivers, clerical and communications workers with 104,729 female wardens.21 In a series of secret meetings, the Cabinet considered introducing male conscription for civil defence, deciding against this as it would make ARP too ‘military in appearance’, undermining the concept of civil defence as ‘organized help by the civilian body’ in which the ‘risks accepted by soldiers, sailors and airmen’ would be extended to civilians who might ‘give their lives for the help and protection of others’.22 When war broke out in September 1939, ARP was firmly established as a civilian organization, calling on male and female citizens to participate in the defence of their homes, their communities and, ultimately, their nation against the threat of war from the air.

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Civil Defence in the Second World War In at least one, fundamental, way, civil defence appeared to be gender blind: 2,379 civil defence workers died and 4,459 were seriously injured by the end of the Second World War. However, closer examination of these figures reveals that, of the total killed and seriously injured, the majority (6,220) were men.23 When women worked alongside men, as in the Warden’s Service, they were just as likely to be killed and injured as their male colleagues. However, the majority of female civil defence workers were employed outside the line of fire, staffing control centres and providing clerical support for the police and fire services, which only employed men in ‘active’ service. Some aspects of civil defence continued to be seen as particularly suited to women: one warden arguing that ‘women are better (as wardens) than men in most cases . . . They can see in a moment who is in a house because they know what to look for’.24 The WVS gradually extended their civil defence role to encompass providing refreshments for rescue workers and victims of bombing, taking those who had lost their homes to rescue centres and helping them negotiate the subsequent bureaucracy, and breaking the news of injury or death to relatives. In its formation of the Housewives’ Service, a street based organization which encouraged women to participate in civil defence by providing information, refreshments and shelter to neighbours in the event of a bombing raid, the WVS successfully extended civil defence to the home, arguing that ‘a woman can offer to the community all the gifts, experience, common sense which she has hitherto expended upon her home and family’. Domesticity, femininity and civil defence were explicitly linked in the service where the good housewife became the good citizen as ‘the life of the nation is distinctly the housewife’s province’.25 Yet, some women wanted to take a more active role in the defence of the nation. From 1941, work on Anti-Aircraft (AA) sites offered them the opportunity to do so, albeit in a limited, gender specific form. Since the late 1930s, Sir Frederick Pile, Commander-in-Chief of Air Defence, had been challenging the exclusion of women from the ‘active’ arm of civil defence, of which AA was a vital part. Pile had identified the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s branch of the Army, as potential AA workers as early as 1938, when he had invited the pioneering female engineer Caroline Haslett to inspect air defence emplacements with a view to assessing the potential for women’s employment. The gap of three years between Pile’s initial plans and the decision to invite members of the ATS into Air Defence indicates the organizational and ideological complexities of employing women on AA sites. Air Defence was particularly vulnerable to being ‘combed out’ for servicemen by the Army, with 30,000 searchlight operators seconded from Air Defence in the middle of 1941.26 The first mixed batteries became operational five months later in Richmond Park, London, and quickly became a public attraction, with crowds often gathering to ‘stand and gaze in fascination’.27 The sight of women working alongside men on these sites soon became commonplace. By 1942 more women were working on AA sites than men, and approximately 50% of new ATS recruits were choosing to work in Air Defence.28 However, although women working on these batteries assisted in the targeting and shooting down of aircraft,

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they remained officially ‘non combatants’, unlike their male colleagues. Women worked as radar operators, height finders, spotters, predictors and locators on the sites, but men alone fired the guns. Thus although women worked with, and sometimes died alongside, men on the batteries, they remained lower status members of a separate organization, on lower pay and, defined as noncombatant, unable to be awarded combat medals. While male and female citizens worked and died alongside one another in the defence of the home, this militarization of citizenship was one in which divisions and hierarchies of gender remained closely guarded. The Second World War witnessed the expansion of aerial bombardment of civilians as a weapon of warfare and the establishment of participation in civil defence as a duty of male and female citizens. New weaponry, and responses to this, effectively saw the expansion of the militarization of civil society, and concurrently of civil defence as both a right and a duty of the good citizen. However, this wartime citizenship was shaped by, and in turn reinforced, established gender identities. A variety of discourses constructed female civil defence workers separately from their male colleagues. Although they may have been united by a shared active citizenship, civil defence workers were organized and imagined in such a way as to preserve the gender hierarchy of military service as an absolutely masculine performance of (male) citizenry.

Civil Defence in the Cold War The gendered politics of civil defence did not end with the conclusion of the war. The use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 conjured up the prospect of a whole new type of warfare: nuclear war. As the Cold War intensified, a rapidly escalating arms race took place and Britain was the third country to test its own independent nuclear ‘deterrent’ in 1952. The new threat of nuclear war led to shifts in British plans for civil defence and the establishment of a voluntary Civil Defence Corps (CDC). Founded in 1949 and eventually disbanded in 1968, the CDC once again drew on notions of active citizenship to recruit male and female volunteers who would undergo training in measures of civil defence in the event of a nuclear war. By 1953, over 300,000 people had signed up as members of the Corps.29 Represented as ‘a call to duty’ which ‘patriotic’ citizens should not ‘leave to someone else’, civil defence in the nuclear age drew on the same discourse of active citizenship as ARP had in the earlier period.30 Defence of one’s nation and home, however apparently pointless in an age of nuclear destruction, was again not simply a military responsibility, but the duty of civilian men and women, reflecting the increased militarization of civil society during the Cold War. Civil defence in the event of nuclear war was organized into four sections: the CDC, the Auxiliary Fire Service, the National Hospital Service Reserve and the Special Constabulary. The CDC was divided into six sections: wardens, headquarters, welfare, ambulance, rescue and pioneer, of which women were eligible to join the first four.31 Advertising campaigns for the CDC demonstrate that, although nuclear weapons were gender blind, conceptions of civil defence were anything but. In the 1950s, when women were encouraged to ‘return’ to domesticity

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and femininity, rebuilding the family in a post-war idyll, recruitment posters emphasized the military experience of potential male recruits, many of whom would have served in the Forces during the Second World War. Again, men were slower to join than women. In an echo of earlier ARP posters, appeals to male citizens informed them that ‘this is a man’s job’, using images of rescue and bravery. In contrast, posters targeting women simply stated that ‘there’s a job for women too’, showing the various uniforms they could wear.32 Significantly, unlike the AA sites, where they had quasi-militarized and skilled roles, now women were primarily expected to volunteer for the Welfare section of the CDC, taking responsibility for evacuees or those made homeless by nuclear attack. Welfare was advertised as being ‘Where a woman’s help is needed’, and a recruitment poster echoed WVS posters in its depiction of a cheery, uniformed, middle-aged woman helping families in the aftermath of an apparently survivable nuclear attack.33 Nuclear weapons might be new, these recruitment campaigns suggested, but the civil defence response to this threat was very much rooted in traditional conceptions of gender during wartime. However, although the CDC had over 300,000 members at the height of its strength, many millions more did not join, and received no formal training in what to do in the event of nuclear war. Successive governments attempted to reach the mass of the civilian population through schemes of public education via films, pamphlets and the press. The information produced to inform citizens of their role in the event of nuclear war continued the gendered construction of civil defence. Films aimed at Civil Defence workers emphasized women’s caring role in the aftermath of a nuclear attack; Care of the Homeless (1965), for example, highlighted the work of the women’s welfare section following a fictitious attack on Bristol.34 The Warden and the Householder (1961) represented the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ female citizen, embodied in the characters of Mrs Wells, who refused to organize the defence of her family because ‘my husband says there’s not going to be a war’, and Mrs Newson, who provided the necessary information to the nuclear warden and sought advice about how to best protect her home and family.35 The WVS continued to play a role in civil defence in the nuclear age, planning to organize food, first aid and accommodation in the aftermath of nuclear war, and educating women in the protection of home and family. Nuclear involved a very new type of warfare, bringing in its wake levels of death, destruction and social breakdown unimaginable fifty years previously. However, gender roles in civil defence, and in the imagined response of citizens to nuclear attack, continued to be highly differentiated. Women’s linkage to the home and the domestic were strengthened in its very organization.

Conclusion: Defending the Home(land) and the War on Terror The gendered militarization of society has occupied an important history in the twentieth century and continues to resonate in the recent context of the ‘War on Terror’. The attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001, shifted the nature of attacks as well as resultant patterns of civil defence. Instead of aerial bombardment from military aircraft, domestic aeroplanes were used as weapons

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in suicide missions. Throughout Europe, the USA and the West security measures were quickly put in place to combat the apparent threat of expanded terrorism to Western citizens. This ‘War on Terror’ encompassed both the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and a range of legislative and ideological responses at ‘home’. In Britain, the government passed various counter-terrorism laws, including the controversial Terrorism Bill of 2005, which sought to allow detention of terrorist suspects for 90 days without trial on the basis of a ‘state of exception’.36 When four young British men strapped explosives to their bodies and detonated them on the London transport network in July 2005, killing 52 people, the ‘War on Terror’ definitively ‘came home’. Britain had a history of civil conflict and terrorism in Northern Ireland, and the demonization of Britain’s Muslim citizens repeated many of the fears about and injustices brought on Irish people during the ‘Irish Troubles’. The citizens of post 9–11 Britain were thus expected to define themselves not just by nation and by gender, but also by religious and cultural practice. Susan Faludi has argued that following the attacks of 2001, traditional gender roles and values were reasserted in the United States, with men reconstructed as combatants, defending a nation represented as a domestic sanctuary inhabited by women and children in need of protection. The War on Terror, Faludi argues, demonized both the feminist woman and the ‘feminized’ man at home.37 In contrast, in Britain any reassertion of traditional gender roles was filtered through overarching concerns with religious and cultural practice, amplifying historical anxieties about multiculturalism and the end of Britain’s empire. Responses to the ‘Rushdie affair’ of 1989 and the Bradford race riots of summer 2001 exaggerated existing concerns about the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism. This creation of a ‘citizenship test’ in 2005 alongside increasingly punitive immigration laws, paralleled widely circulating citizenship discourses which demonized Britain’s Muslim population, positioning them as problematic citizens. Within this toxic atmosphere, Muslim women who wore the Hijab were subjected to particularly virulent, and state-sanctioned, criticism. In 2006 Jack Straw, previously Home Secretary and Labour MP for Blackburn, which has a large Muslim population, stated that he would ask female constituents to remove their veils when talking to him, going on to claim that he would like to see the veil abolished altogether, a highly-controversial public sector policy being pursued in France at the time, and subsequently passed into law.38 Whilst Straw’s comments signalled a radical shift in Labour party rhetoric, potentially inflammatory to some of its core constituents, they also showed political willingness to court a strand of thinking in contemporary Britain that associated citizenship with liberal, Christian-based religious and cultural practices. This association was made even more visible in Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2011, where he linked national security with a unifying sense of nationhood. In Cameron’s vision, Britishness explicitly excluded allegiance to religious and cultural identities increasingly being demonized, as he opposed an ‘active, muscular liberalism’ to the beliefs and action of ‘young men . . . who are prepared to blow themselves up and kill their fellow citizens’.39 Muslims are thus increasingly perceived as prioritizing their religious and cultural values over unifying civic duties. In the War

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on Terror, it has become ever more important to be easily identifiable as a ‘good’ citizen who embraces ‘British’ values over presumably oppositional religious or cultural identities. However, while this contemporary, wartime construction of citizenship is clearly racialized, it is also deeply gendered. While, at present, only Muslim men are imagined as terrorists and thus a physical threat to British security, Muslim women who wear the Hijab are imagined as a symbolic threat, embodying and signifying a feminine failure to identify as ‘good’ citizens. The ‘War on Terror’ has produced an ongoing gendered militarization of society in which men and women are considered to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ citizens depending on their race, religion and beliefs. Crucially, this racialized citizenship is filtered through the lens of gender. Within this discursive construction of wartime citizenship, Hijab wearing women have ‘failed’ an imagined citizenship test based on visible assimilation to the signalled values of civic normativity. Civil defence in the age of the ‘War on Terror’ has moved away from organized bodies of civilians, in which women and men had specific gender roles to play in the defence of a gendered home, towards a citizenship in which cultural and religious identity defines and polarizes the good versus the potentially dangerous citizen. If war can be fought anywhere by anyone, civil defence has become an act to be embodied by all.

Notes 1. S. Evelyn Thomas, Handy War-time Guide for the Woman at Home and the Man in the Street (St Albans, 1939), 3. 2. C. Enloe, Maneuvers. The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 3. S.O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19. 4. Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1938. 5. For a survey of different positions see R. Beiner, (ed.) Theorizing Citizenship, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 6. J. Jenson and S.D. Philips, ‘Regime Shift: New Citizenship Practices in Canada’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 3/3, (1996). 7. K. Hunt and K. Rygiel (eds), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, (Ashgate: Hampshire, 2006), 5. 8. http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-and-transcripts/2011/02/pmsspeech-at-munich-security-conference-60293 [accessed 21 February 2012]. 9. The Times 26 Dec. 1914. 10. The Times, 2 June 1915 and 10 June 1915. The Daily Chronicle, 3 June 1915. 11. The Times, 16 June 1917. 12. See T.H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (London: HMSO, 1955), Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire (forthcoming). 13. The Times, 12 January 1938. 14. Daily Express, 3 November, 1937. 15. The National Archives (TNA), Home Office (HO) 45/17597, Police, Fire Brigades and A.R.P. Services Manpower Requirements: Memo for Cabinet, 14 December 1937. 16. Daily Telegraph, 12 April 1938. 17. Mass-Observation (M-O), File Report A24, Report of A.R.P. Survey Carried Out in Fulham by Mass-Observation April-July 1939, 84.

40 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

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Imperial War Museum (IWM), catalogue number IWM PST0720. The Times, 17 June 1938. The Star, 30 Sept. 1938. TNA, HO186/371, Civil Defence Preparedness, A.R.P. Training State, March 1939, HO186/153, Organisation of Civil Defence Personnel, Home Office Estimate of Requirements, March 1939. TNA, HO186/153, Organization of Civil Defence Personnel, Minutes of Secret Meeting of Cabinet, 24 March 1939, Sir John Anderson speech to A.R.P. volunteers at the Albert Hall, cited in The Telegraph, 25 January 1939. T.H. O’Brien, Civil Defence Appendix II, 678. Cited in J. Gardner, The Blitz. The British Under Attack, (London: Harper Collins, 2010), 105. Cited in J. Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War. Continuities of Class, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 79. Gen. Sir F. Pile, Ack Ack: Britain’s Defences Against Air Attack During the Second World War, (London: George G. Harrap, 1949), 226. Pile, Ack Ack, 192. J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, (London: Granta, 1999), 328, V. Douie, Daughters of Britain: An Account of the Work of British Women During the Second World War, (Oxford: Vincent Baxter Press, 1949), 34. M. Grant, After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain 1945–1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010) 4–5. TNA, Ministry of Information, (INF) INF2/118, Civil Defence Recruitment Campaigns’, 1950–1957. Grant, After the Bomb, 65. TNA, INF2/118, Civil Defence Recruitment Campaigns. TNA, INF2/118, Civil Defence Recruitment Campaigns. Care of the Homeless (1965). The Warden and the Householder (1961). This aspect of the Bill was rejected by the House of Commons. On the ‘state of exception’ see G. Agamben, State of Exception, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). S. Faludi, The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America, (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). Lancashire Telegraph, 6 October 2006. Also see M. D. Byng, ‘Symbolically Muslim: Media, Hijab and the West’, Critical Sociology, 36: 109, 2010. http://www.number10.gov.uk [accessed 21 February 2011].

3 Men Refusing to be Violent: Manliness and Military Conscientious Objection, 1914 to the Present Day Lois S. Bibbings

The 1916 Military Service Act required men aged 18–40 in England, Scotland and Wales to enlist as soldiers.1 The Act also allowed men who had ‘a conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant service’ to apply to be exempted from conscription.2 Those who claimed to be conscientious objectors (COs) applied to a tribunal to decide their case. The tribunals were court-like bodies, made up of a panel of non-lawyers, and could either reject the application or grant some degree of exemption.3 Consequently, in terms of the letter of the law, conscientious objection was a legitimate stance for a man to take, if he was judged to be genuine. Harry E. Stanton, a Quaker in his early twenties, had decided that he could have no part in the war. In the face of the growing social isolation experienced by pacifists, he allied himself with similarly minded anti-militarists. These men stood against the mainstream view which saw them not only as a threat to the war effort but also as unmanly. They were accused of being cowardly, un-English, unpatriotic, deviant and feminine – and such attitudes were often shared by those who were closest to them. Stanton applied to be legally recognized as a CO, stating that he objected to having any direct or indirect involvement in the war. Despite the law’s provision for objectors, he found that legal personnel were reluctant to deal with claims of objection, let alone to implement the statutory exemption. Indeed, it seemed that tribunal members’ views tended to reflect popular feeling against objectors. Though expecting a full hearing to assess his ‘conscience’ claim, the tribunal was dismissive, taking a mere three minutes to deal with his case. While his beliefs were deemed genuine, he was granted limited exemption from the Act, which meant undertaking non-combatant work within the military. As a religious person, this did not meet the requirements of his conscience. At his appeal, Stanton 41

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received fuller consideration. However, the twenty-minute hearing resulted in a refusal fully to release him from the Act, instead requiring him to undertake civilian work of ‘national importance’. Both tribunals affirmed that even if he would not fight, he must work to support the war. Stanton refused to accept the appeal decision because it, too, failed to accord with his conscience. He was, therefore, still liable to serve as a soldier, and was called to report for duty on 8 April 1916. As a result of his non-compliance he was arrested on the 11 April. Following an appearance before a police court, he was handed over to the army. Once in the military, Harry Stanton’s refusal to obey army orders was viewed as a failure of military masculinity and resulted in verbal abuse, physical punishment, military detention as well as time spent in civilian prisons. In May 1916 he and a number of other objectors were shipped to France, court-martialled for disobedience at the front and sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to incarceration. Following this, he was imprisoned for his continued disobedience in the military and ended up quarrying in a CO work camp.4 In short, despite the legal recognition of conscientious objection and his acknowledged genuineness, Stanton was only partially exempted under the legislation and ended up being punished for his beliefs. Stanton’s experiences were by no means unique, as it was common for COs to be ostracized, to receive inadequate or no legal recognition and to suffer ill treatment. Typically, the masculinity of objectors became suspect, resulting in various forms of rough treatment from civilian society, the military and the legal system. Often seen as feminine or effeminate, they symbolized the opposite of the soldier’s idealized masculinity, which in this period represented what the sociologist R.W. Connell describes as a hegemonic form of masculinity.5 This chapter explores the history of men’s military conscientious objection in the United Kingdom by focusing upon two periods; the First World War and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These historical contexts are very different – not least because, as Stanton’s experiences demonstrate, conscription legally obliged male military service in the years 1916–18, whilst in the contemporary period, men (and women) exercise their free choice to join the military. Consequently, this chapter examines male military conscientious objection to joining the military during the First World War, and compares this with current objections on the part of men who are serving members of the Armed Forces. In both periods, the chapter considers the perception and treatment of objectors, reflecting upon ideas about gender and, in particular, about men, manliness, aggression and violence. In doing so, this chapter significantly develops my previous work on gender and objection in the First World War, in terms of the historical periods considered and the theory advanced. It also marks an entirely new venture, as UK military conscientious objection in recent times has barely been studied and has never been subjected to a gender analysis. Additionally, for the first time, this chapter links together three seemingly separate strands of my research; namely, my work on conscientious objection, gendered violence and state power.6 This examination of objection uses scholarship from gender, history and, in particular, law and criminology. The analysis looks at societal and state reactions to objection, including specifically objectors’ experiences within the legal

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realm. In doing so, the focus is on legislation, regulations, legal cases and objectors’ attempts at legal recognition. The legal approach adopted falls under the headings of both ‘socio-legal studies’ and the related field of ‘critical criminology’. Socio-legal studies is a ‘multi or interdisciplinary’ field, bringing together a range of disciplines including sociology, social policy, criminology, gender, historical and literary studies.7 My socio-legal approach in this chapter involves examining the legal treatment of male COs in the context of their wider social experiences, drawing upon gender and historical studies. Critical criminology focuses upon the study of deviance and social control in the context of politics, the state and social relations. Here ‘deviance’ refers to behaviours and identities that are supposedly non-conforming, abnormal and aberrational, including but not limited to those that are categorized as crimes at a particular place and point in time. ‘Social control’ emphasizes the power of the state, not least the legal institutions of the state, to direct people’s lives in various ways, often by the use of coercion.8 This chapter uses scholarship from critical criminology to suggest why male objectors have been treated as they have, both in the past and in the present. In considering the history of men’s military conscientious objection, a number of questions are raised: How were male objectors seen in terms of their gender? How did the law deal with male objectors in theory and in practice? How might socio-legal studies and critical criminology assist in the study of male military conscientious objection? Why is the study of male military conscience objection important to gender studies? In order to address these issues, the chapter begins by explaining military conscientious objection. It then considers the specific cases of male objection in the First World War and male objection in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The conclusion focuses upon considering why studying male conscientious objection is crucial to gender studies – and, more specifically, how the lenses of socio-legal studies and critical criminology reinforce this. In doing so, this chapter resonates with a number of the chapters in this volume. In particular, by reflecting upon ideas about gendered duty, it links with the previous chapter by Grayzel and Noakes. By focusing upon the ways in which male objectors have been viewed, it provides a useful companion piece to the representations of the female combatant considered by Murphy in the next chapter. Also, like the work of other contributors in this volume, and the author of its Afterword, Cynthia Enloe, the chapter demonstrates the importance of paying heed to gender when studying war and militarism.

What is Military Conscientious Objection? Ethicist Alastair V. Campbell has provided a useful definition of conscience as ‘a kind of inner voice or authority warning you against wrong doing’.9 It can originate in or be founded upon religious belief, political or philosophical creed, its basis can be moral, cultural, familial or even professional. Indeed, an individual’s conscience might be informed by more than one of these factors. So conscientious objection is the refusal to undertake a task or perform an obligation on the basis of conscience and such refusals are founded upon strongly felt convictions.

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Military objectors have very different grounds for their objections and often object to different things; for example, some object to the state telling them what to do, others are pacifists who unconditionally reject all warfare and violence. The men appearing in this chapter resisted war, the military and militarization, and the use of force in general or specific circumstances – but they were not all pacifists, in that they did not necessarily reject all war. What links them is that they objected on grounds of conscience. For example, Harry Stanton was a religious CO whose membership of the Society of Friends, along with his adherence to political ideas about economic interdependence and global cooperation, led him to embrace pacifism.

Military Conscientious Objection in the First World War (1914–1918) From August 1914 until the beginning of 1916, the British military was made up of a professional core supplemented by volunteers. During this time a great deal of pressure was placed on men to enlist; 2.5 million men and boys volunteered in the first sixteen months of the war.10 Men who failed to come forward, including COs, were generally viewed as un-masculine, tainted with the qualities of cowardice, feeble-mindedness, immorality, physical unfitness or degeneracy, and they were seen as having failed to demonstrate the sense of duty and patriotism expected of their gender. A pervasive assumption underpinning these sentiments was that men were or should be brave, aggressive and prone to violence. Consequently it was assumed that, when called upon to fight for their country, men would rush forward. This in turn meant that civilian men were often challenged and castigated over their lack of uniform, with insults focusing upon their failure as males. Such comparisons between combatants and civilians revealed intense gender anxieties, as Lucy Noakes and Susan Grayzel discuss in this volume. It was, however, COs who were the most frequent targets of patriotic activities aimed at public shaming. For instance, they were sent or handed white feathers as symbols of cowardice in coordinated campaigns to coerce men into military service.11 Conscription was introduced in 1916. Popularly, this was portrayed as a decision taken because some men were failing to live up to their gender as they had not volunteered for service. In fact, military compulsion was underpinned by concerns about whether the best use was being made of manpower under the voluntary recruitment system. The latter was seen as inefficient and wasteful as it allowed skilled male workers to join up rather than remain in essential industries on the home front. Worries about men and what they were or were not doing were, therefore, an important element of the justification for conscription. Gradually those compulsorily enlisted under the Military Service Act were called upon to serve. Objectors had few options: they could do nothing and wait to be handed over to the military; they could go into hiding or leave the country; or they could appear before a tribunal to argue their case. An estimated 20,000 objectors opted for these different approaches.12 Whether they passively resisted, fled or cooperated, these men tended to be viewed as un-masculine,

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and patriotic citizens had no hesitation in stating this. Indeed, the castigation of COs in the mainstream press was a popular pastime. Writing in The Times, Reverend A.W. Gough described the objector as a ‘weaker vessel’, a ‘crank’ and a ‘coward’, and argued that such men were ‘egotistical decadents’ and ‘neurotic curiosities’ whose citizenship should be removed.13 Such sentiments could also be expressed closer to home. As William Campbell (the father of ethicist Alastair V. Campbell mentioned earlier) found when he revealed his views about war, some family members could not abide to be associated with an objector.14 The tribunals reflected similar views about the gender identity of objectors; in fact, even claiming to be an objector was tantamount to an admission of unmanliness. Refusals to fight were met with astonishment, disbelief and horror. Such sentiments tended not only to mean that objectors were insulted but also that their claims were rejected without any proper consideration or that only a limited and (to the objector) unacceptable level of exemption was granted. Comments from tribunal members included the idea that objectors were of a different and lesser ‘breed’. Judgements about physical and mental fitness and health also played a role. One CO applicant was described as ‘a shivering mass of unwholesome fat’, whilst another was told his was ‘a case of an unhealthy mind in an unwholesome body’ and to one tribunal member they were ‘the most awful pack that ever walked the earth’.15 In particular, tribunals were incredulous when faced with the claim that a man would not countenance the use of violence: ‘[d]o you really mean to say you wouldn’t kill anybody? What an awful state of mind to be in!’16 Men, it was commonly held, were predisposed to violence, if not by nature then by upbringing (or by a combination of these factors) – and at times of national need this should come to the fore. In this context, a non-violent man was a disturbing gender abnormality. Such views sometimes led tribunal members to refuse to accept or apply the ‘conscience clause’. For instance, having expressed his belief that men should fight, the Chairman of Wirral Local Tribunal announced: ‘I wish the Government had not put this clause about COs in the Act at all. I do not agree with it myself’.17 Negative views about an objector’s masculinity pervaded the whole of the system charged with dealing with them and impacted upon the way they were treated throughout the war. For example, the Home Office described COs as: . . . feeble in physique, weak of will or unstable of character . . . the majority are below the average, and an appreciable amount of mental defect has also been observed.18

Unsurprisingly, the military regarded objectors as not ‘real men’, and they were treated accordingly. When George Beardsworth repeatedly refused orders, he was forced into a re-masculinizing programme. He was manhandled around an army assault course, thrown over a gymnasium vaulting horse, repeatedly pushed into a water jump and dragged out and, while he lay on his back with a man’s foot on his stomach, he had his arms and legs ‘drilled’ by other soldiers.19 This seemed to reflect a popular sentiment; namely, that if man would not willingly conform to his proper gender role, and be rightfully aggressive (in the name of

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‘King and Country’) when called upon to do so, then perhaps he could be made to do so. Once the Armistice was signed in November 1918, recruiting under the Military Service Act was suspended, the work of the tribunals ended and objectors were gradually, but often reluctantly, allowed to return to their normal lives.20 However, the sense of unmanliness continued to be associated with objectors and, at a time when the vote was extended to all men over 20 and women over 30, many objectors were temporarily disenfranchised by the Representation of the People Act, 1918.21 COs also faced employment difficulties after the war.22 Their perceived failure to be properly male led to their further emasculation in relation to key aspects of their manliness: their citizenship and their capacity to be breadwinners. During the war and for some time afterwards, many objectors had, using Susan Gilbert’s work on war and gender, ‘become not just No Men, no bodies, but not men’.23 Indeed, COs came to occupy a liminal gender identity – which was somehow both less than male and not female. This widespread perception of objectors as unmanly goes some way to suggest why the law of exemption frequently failed to be applied. But this is only a partial explanation for the poor treatment of objectors by the state and in society. In order to develop a deeper understanding of this, critical attention should turn to the legal sphere and, more specifically, the breach between law in theory and law in practice. The idea of a gap or fissure between what legislation seems to provide and what actually happens is a notion familiar to both socio-legal and critical criminological scholars. Such work argues that this phenomena may not solely be a matter of the front men or women (the tribunal members in the present case) failing to apply the law, but that something more fundamental, more systemic, more institutionalized might be going on. Moreover, this legal gap should be viewed in the wider context of other state and societal responses to COs. Applying this thinking to First World War objectors, it can be argued that, whilst the attitudes of those charged with implementing the Military Service Act partly explains this particular fissure, there may also be more deep-seated reasons for this non-recognition and castigation. Assumptions about the (pre)disposition of men to aggression and violence and the prioritization of military masculinities were ideas of fundamental importance to the state during the First World War. Indeed, in waging warfare, the state actually needed men to be violent. More specifically, it required men to be prepared to take up arms to protect it when called upon to do so. These observations raise doubts as to the genuineness of the legislative recognition of objectors. Perhaps the exemptions were always purely or partly symbolic. If so, they were never likely to work well in practice. Indeed, had the legal recognition granted to COs been effective, other men might have decided to follow the objector’s example in order to avoid military service. This could have resulted in a spread of ‘unmanliness’, the possible defeat of conscription, the potential loss of the war – and, ultimately, the end of the British state. So, the state needed ideas about manliness, violence and soldiering along with notions of unmanliness, non-violence and objection to persist in order to defend its very existence. Consequently, the castigation of COs as unmen, as well as their legal

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non-recognition was, from the perspective of the state, something to be, if not encouraged, at least not actively discouraged or prevented. More fundamentally, if this analysis is correct, why was a conscience clause included in the legislation at all? Critical criminological scholarship points to the potential benefits in providing for the apparent recognition of supposedly deviant activities and identities (such as male objection) in legislation. Allowing for exemption meant that the state and, in particular, the legal and military institutions, could offer the appearance of being liberal and tolerant of difference when it came to male citizens, manliness and violence. Additionally, specifically including objectors within the legal framework was actually beneficial to the state, as it allowed objectors to be identified, monitored and controlled; requiring COs to register their claim made them visible.24 However, socio-legal and critical criminological scholarship also suggests that legislation founded upon such a contradictory basis need not be entirely useless. The work of Vilhelm Aubert, a sociologist who studied law, is instructive in this context. Aubert devised the helpful notion of ‘symbolic legislation’, arguing that a tokenistic measure would not be entirely ineffective as, in order to fulfil its symbolic effect, a law would have to be seen to sometimes work.25 This assists with the analysis here as, in the case of the Military Service Act, despite the tendency towards non-recognition and insults about their manliness, some objectors were recognized and received respectful treatment within the legal system, as well as from other state institutions and wider society. Stanton, for example, received fuller and more courteous consideration from the appeal tribunal than the tribunal which initially heard his application. He was also well-treated by some of the soldiers he encountered in the army, not all of whom felt that his position demonstrated a lack of masculinity or cowardice.26 In a similar vein, Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, who had some responsibility for dealing with uncooperative objectors, far from seeing them all as unmanly, described some as ‘men who unquestionably, by common consent, are men of the highest character, and in other matters good citizens’.27 Beyond the state, there were other instances of COs being treated well and viewed as upstanding men. This was especially likely in the case of Christian pacifists and, in particular, Quakers, as their stance was both well-known and respected.28 Most obviously, there were those who supported COs in pacifist, anti-war and anti-militarist circles, as well as within their families. Here, they tended to be viewed as the most manly of men, who were prepared to endure derision and suffering for their beliefs. Writing during the war, Stanley Bloomfield James saw objectors’ experiences as heroic adventures, describing the ‘desperate courage’ of ‘a handful of men’, who stood fast against militarism.29

Military Conscientious Objection in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Military conscientious objection continued to be a concern through the twentieth century and remains so today. Despite legal recognition, ideas of unmanliness are still associated with male objectors, and a reluctance to unreservedly recognize their stance remains. In Britain, conscription was reintroduced in

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1939 and continued for the duration of the Second World War. COs were again recognized within legislation, but this time their treatment improved, although there was still some evidence of both an unwillingness to give effect to the law and unfavourable attitudes to male objectors. After the conflict, male military compulsion continued in the form of National Service and here, too, there was provision for objectors. Again, however, there were concerns relating to nonrecognition, attitudes and treatment as well as an underlying sense that male objectors were not masculine.30 In 1960, National Service ended and the last conscripts left the military in 1963.31 Since then, there has been no compulsory military service in the UK. However, this does not mean that the issue of military objection has disappeared. Since 1970, conscientious objection by male and female service personnel has been formally recognized in military regulations, at least in relation to general objection (objection to war or the military in general).32 Soldiers have been able to apply for release from the military and, if refused, may appeal to a specialist committee.33 However, the legal position in regard to selective beliefs (objection to participating in a specific operation or conflict) is less clear – but it seems that these cases, along with some instances of general objection, might sometimes be dealt with informally through a change in posting or role or release from the Forces by other means.34 There is limited evidence about how the formal procedures have been applied, let alone any informal arrangements. Official information only reveals applications that have been recorded, and appears to be both incomplete and inaccurate, not least as unofficial sources suggest that the issue is more significant.35 So Ministry of Defence figures showing that, from 1970 until the end of 2011, sixty men and women applied for release on conscience grounds may only reveal part of the picture.36 Also, as serving personnel were (and are) not free to talk publicly about their experiences in the Forces, there are few stories about how objectors have fared.37 However, a few individuals have received some publicity (because their legal cases came to public attention or because they decided to speak out), providing some additional information. More significantly for this chapter, official figures do not record the gender of COs – so there is no way of knowing how many are male and how many are female.38 However, the few objectors who have come to public attention have been men. Consequently, the information on contemporary COs is much more patchy than that on COs in the First World War. What is available allows for a brief, more speculative analysis to be undertaken in parallel to the investigation of male objectors in the 1914–18 war. Since 1970 the legal status of objection has been more unstable than previously because, as legal scholar Gary Wilson has pointed out, it has been contained within military regulations, rather than an Act of Parliament.39 Indeed, attempts to give the conscience provisions a statutory basis have been rejected and this in itself suggests disinclination to recognize objectors.40 The stories about informal ways of dealing with objectors might similarly suggest an unwillingness to acknowledge or deal with them formally. Moreover, the fact that a soldier could be a CO has been something of a well-kept secret.41 As a result of this, some objectors only came to light when they refused to obey orders,

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deserted or went absent without leave; by which time they could no longer claim conscience, and, rather than being recognized, were punished for disobedience.42 Thus in recent times, as well as in the period of the First World War, there seems to be a breach between the rhetoric and the reality of the law when it comes to the recognition of military conscientious objection. To some degree, this reluctance and the resulting legal gap probably arises from a perception that, given the military is made up of people who opt for a career in the Services, for a soldier to object to fighting is, at the very least, paradoxical. Indeed, such behaviour seems contrary to the character and essence of being a soldier. This sense of incredulity over a soldier’s claim of conscience is frequently reflected in military personnel and Ministry of Defence comments about objection and COs.43 More significantly in terms of gender, given both the military’s focus upon masculine values and a general assumption that men are prone to violence, for a male soldier to object to the use of violence is particularly incomprehensible – and reprehensible. The underlying view that maleness and violence go together can perhaps best be illustrated in relation to the UK Armed Forces by the limiting of combat roles, which require soldiers ‘to close with and kill the enemy face to face’, to men. Indeed, as recently as 2010, the military reaffirmed that men were more able to cope with the use of lethal violence than women.44 The experiences of male soldier-objectors also suggest that ideas about masculinity – and indeed a lack of manliness – have remained key to state and societal attitudes to them. Gwyn Gwyntopher of At Ease, a voluntary organization that advises and supports members of the Armed Forces, recalls a case during the first Persian Gulf War (1990–91). An officer in his late twenties became philosophically opposed to war, unsuccessfully applied for recognition, refused to accept this decision and was eventually directed to resign his commission. He was reportedly ‘ostracised on the base by other officers and their wives’ and his father believed him a coward and a disgrace both to his family and the military.45 In the eyes of at least some of those around him, his position was irrational, shameful, unsoldierly and, therefore, unmanly. Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, who claimed an objection to the Iraq War (2003–), met with bullying and intimidation and was branded a coward and a malingerer within the military. Not knowing about the provision for COs, he fled and was subsequently sentenced to military detention for going absent without leave.46 Medical assistant submariner Michael Lyons went through a similar experience. The Navy ‘mocked’ him for his views and he had ‘the feeling of being ignored, or not being taken seriously’. His wife felt that they had put him through ‘hell’. His mother described the pressure placed on him both by the Navy and some members of his family (which had a strong military tradition). He also received abuse and threats from the community, which labelled him a coward. Lyons’s objection to deployment in Afghanistan failed to be recognized (perhaps because it was political and moral rather than religious) and he was court-martialled for disobedience and sentenced to detention.47 These men’s apparent change of stance (from soldier to objector) was seen by some as ridiculous, irrational, pathetic and dishonourable. These reactions to the perceived undermining of masculinity echo the negative responses to military

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objectors in the First World War. Such evidence suggests that men claiming to be objectors are still regarded as unmanned or feminized for their stance. Reports concerning the shadowy informal means by which COs are dealt with perhaps indicate that one route by which this is achieved is through medicalizing those who purport to have developed a conscience. Here COs are pathologized by defining them as sick, weak and unfit for the standards of military masculinity. For instance Gwyntopher of At Ease reported that ‘[m]any of the COs from the last Gulf War were discharged’ on medical grounds.48 Consequently, as in the First World War, in recent times there has been both a reluctance to recognize male military COs and an associated branding of them as unmanly. In the light of the arguments made in relation to the early twentieth century, these reactions are, perhaps partially, attributable to concerns about military efficacy, the maintenance of the Armed Forces and, ultimately, the survival of the state, should too many soldiers successfully claim conscience; the state needs soldiers to be prepared to use lethal force. However, this is not to say that the regulatory recognition of COs in recent times has been entirely ineffective; as in the First World War, some objectors have gained their release via the formal procedure.49 Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the experiences of military objectors from these two periods. Outside the military and legal spheres, social and gendered perceptions of objectors have been much less condemnatory in recent times than in the early twentieth century. This is not surprising, given the vastly different contexts. For example, the 1914–18 war involved a mass mobilization of society, including both male and female citizens. This made objectors’ refusals to participate all the more unacceptable in terms of gender expectations. Also, though pacifism was a global movement in the First World War, as discussed by Laurie Cohen in this volume, it did not have a groundswell of popular support. By contrast, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen global protests, extensive discontent and public unease about military operations, suggesting a greater level of societal sympathy and support for objectors.50 For instance, Joe Glenton became a manly figurehead for anti-war campaigners, speaking at rallies and featuring on YouTube.51

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted that, despite differences between the First World War and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, parallels can be drawn in terms of attitudes towards and the treatment of male military COs. These men were and are often seen as un-masculine in their rejection of violence. Partly in consequence of this conception of male objectors, they have often found themselves refused recognition, despite the fact that conscientious objection was and is, in theory, a legitimate and legal stance. Socio-legal and critical criminological insights suggest that the reasons for these gaps between the law in theory and the law in practice are more deep-seated than societal or individual legal and military personnel’s attitudes to supposedly unmanly men. These findings, along with the consequent arguments made about the state in this chapter, are important for gender studies. In particular, the insights drawn

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from studying male COs can assist in the study of gender and violence in relation to the military but also more generally. For example, studying social and state, including legal, attitudes to various instances of male violence suggests that the tendency to assume that men are inclined to force (whether by nature and/or nurture) is by no means limited to military. Crucially, this can lead to the normalizing and condoning of male violence, whether committed by soldiers or civilians. Indeed, my work in the field of socio-legal studies has argued that there is a tendency for some types of male aggression not to be criminalized precisely because it is expected. For example, fighting between males is often treated as mere ‘horseplay’, rather than criminalized as assault, because men and boys are supposedly prone to engage in playful but physically dangerous activities. Equally, instances of male-perpetrated domestic and sexual violence are sometimes not treated as real crimes because such conduct is thought to be part and parcel of being male.52 All these forms of violence technically constitute criminal offences, yet here, too, there is a gap between the rhetoric of law and the reality of practice – and this is a gap which existed in 1914 and continues today, despite social and legal advances. This chapter’s brief study of male COs reinforces and also adds an extra layer to this analysis. It suggests that sometimes what is in theory criminal violence is effectively condoned, not only because of the idea that men are inclined to violence, but perhaps also because the state has an interest in ensuring that sufficient numbers of men are ready and willing to adopt violence. What is more, because a willingness to use force is necessary in order to maintain the military (as well as other state institutions, including the police), it might even be conjectured that it is also in the state’s interest to sustain the very idea that men are prone to violence. Finally, the investigation of male non-violence is of political significance for those interested in gender and, in particular, gendered violence. This is because studying men who in some way eschew violence can assist in challenging the presumption that lies at the heart of this chapter’s critique; namely that all men are/should be (pre)disposed to aggression and violence. In this context, the stories of COs like Stanton and Lyons are important because they show that men do refuse violence and, in doing so, suggest that instances of male aggression should not be too readily accepted or condoned.

Notes Statements as to current law and cases were correct on 15 August 2011. 1. Subsequent Acts extended conscription. See L.S. Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service During the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 44, endnote 10. 2. Section 2(1)(d). 3. Section 2(3). 4. Stanton’s story is recorded in Harry E. Stanton, ‘Will You March Too?’ 1916–19’, unpublished account in 2 volumes (privately owned). 5. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2nd edn, 2005). 6. See, in particular: Telling Tales; ‘Boys Will Be Boys: Masculinity and Offences Against the Person’ in L.S. Bibbings and D Nicolson (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Criminal Law (London: Cavendish Press, 2000), 231–252; ‘The

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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Heterostate: Hegemonic Heterosexuality and State Power’ in R.Coleman, J. Sim, S. Tombs and D. Whyte (eds) State Power and Crime (London: Sage, 2009), 35–48. Socio-Legal Studies Association http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/pgdegrees/taught degrees/msc-socio-legal-studies.html [accessed 21 February 2012]; P.A. Thomas, Socio-Legal Studies (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997). Key texts include: N. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978); S. Hall, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978); Coleman et al. State Power and Crime. Modern Dilemmas in Medicine (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 2nd edn, 1975), 14. General Annual Reports of the British Army for the period from 1 October 1913 to 30 September 1919, Cmd 1193, 9. See N.F. Gullace, ‘White feathers and wounded men: female patriotism and the memory of the Great War’, Journal of British Studies, 36/2 (1997), 178–206. C. Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (London: Francis Boutle, 2001), 168–9. Letter, The Times (18 April 1916), 9. Bibbings, Telling Tales, 66–7. P. Snowden, British Prussianism: The Scandal of the Tribunals (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1916), 9; R.L. Outhwaite 5 HC 80, col. 2435, 16 March; Snowden, British Prussianism, 10; Snowden, British Prussianism, 8. Quoted in J.W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: A History 1916–1919 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), 89. Quoted in Snowden, British Prussianism, 8. National Archives HO 45/10882 ‘Memorandum concerning the treatment of conscientious objectors’, July 1916. Quoted in S.B. James, The Men Who Dared: The Story of an Adventure (London: C.W. Daniel, 1917), 27–31. See Bibbings, Telling Tales, 34–6. Section 9(2). See Bibbings, Telling Tales, 69. ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’, Signs 8/3 (1983), 422–50, 423. I make similar arguments in relation to the liberalization of the law in relation to sexualities. See Bibbings, ‘The Heterostate’, 46. Sociology of Law (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), chapter 2; ‘Some Social Functions of Legislation’, Acta Sociologica, 10/1–2 (1966), 98–120. ‘Will You March Too?, 43–5. 5 HC 78, col. 451, 19 January 1916. See further Bibbings Telling Tales, 175–6. The Men Who Dared, 6–7. On positive reactions to objectors as men see further Bibbings, Telling Tales, 165–75, 195–213. On objection in this period see, for example, L.S. Bibbings, ‘State Reaction to Conscientious Objection’ in I. Loveland (ed.), The Frontiers of Criminality (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1995), 71–9. See Bibbings, Telling Tales, 240, endnote 3. See further House of Commons Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill, Special Report of Session 2005–06, HC 828-II (London: Stationary Office, 25 April 2006), Ev 198–9, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm200506/cmselect/cmarmed/828/828ii.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012].

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33. Each branch of the Forces has its own regulations for objectors. In relation to the Army see: Queens Regulations for the Army 1978 Amendment 29 (London: Stationary Office, March 2009). 9/6/4-4/9.424.7; AGAIs Vol. 5 Instruction 006 – Retirement or Discharge on Grounds of Conscience, available at http://wri-irg.org/news/2007/MOD/Army%20AGAI%20on%20CO.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]. For information about appeals from all Service personnel see http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/Corporate Publications/AnnualReports/AnnualReportsAgenciesNDPBs/AdvisoryCommittee OnConscientiousObjectorsAnnualReport200708.htm [accessed 21 February 2012] 34. See, for example: War Resisters International, http://www.wri-irg.org/node/ 5729; Before You Sign Up, http://www.beforeyousignup.info/serving/serving/ 88-coleave [accessed 21 February 2012]; The Big Issue (UK), 26 May–2 June 2003, http://www.refusingtokill.net/UKGulfwar2/breakingranksTheBigIssue.htm [accessed 21 February 2012]. Further information about conscientious objection in the UK military can be found from: At Ease at http://www.atease.org.uk/info_ 05_01_30.htm [accessed 21 February 2012]; Peace Pledge Union http://www. coproject.org.uk/[accessed 21 February 2012]. 35. Ibid. 36. Freedom of Information request (by the author) 21-03-2011-114944-007, available at http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/11C19C76-721F-4A09-975CCCDB36BD39CF/0/FOI_21032011114944007_Conscientious_Objectors.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]. Further, (not entirely consistent) official information is available in: Advisory Committee on Conscientious Objectors, Annual Report 2007/08, available at http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/1043A1A3-DF1A-46E7-853494BBEDE07932/0/acco_annreport0708.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]; Freedom of Information request 01-06-2011-170837-002, available at http://www. mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/55452707-14B4-40AC-BE89-9A069D18C107/0/FOI_ 06012011170837002_Conscientious_Objectors.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]. 37. For the current provisions relating to the Army see Queens Regulations, chap 12, part 2. 38. Freedom of Information request 21-03-2011-114944-007. 39. ‘Selective Conscientious Objection in the Aftermath of Iraq: Reconsidering Objection to a Specific War’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 12/5 (2010), 665–88. 40. See further House of Commons Select Committee, Ev. 175–6, 199. 41. For example, see BBC2, ‘Conscientious Objector’ Newsnight, 7 November 2003. Transcript available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/ 3248689.stm [accessed 21 February 2012]. 42. Bibbings, L.S., ‘Conscious Decisions’, Socialist Lawyer, June 2011, 34–6, http:// www.haldane.org/socialistlawyer/ [accessed 21 February 2012] 43. For example, see: Newsnight ; posts by ‘telec’ and ‘gallowglass’ at http://www.arrse. co.uk/intelligence-cell/157036-conscientious-objectors.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. 44. http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/CorporatePublications/ PersonnelPublications/EqualityandDiversity/Gender/WomenInCombat.htm [accessed 21 February 2012]. 45. The Big Issue. 46. See BBC, 5 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8551245.stm [accessed 21 February 2012]; R. v Glenton (Joe John) [2010] EWCA Crim 930.

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47. Telegraph, 17 December 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ defence/8209595/Navy-medic-loses-appeal-over-objections-to-Afghan-duty.html [accessed 21 February 2012]; Guardian, 15 December 2010, http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/conscientious-objector-navy-afghanwar [accessed 21 February 2012]; Independent, 27 March 2011, http://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/navy-medic-may-face-10year-sentencefor-disobedience-2254131.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. 48. The Big Issue. 49. See: Freedom of Information request 21-03-2011-114944-007; Advisory Committee on Conscientious Objectors. 50. See: BBC, 16 February 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm [accessed 21 February 2012]; Guardian, 7 March 2003, http://www.guardian.co. uk/politics/2003/mar/07/highereducation.iraq [accessed 21 February 2012]. 51. See, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYtlR9F5Ilo&feature=related [accessed 21 February 2012]; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1X9HsotKag [accessed 21 February 2012]; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKj3vH4YQY [accessed 21 February 2012]. 52. Bibbings, ‘Boys Will Be Boys’.

4 Trespassing on the ‘Trench-Fighter’s Story’: (Re)-Imagining the Female Combatant of the First World War Libby Murphy

The First World War gave rise to narrative patterns that for almost a century shaped the ways in which the war could be imagined and the types of war stories that could be told. Over time, as Margaret Darrow explains, the ‘trenchfighter’s story’ – the story of the men who fought in the trenches of the Western Front – drowned out all other war stories, including those of non-infantry combatants, of non-combatant support personnel, war workers and civilians.1 Only men – ‘trench-fighting’ men – it was assumed, had the ability or the right to speak about the war. A narrow definition of the war experience as combat or trench experience, and of war literature as ‘authentic’ autobiography, emerged as the dominant paradigm of subsequent imaginative and historiographical treatments of the war for most of the twentieth century.2 Over the century the war shifted from that of a just war to an absurd war, but the focus remained on the ‘trench-fighter’s story’ as the authentic experience from which meaning could be created. A few women managed to serve as ‘trench-fighters’ during the First World War. The Englishwoman Flora Sandes, who fought with the Serbian army, is one legendary example, as is Maria Botchkareva, who joined the Russian army in 1914 and later founded the ‘Battalion of Death’, used for recruitment and propaganda. If these women represent a minority in terms of numbers of combatants, they occupied a disproportionately large place in the contemporary cultural imaginary – as figures whose actions radically disrupted gender norms, inspiring fear in some and hope in others. They took their place in the public imagination alongside figures like the Amazons, Joan of Arc, cross-dressing 55

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women soldiers from the historical past, and camp followers such as the French cantinières and vivandières, who sold food and drink to soldiers and whose mobile canteens were sites of soldier recreation and social activity.3 As Thomas Cardoza explains, the cantinières and viviandières enjoyed official army recognition during the Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and Second Empire, assuming over time a role that was more ‘symbolic’ than ‘practical’, as morale boosters for soldiers. The French army gradually eliminated the cantinières-vivandières in the years leading up to the First World War. Even in support roles, women’s presence was seen as threatening the gender ideology of the military.4 Interestingly, the American Red Cross reinvented such traditionally feminine roles for women as Donut Dollies in the Vietnam War, as Kara Dixon Vuic discusses in this volume. During the First World War thousands of militarized women’s auxiliary forces served in the armies of Great Britain, Russia, Serbia, Austria and the United States. While women were increasingly associated with soldiers, the female combatant remained a powerful and distinct category. As Joanna Bourke argues, this fascination with armed women soldiers remained powerful ‘[throughout the twentieth century]’ with ‘novels, short stories, magazine articles, and autobiographies [indulging] the demand to hear more about female combatants’.5 This chapter draws upon the fields of military and social history, political science, and literary and media studies to analyse representations of female combatants in the twentieth century. The chapter begins with a short reflection on the work that imaginative fiction can perform in creating historical meaning. It then moves to an examination of the imagined figure of the poilue (female French infantry soldier) that circulated in literary and visual culture during the First World War in France. The poilue was an imaginary character used for expressing a variety of opinions about women’s participation in the war effort. One literary articulation of the poilue fantasy—the serial novel La Poilue (1915–1916) – borrowed textual legitimacy from the ‘trench fighter’s story’ in order to subvert a number of gendered stereotypes that marginalized women in the war effort and in public life. Significantly, similar stereotypes continue to structure attitudes about women’s participation in the military today. The chapter concludes with an examination of the recent film La France (2007), which uses the same narrative conceit as La Poilue – that of a cross-dressing female soldier in the First World War – to mount a very different critique of war through gender. In this contemporary re-imagining of the poilue, the fantasy of the female combatant serves not to include women in the militarist paradigm, but to liberate men and contemporary memory from the ‘trench-fighter’s story’.

Imaginative Trespassing as Historical Inquiry Since the late 1980s historians have been analysing the myths structuring our understanding of the First World War, including the role that gender has played in the creation and transmission of those myths. They have been aided in this task by literary scholars, novelists and filmmakers who have turned their attention to the First World War, arguing that imaginative works do not just reflect but also produce knowledge about the historical past.

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The concept of la culture de guerre or ‘war culture’ has been useful for thinking about the role of imagination in the creation of meaning during and after the First World War. Understood as the network of representational ‘means through which contemporaries understood the conflict and persuaded themselves to continue fighting’, the concept of ‘war culture’ includes the entire field of representations produced during and after the conflict.6 Such representations include first-hand ‘trench-fighter’ stories, but also works of journalism and imaginative literature, popular media such as cartoons, illustrations, and photographs, music-hall performance and cinema. The ‘war culture’ in which ordinary people were situated both reflected and inflected their understanding of the war. Claire M. Tylee, in her work on British women’s writing about the First World War, argues that women, as civilians and non-combatants, wrote not just ‘to express what their varied war-experience was like, but also to publish opinions about the war, and to try to enter imaginatively into areas of war experience other than their own’.7 This gesture of ‘entering imaginatively’ into areas of war experience that were not based on first-hand experience was politically and professionally risky. As Margaret R. Higonnet explains, ‘[the] woman writer who trespasses onto the territory of war fiction transgresses many taboos. First and most important, she articulates knowledge of a “line of battle” presumed to be directly known and lived only by men’.8

Les Poilues: Heroines of the Home Front For French women writers this ‘line of battle’ was particularly exclusionary. As Margaret Darrow has shown, the French government, unlike the governments of Great Britain or the United States, made the decision not to grant military status to women performing support roles for the army, but to hire them as civilian employees instead. It was assumed that militarizing women would emasculate men, undermining what feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe describes as the male ‘uniqueness and superiority’ that in the short term bolstered soldier morale and in the long term ‘[justified] [men’s] dominant position in the social order.’9 Keeping women out of uniform meant that any direct equation between war work and soldiering or between the war effort and future voting rights could be avoided. The government’s decision not to militarize women may have kept women soldiers out of the military hierarchy, but it did not keep them out of the imaginative sphere of wartime print and popular culture. ‘Girls in Horizon Blue’, as Darrow calls them, first gained visibility during the brief period of debate over the prospect of militarizing women she has identified between the spring and fall of 1915. These poilues, as they were called, continued to inhabit the French popular imaginary after the debate about women’s militarization was closed.10 The figure of the poilue survived despite, or perhaps because of, the absence of real, historical French women soldiers and functioned as a site within the wider discussion of women’s war roles for the expression of fantasies and anxieties about gender identities and national identities in wartime. The conflicting demands placed upon the poilue figure meant, however, that no stable or unified fantasy of the female soldier emerged.

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The dominant treatment of militarized women was ironic and derisory. In the bawdy illustrated magazine La Vie Parisienne, (Parisian Life) the majority of drawings of the female soldier served to reinforce traditional gender roles and stereotypes and to give a voice and outlet to heterosexual soldier desire. In 1915, illustrator Fabien Fabiano presented the possibility of ‘Female Mobilization’ in a playful, burlesque mode. ‘You’ll see’, one captions reads, ‘that in the Great War Feminism will Also be Victorious’. One image features a ‘Ministresse’ with top hat and monocle, the caption stating: ‘we need a good Feminister’. The same series features an equally busty poilue serving in the ‘auxiliary services, of course’.11 In his 1916 cartoon, the artist Valdès provided a visual commentary upon the War Ministry’s decision that ‘women will need to replace, wherever possible, auxiliary soldiers’. Valdès’ sketches feature curvacious and flirtatious women secretaries, barbers, batwomen, cooks and orderlies (in horizon blue) whose contributions to the war effort come from their ‘grace and charm’, represented as ample breasts and hips, and not from the actual work they perform. By insisting on the sexualized bodies of women war workers, these kinds of images deprive women’s participation in the war effort of dignity and political capital.12 A month later, an article by Marcel Boulenger described the work of poilues of the Parisian home front. The most authentic and valorized poilues were women who earned a military stripe for every baby born as the result of a soldier furlough. Women served the war effort – and earned the title of poilue – Boulenger suggested, by embracing the ‘natural’ mission of Republican motherhood.13 Alongside such pro-natalist approaches, postcards represented the always hypothetical female soldier taking up arms and displaying the same courage and patriotic devotion as the poilu. One postcard of a smiling woman in horizon blue holding a bayonnette reads, ‘If need be, les poilues will come lend you a hand’.14 Total war called for the emotional, intellectual and economic mobilization – if not militarization – of the entire civilian population. The fictitious figure of the female combatant would be a powerful tool for imaginatively closing the gap between the front line and the home front – a gap that was necessary for upholding a traditional gender ideology and yet problematic for asserting a unified nationalist ideology.

La Poilue: From Midinette to Trench-Fighter The fantasy of la poilue as a courageous and capable fighter ready to cross into the front lines at a moment’s notice was developed in the serial novel La Poilue, published anonymously in L’Œuvre beginning in November 1915, around the time when debates about the militarization of women began to taper off in the mainstream press.15 While the novel’s author is unknown, there is every reason to believe that La Poilue is at least partly the work of the pro-war feminist journalist, editor and novelist Annie de Pène, a regular contributor to L’Œuvre and the companion of the paper’s editor-in-chief Gustave Téry.16 Annie de Pène was one of a limited number of women journalists allowed access to the combat zone in the early months of the war. Her 1915 Une femme dans la tranchée (A Woman in the Trench), a collection of reportages

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from her trip to Furnes and Pervyse, Belgium in late fall 1914, were published by L’Œuvre’s (Work) special press sometime in 1915 before the paper resumed daily publication in September. In A Woman in the Trench, De Pène positions herself as a conspicuous outsider, commenting on the suspicions she arouses as a single woman travelling in the war zone. She then stages her own promotion to eye-witness of the ‘trench-fighter’s story’, insisting that ‘unless you’ve seen with your own eyes the spectacle of a living trench [. . .] you cannot know what it is’.17 In La Poilue, a number of descriptive passages of the sights and sounds of the trenches are reprinted word-for-word from De Pène’s A Woman in the Trench. This pattern of reworking journalistic reportage as war fiction has likewise been identified in British women’s writing.18 In the case of La Poilue, these passages ground the far-fetched story of the cross-dressing woman soldier in a realistic, though not graphic, depiction of the front lines like those found in patriotic fictions by soldier-writers such as René Benjamin in his 1915 best-seller Gaspard. Like Benjamin’s Gaspard, Lina Martin, the heroine of La Poilue, is a working-class Parisian who prides herself on her ‘gift of the gab’. A seamstresssaleswoman or midinette, Lina leaves her job in a prominent Parisian couture house, swaps identities with a wounded soldier, and goes to the front to warn her lover of the presence of a spy in his ranks. Along the way, she develops a passion for combat, acquires trench knowledge, including soldier slang and other forms of soldier sociability, and develops an ironic distance from the civilian population. She resembles the working-class, work-shirking, wise-cracking male poilu (infantry soldier) common in French ‘war culture’.19 The arguments Lina advances to convince the wounded soldier that she should take his place in the trenches undermine the notion of a division of labour between the sexes, insisting instead upon women’s instinctive resourcefulness and adaptability. These traits were key tenets of the wartime concept of débrouillardise (resourcefulness) or le système-D – a survival strategy commonly attributed to French soldiers: ‘Tell me women in Montenegro aren’t fighting in the war . . . that they aren’t doing it even though nobody has taught them how. There are many things people thought women were incapable of and that they manage as well as, if not better than men. [. . .] just look at women pilots, coach drivers, chauffeurs, billposters, munitions workers,—was that women’s work?—and what about farm workers! who are making sure we all have bread this winter, and vegetables, food on the table, you know! Haven’t they done the work of men? And how many men from the cities wouldn’t have shown the same endurance! And then, and then, once you’ve jumped in, you figure it out [on se débrouille]. A cat is not an aquatic animal, is it? Still, if you throw it in the water, it swims, instinctively, to stay alive.’20

The ‘men from the cities’, whose ‘endurance’ Lina calls into question, are depicted in the scenes of La Poilue set in the pre-war milieu of the Parisian

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fashion industry. The same hen-pecked husbands and greedy industrialists who haunt the couture houses will be shirkers or spies during the war. Meanwhile Lina’s status as a working-class ‘New Woman’ – an independent, intelligent, adventurous single woman making a living on her own in Paris – provides her with the skills she will need to serve her country as a cross-dressing soldier. Her work and sociability prepare her for life in the squad, but also allow her to observe and ultimately expose the machinations of the German spy Otto Becker. Lina’s youthful and feisty – but, crucially, virtuous – femininity does not threaten bourgeois morality. Indeed, this version of femininity is valourized and put to the service of nationalist ideology. Lina’s refusal of the sexual advances of foreign suitors, her critique of Germanic masculinity, and her easy adoption of masculine military sociability at the front establish her credentials as a patriot and distance her from the sexualized figure of the female spy or the camp follower. If Lina is the only cross-dressing female combatant in the novel, the warscape of La Poilue is not reserved exclusively for men. Fearless women like Lina – albeit much older and less physically attractive ones – find themselves caught in the war zone. The wounded soldier Jules Biot tells the story of a kindly old woman who was making fries for a group of soldiers billeted in her town when her house was suddenly shelled by the Germans. The woman calmly continued dishing out her fries ‘sans se biler’ – a famous poilu expression – without worrying about the bombs falling around her.21 Lina later encounters a couple of old, peasant women who exhibit the same ‘sang froid’ as they calmly lead their cow home through an artillery barrage, ‘heedless of the danger’.22 The calmness of these old women is completely unrealistic. Yet, depictions of soldiers smiling as they go over the top or calmly playing cards while bombs fall around them were common in early accounts of the war, including those written by soldiers. More interesting is the critique that La Poilue mounts of such overly optimistic depictions of soldier courage. Once at the front, Lina experiences combat and sees dead bodies. She fires her gun and throws grenades, never shying away from danger or succumbing to fear or fatigue. Ultimately, Lina’s credentials as a ‘trench-fighter’ are secured by the ironic distance she takes from civilian conceptions of French military masculinity, rather than by imitating hyper-masculinity, as Phoebe Godfrey explores in this volume in regard to female interrogators in the Iraq War. The technique of exposing bourrage de crâne (skull-stuffing) in a serial novel was developed further in Le Feu (Under Fire) – the hugely successful serial novel by soldier-novelist Henri Barbusse, published at L’Œuvre just six months after the end of La Poilue.23 In one scene in La Poilue in which the soldiers discuss fear under fire, the peasant called Sénateur insists that, while he is never tempted to flee from danger, he ‘isn’t a glorious soldier [. . .].’ ‘I’m scared stiff’, Sénateur frankly admits, ‘I go over the top like everybody else, but I’m scared stiff—I can’t help it’. It is only in the ‘damned newspapers’, he goes on to explain, that writers tell tall tales of soldiers going into battle as they would go to ‘a wedding, with the canon for a fiddler’.24 As a ‘trench-fighter’, Lina holds the same credentials as Sénateur for critiquing civilian accounts of the war. She impresses her trench buddy, the journalist and serial novelist Henri Barmille (a likely reference to Henri Barbusse),

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when she expertly comments upon an ‘idiotic story’ in the press, asking ‘Don’t you find these made up stories about [the soldier’s] so-called way of life at the front exasperating?’.25 The reader is invited to accept La Poilue as a story closer to verisimilitude, despite its female protagonist, than the bourrage de crâne peddled in the mainstream press. The myth of the female soldier, La Poilue suggests, is ultimately no more far-fetched than the myth of the ‘glorious’ male soldier. In a later newspaper scene, one of the men reads a report of a young Russian woman who was able to fight at the front for six months without having her identity discovered. Lina reacts to the men’s scepticism, insisting ‘You don’t know what a woman, even a frail woman, is capable of when she wants something’.26 The men weigh in on the likelihood of such a story before consulting with the most respected man of the squad, Henri Barmille. However much the men may poke fun at the serial novel and at journalistic representations of the war, they and Lina repeatedly turn to Barmille, ‘author of one of the most beautiful books of the time’, as a moral and epistemological compass.27 Barmille’s verdict is that ‘anything’, including the story of the female Russian soldier, ‘is possible’.28 No attempt is made to suggest that the story of Lina Martin as poilue is factual. Instead, the text points to the instability of wartime factuality and invites readers to question not just the text they are reading, but all war stories in the popular press. Near the end of the novel, Lina muses to herself: ‘Honestly, if somebody wrote my story, nobody would believe it were true . . . In a good book, it would be unacceptable . . . at best, it would be fit for a serial novel’.29 What the serial novel lacked in literary and cultural prestige, it made up for in visibility and in generic flexibility and open-endedness. The hybridity of L’Œuvre’s serial novels – combining elements of reportage, editorial and faits divers with features of the adventure novel and the love story – made them effective tools for social, political and cultural critique.30 La Poilue enjoyed at least enough popular success to be published as a free-standing volume by Albin Michel in 1916. Meanwhile L’Œuvre continued to grant significant column space to stories of women’s war experiences while also soliciting stories from soldier-writers at the front. In her regular column ‘Ouvrages de dames’ (a play on the French expression for needlework), Annie de Pène chronicled the evolution of women’s war work, championing the cause of home front poilues until her death in October 1918 from Spanish influenza.31

Daughters of the Poilue The presence today of significant numbers of women in militaries all over the world means that the woman soldier has, in our contemporary imagination, become, as Cynthia Enloe has argued, a highly visible, globalized image of both the modern military and the modern woman.32 If women are no longer excluded from the military, the female combatant remains a controversial figure. Many of the arguments advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century for women’s exclusion from certain military positions are still advanced today. Despite the increased emphasis placed on technologies that render irrelevant

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physical differences such as size and strength between male and female soldiers, women’s biological differences as child-bearers are still invoked as arguments for limiting women’s participation in combat roles. Despite the relatively large numbers of women soldiers in France – roughly 13% of the military in 2005 – certain deep-seated cultural anxieties about the female combatant remain largely unchanged since the First World War.33 A 1994 report on gender policy in the French military noted that, ‘A woman’s role is to give life and not death. For this reason alone it is not desirable for mothers to take direct part in battle’.34 This policy statement reflects an attitude about women’s ‘natural’ roles as life-givers (mothers) or life-sustainers (nurses) as opposed to life-takers that was widespread during the First World War. Michel Martin pointed out in the early 1980s that ‘combat roles’ in the French military ‘no longer [constituted] the center of the institution’ on a practical level.35 Still, as long as combat remains symbolically at the centre of the military, women will continue to be kept at its periphery. This is true in many modern militaries where, even when the issue of combat is not directly invoked, issues related to women’s potential as child-bearers – issues of pregnancy, child care and related absenteeism, and even menstruation – are used to ‘construct a essentialist barricade’ against women’s full integration in the military.36 Martin also pointed to the ‘persistence’, especially before the 1960s, of ‘heroic norms in the French military collective psyche’ that explained in part why even after women were allowed into the military the ‘image mirrored back’ to them by men was ‘more often that of the healing figure, the devoted nurse, if not the pleasure-giving camp-follower, than that of an equal partner’.37 On this point, the example of French women Resistance fighters is illuminating. The long-standing ‘prejudice in France against women fighters’ was challenged, but not overturned, by the active roles – including in a few cases combat roles – women assumed in the French Resistance and in the auxiliary corps of the Free French forces.38 Even if the zones of guerilla-style Resistance fighting in Occupied France were more fluid than the battle lines of the First World War, both war zones were ideologically segregated according to gender. Women’s engagement in dangerous liaison or transport missions, for example, did not translate into a widespread acceptance of women’s aptitude for or effectiveness in combat roles or command positions within the Resistance.39 As Luc Capdevila explains, the highly mediatized image of the gun-carrying woman Resistance fighter marching at the head of Liberation parades masks the reality of the refusal during the war of most Resistance leaders to arm women or to allow them to assume active combat roles.40 The ‘ideal feminine type’ celebrated at the Liberation was not the gun-toting ‘partisane’ but the ‘ménagère’ – the ‘housewife’ or performer of domestic and support duties. In fact, women who had stepped visibly outside of these support roles were sometimes accused of sexual impropriety. If their heads were not shaved like those of the famous ‘horizontal collaborators’ or tondues, their reputations nevertheless had to be destroyed in order for French male virility and the gendered hierarchy built upon it to be restored.41 As Cynthia Enloe has shown, when war zones get blurry, ‘the military has to constantly redefine “the front” and “combat” as

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wherever “women” are not. Women may serve the military, but they can never be permitted to be the military. They must remain “camp followers” ’.42 Whatever reality the image of the gun-carrying female Resistance fighter masks, that image, once released into the popular imaginary, becomes available for imaginative reappraisals of both history and contemporary society. Jean-Paul Salomé’s 2008 action film Les Femmes de l’ombre (Female Agents), for example, depicts the adventures of sniper Louise Desfontaine (Sophie Marceau) and her band of gun-carrying female Resistance fighters as they are parachuted into Occupied France. The consensual reading of the Second World War as a just war worth fighting undergirds this re-imagining of the French woman of the Occupation as Resistance fighter and active opponent of Nazism. The film authorizes the extreme liberties it takes with the historical female Resistance fighter’s story by presenting, during the opening credits, a series of black and white Second World War photographs of women combatants from around the world. The film alludes to French collaboration, but uses the story of this female commando unit to replace the image of the female collaborator with that of the female combatant.

Re-Imagining the Poilue Today Unlike the Second World War, which remains legible as a just and necessary war, the First World War is legible to most contemporaries only as an absurd war and as a largely dehistoricized symbol of human suffering and loss. The ‘trench-fighter’s story’ has, therefore, ceded intellegibility and precedence to that of the conscientious objector or pacifist. Many of the novels and films about the First World War that have appeared since the 1980s situate their stories at the margins of the original ‘trench-fighter’s story’ – treating soldier experiences that are historically verifiable but also exceptional: self-mutilation, desertion, execution, Christmas truces. These contemporary re-imaginings of the war often pay rhetorical deference to the ‘trench-fighter’s story’ and to the cultural inheritance of first-hand accounts published during and after the war. Films like Bertrand Tavernier’s Capitaine Conan (1996) or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) (2004) use sophisticated special effects to recreate the chaotic sensory experience of an artillery barrage. In Jean Rouaud’s novel Les Champs d’honneur (Fields of Glory) (1990), the reader witnesses in graphic detail the gas attack that killed the narrator’s great uncle. The narrative fluidity of literary and cinematic points of view are exploited to allow readers or viewers to occupy an intermediate position between eye-witnesses and historians.43 These contemporary reimaginings of the First World War in fiction and film take as their primary imaginative problem the question of how war knowledge is produced – what can be known about the war, by whom and at what historical and cultural moment. Director Serge Bozon’s film La France (2007 France) is a unique case in point. The film uses a bold embrace of anachronism and fantasy as rhetorical devices for retelling the story of the First World War for and through twenty-first

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century sensibilities. Bozon and screenwriter Axelle Ropert tell the story of a misfit squad of deserters who flee the front lines and make their way across the French countryside, heading for escape into Holland. They are joined in their travels by Camille Robin (played by Sylvie Testud), a young woman who has bound her breasts, cut her hair and donned men’s clothing, passing herself off as an adolescent boy. While the squad makes its way toward freedom, Camille believes herself to be heading toward the front lines, where she will attempt to find her husband François. No hyper-realistic special-effects sequences bind the the story of La France to the original ‘trench-fighter’s story’ or position the viewer as eye-witness of combat violence. Insteady, a ghost-like quality dominates the film, shot almost entirely outdoors in peaceful, forested landscapes. This feeling of unreality is intensified by the sudden shifts in tone occasioned by the film’s musical interludes. Suddenly outfitted with makeshift trench instruments and singing in broken harmony, the men perform songs inspired by the sound of 1960s American Sunshine Pop and British psychedelic pop.44 The erupution of 1960s pop melodies into the narrative fully dislodges the story from any notion of historical authenticity and unsettles the boundaries of the war film and the musical. In their slow, gentle gestures, their forms of sociability and their singing, the men offer an alternative sensibility and masculinity to the harsh pragmatics of the early twentieth-century ‘trench-fighter.’ Significantly, the viewer is pushed forward in time to the Vietnam War and the anti-war counter-culture of the 1960s, as the men of the squad sing about youth, innocence and love. The film includes a recurring ballad on the longing and desire of a young blind girl, which is sung by the soldiers from the point of view of the girl. In these moments, as in others, gender as a category of difference separating Camille and the men collapses; neither she nor the men display attributes that are coded as straightforwardly masculine or feminine. In merging the plotline of the cross-dressing female soldier with that of the pacifist male deserter, Bozon reimagines the First World War through a contemporary understanding of gender identities in war as fluid and indeterminate. In the First World War, as the chapters in this volume by Lois S. Bibbings, Jessica Meyer, Hazel Croft and Ana Carden-Coyne show, gendered attributes have been used to shame deserters and conscientious objectors and marginalize the shell-shocked or physically wounded by calling their manhood into question. Interestingly, gendered attributes of kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness, imagination, youthful innocence and creativity are often valourized in the twenty-first century as the traits of a shared, pacifist humanity. There is no reason to believe that Bozon had read La Poilue or was even aware of its existence. He draws upon the enduring fantasy of the female combatant to perform a very different kind of critique of war through gender than that performed in La Poilue. After all, Camille sets off for the front, not to fight, but to find her husband, with whom she shares a powerful bond. As she follows the men on their journey away from the trenches, the squad’s war-weary Lieutenant Paulhan (played by Pascal Greggory) senses in Camille a profound sadness and a suicidal longing. These gentle, damaged souls are bound together by nostalgia for a lost home and a shared refusal to accept the brutality of war.

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In interviews, Bozon describes his desire to avoid ‘historical reconstitution’ of the First World War.45 The true subject of La France, Bozon insists, is the ‘menace of war’ in general, which is ‘unceasing, or even eternal’.46 ‘I could have set [La France] in the present’, Bozon argues.47 In fact, Bozon and Ropert considered setting the film during the Algerian War or the Second World War.48 It was the ‘question of desertion’, Bozon explains, which led them to choose the First World War.49 In deserting from the army and seeking peace and freedom in Holland, the men of this squad are on a desperate mission to escape the soulcrushing violence of war. War, the film suggests, is an experience that cannot be contained within clear battle lines – it brutalizes and traumatizes women as well as men and haunts them long after the immediate experience of violence is over. No happy ending awaits viewers of La France. The men do not make it to Holland, and Camille’s reunion with her husband is anything but blissful. The film ends with Camille’s husband gazing up at the stars from their bedroom window. The melancholy lyrics of Payne and Curtis’ ‘Gospel Lane’ (1969) – which speak of poverty, isolation and death – provide a cold commentary on the possibility of healing for victims of war.

Conclusion Ultimately, La France is a film not about the First World War but about how war can be imagined today. That the First World War can be imagined only as a story of victimization and the violation of universal human rights is a foregone conclusion in La France, as it is in many contemporary re-imaginings of the war.50 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the female combatant’s war experience, that of a soul crushed by war and struggling to survive, takes its place alongside, and indeed inflects, our vision of the soldier’s experience – corroding the gendered stereotypes used to separate women’s war experiences from men’s. The poilue fantasy is a site where gender differences collapse in favour of a consensual narrative, not of Frenchness, as in La Poilue, but of victimhood. This chapter has drawn upon the fields of military and social history, literary and media studies, and political science to show how the figure of the female combatant, both real and imaginary, has been used in a variety of historical and cultural contexts for both challenging and supporting prevailing assumptions about gender and war. If the figure of the female combatant has long been a site for the imaginative projection of fears and fantasies, it was during the First World War that the wholescale intellectual, emotional and economic – if not physical – mobilization of women in wartime became a reality. As the line separating the fact from the fiction of the woman soldier began to collapse in the twentieth century, the fantasy of the female combatant remained available as a tool for social and political critique and for creating new meanings out of old war stories. Fictitious female combatants help us re-imagine historical wars even as real female combatants complicate our understanding of contemporary wars. The changing nature of warfare and the changing composition of modern militaries in the second half of the twentieth century (and now a decade into the twenty-first) have altered our gendered understanding of war, making it

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increasingly difficult for military officials and policy makers to keep women out of combat, as much as they might try. The semi-fictionalized, mass-mediated account of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from Nasiriyah in April 2003 serves as a reminder of the maleability of the female combatant’s war story and of the tenuous space it occupies between fact and fiction.51

Notes 1. Margaret H. Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (New York: Berg, 2000), 4. 2. Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘Not So Quiet in No-Woman’s-Land’, in Gendering War Talk, ed. by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 205–226 (208). 3. Cynthia H. Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 97, 117–19; Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 106–7; Darrow, French Women and the First World War, 237. 4. Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 131, 219. 5. Joanna Bourke, ‘Women Go to War’, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York: NY, Basic Books, 1999), 294–333 (300). 6. Leonard V. Smith, ‘The “Culture de guerre” and French Historiography of the Great War of 1914–1918,’ History Compass 5/6 (2007), 1967–1979 < 10.1111/j.14780542.2007.00484.x> (1967–68). 7. Claire M. Tylee, ‘Verbal Screens and Mental Petticoats: Women’s Writings of the First World War’, Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 13–14 (1987), 125–152 (128). Emphasis added. 8. Higonnet, 206. 9. Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 15. 10. See the April 3, 1915 issue of La Vie Parisienne featuring photos of popular music hall and cabaret performers in the military attire they wore on stage. See also the following trench newspapers available at the Centre de Recherche de L’Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, France: 120 Court (15 August 1916), Le Mouchoir (Christmas 1916), Le Petit écho du 18e Territorial (12 August 1917), Le diable au cor (25 March 1917). 11. Fabien Fabiano, ‘La Mobilisation féminine’, La Vie Parisienne. 23 October 1915, 768–9. This and all subsequent translations are my own. 12. Valdès, ‘Les Petites auxiliaires’, La Vie Parisienne. 26 February 1916, 157–8. 13. Marcel Boulanger, ‘Les Vraies poilues’, La Vie Parisienne. 25 March 25 1916, 225, 228. 14. Serge Zeyons, ‘Les Femmes aussi,’ Le Roman-Photo de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Éditions Hier et demain, 1976), 93–96. 15. La Poilue ran from 1 November 1915 to 10 February 1916. All citations from La Poilue in this chapter come from the 1916 edition La Poilue par Une Première de la Rue de la Paix (Paris: Albin Michel, 1916). 16. For a more detailed account of the remarkable career of Annie de Pène, see Dominique Brechemier, ‘Rencontres: Colette et Annie de Pène’, Cahiers Colette No. 30 (Paris: Société des amis de Colette, 2008), 93–103.

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17. Annie de Pène, Une Femme dans la tranchée (Paris: Imprimerie spéciale de l’Œuvre, 1915), 19. 18. Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–1964 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 30. 19. Libby Murphy, ‘Gavroche and the Great War: Soldier gouaille and the Legend of the poilu’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 2/2, (2009), 121–133. 20. Anon. La Poilue par Une Première de la rue de la Paix (Paris: Albin Michel, 1916), 58–9. 21. Anon., La Poilue, 30. 22. Anon., La Poilue, 79, 84. 23. Le Feu ran from 3 August 1916 to 9 November 1916. 24. Anon., La Poilue, 354. 25. Anon., La Poilue, 336. 26. Anon., La Poilue, 363. 27. Anon., La Poilue, 81. 28. Anon., La Poilue, 364. 29. Anon., La Poilue, 353. 30. Libby Murphy, ‘Newspapers, Novels, and the Comic Book War’, in Patricia Lorcin and Daniel Brewer (eds) France and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 193–209. 31. Brechemier, 101, 93. 32. Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 63–9. 33. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism, 70. 34. 1994 NATO report on France’s policy regarding women in combat positions, cited in Goldstein, War and Gender, 85. 35. Michel L. Martin, ‘From Periphery to Center: Women in the French Military’, Armed Forces and Society 8/2 (1982), pp. 303–333 http://afs.sagepub.com/ content/8/2/303.citation [accessed 21 February 2012] (317). 36. Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 139, and Martin, ‘From Periphery to Center’, 327. 37. Martin, ‘From Periphery to Center’, 326. 38. Goldstein, War and Gender, 78. 39. Luc Capdevila, ‘La mobilisation des femmes dans la France combattante (1940– 1945)’, CLIO. Histoire, femmes et sociétés [On line] 12 (2000) http://clio.revues. org/187?lang=en. See also Goldstein, 78–79. 40. Capdevila, ‘La mobilisation des femmes’, 6. See also S. Saywell, Women in War (Markham, Ont.: Viking, 1985), 39. 41. Capdevila, ‘La mobilisation des femmes’, 8–11. 42. Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, 15. 43. Caroline Eades, ‘La Première Guerre mondiale vue par le cinéma français d’aujourd’hui’, in A. Laserra, N. Leclercq and M. Quaghebeur (eds) Mémoires et Antimémoires littéraires au XXe siècle: La Première Guerre mondiale, Vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 229–249 (242). 44. Mark Peranson, ‘Band on the Run: Serge Bozon’s La France’, Cinema Scope 33: n.d. http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs33/int_peranson_bozon.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. 45. Jean-Philippe Tessé and others, ‘En ligne avec Serge Bozon: Chat des Cahiers sur le bateau d’ARTE,’ Cahiers du cinéma.com 24 May. http://www.cahiersducinema. com/article1132.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. 46. Peranson, ‘Band on the Run’.

68 47. 48. 49. 50.

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Peranson, ‘Band on the Run’. Tessé, ‘En ligne avec Serge Bozon’. Peranson, ‘Band on the Run’. See Leonard V. Smith’s critique of the ‘soldier-as-victim truism’, in The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony in the Great War (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007). 51. The research and writing of this chapter were conducted with the generous support of Oberlin College, The American Philosophical Society, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and Notre Dame University.

5 Courage, Conflict and Activism: Transnational Feminist Peace Movements, 1900 to the Present Day Laurie R. Cohen

Berlin Feminists and a Memphis ‘New Woman’ In April 1904, 40-year-old Mary Church Terrell of Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of two former slaves, received an invitation to give a speech at the Third Quinquennial Meeting of the International Congress of Women (ICW) in Berlin, Germany. It would take place at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall and be attended by over 2,000 people. As she recalled: It took my breath away for a second, for I had no idea that such an invitation would be extended to me. I wanted very much to accept the invitation, of course. . . . As soon as I reached Berlin some of the German women who discovered that I spoke German began to ask me about ,die Negerin‘ (the Negress) from the United States whom they were expecting. At first I thought they knew I was that individual and this was the German way of telling me so. But I soon learned that I was mistaken.1

Terrell ended up identifying herself to them and explained her motivation for attending the conference: I had only one thought in mind. I wanted to place the colored women of the United States in the most favorable light possible. I represented, not only the colored women of my own country but, since I was the only woman taking part in the International Congress who had a drop of African blood in her veins, I represented the whole continent of Africa as well.2

Mary Church Terrell’s recollection about her transatlantic crossing and her expectations as a speaker at an international women’s conference reveal several 69

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key qualities of the feminist New Woman of her time: a strong sense of self and of women’s solidarity, concern about the oppressive state of the world, and a clear interest in political, including feminist, activism. Yet, this brief passage also indicates that part of belonging to female internationalism included national pride. Terrell, the first President of the National Association of Colored Women (1896–1901), was focused on her identity as a representative of African Americans. Furthermore, well-meaning internationalists appeared to have little practice in challenging their own ethnic stereotyping or biases. Terrell’s welcoming German colleagues, she recalled, did not initially ‘see’ her; they had not expected a woman of colour to be able to speak German. In the 1990s, feminist theorists critiqued the idea of ‘global sisterhood’, as making women’s interests and identities seem uniform. They introduced a new term, ‘intersectionality’, which recognized that individuals have multiple identities, based on important factors such as class, ‘race’, religion, gender and sexual orientation.3 This concept added more complexity to the binary relationship of, for instance, woman/man and feminine/masculine. Sociologist Leslie McCall suggests investigating which of these factors may directly or subtly influence women’s discrimination and oppression, including within feminist movements themselves.4 This chapter examines the early feminist peace movement through the lens of intersectionality, which provides additional insights into the challenges and conflicts women faced in crafting both an internationalist and feminist peace culture. By comparing early peace feminism with feminist peace organizations today, this chapter also identifies continuities and changes in the current feminist transnational peace movement. This longer perspective over the century enables us to better appreciate the courage of these women and assess their activist accomplishments. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that combines feminist gender analysis with transnational history and the sociology of peace movements and peace activism, this chapter has two aims: to investigate changing gender norms and their relationship to the emergence and growth of the feminist peace movement; and to highlight two main contradictions of persistent nationalist susceptibilities and ethnic prejudices in the first (and still most significant) feminist peace organization today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). I begin by explaining the terms internationalism and transnationalism in the framework of the women’s movement, which establishes the context for the following review of the early years of women’s peace activism. Then I examine WILPF’s formative years and contextualize their post-war decision to remain a separate women’s organization. I conclude by comparing WILPF’s ideas and actions with those of a new and highly influential US-based feminist peace group, Code Pink.5

Nationalism, the ‘old Internationalism’ and Transnationalism At the outbreak of the First World War in late July 1914, the vast majority of the members of the international women’s movements – adherents of the International Council of Women (ICW) and its 1902 offspring, the International

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Women’s Suffrage Association (IWSA) – put loyalty to the nation-state at war above their international solidarity, cancelling their international meetings. As the war continued, they aided their various nations’ relief efforts (e.g. serving in Red Cross and Patriotic Societies, replacing men in factories, caring for refugees and orphaned children). However, a few courageous members thought they could serve ‘their country’ and humanity best by putting their efforts into stopping the war. United, they remained committed to the belief, ‘that international disputes should be settled by pacific means [and] that the parliamentary franchise should be extended to women’.6 The group weighed equally their opposition to violence to resolve conflicts and their promotion of justice, beginning with a woman’s right to vote, propelling a new women’s international peace movement. Specifically, they protested at what they saw as the madness of militarism and women’s suffering in war, including rape. They called for mutual understanding and cooperation between nations and demanded that women share in the responsibility of affecting political change. Victorious generals and heads of state handled the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919 and expressly barred these feminist pacifists (and any women whatsoever) from participating. Undeterred, the activists organized an alternative peace congress in Zurich, Switzerland, which represented women from 16 national sections. British suffragist and pacifist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence reflected the feeling of most participants when she recalled the May 1919 congress as ‘perhaps the most moving experience of my life’.7 The WILPF women then brought their resolutions to Paris. Once again, they were ignored. Significantly, it took 80 years – until 2000 – for the transnational feminist peace movement to achieve one of its long-term key goals: the legally binding and unanimous adoption of a formal statement on women, peace and security that recognizes the role of women in peace processes and acknowledges that peace is linked with equality between women and men (United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325)8 . Leopoldina Kulka, an Austrian participant in Zurich, explained the uniqueness of WILPF’s commitment to internationalism as compared to that of the ICW and IWSA: The essential difference between the old and the new Women’s International is that the previous one used internationalism as a tool to obtain their rights . . . but for [WILPF], internationalism itself is the goal. The aim is to overcome nationalism by internationalism.9

WILPF’s first international president, leading pacifist and US Hull House co-founder Jane Addams, explained this ‘new’ internationalism thus: ‘internationalism . . . surrounds and completes national life’.10 The term transnationalism – used in this chapter to indicate a fundamentally global concern that is not based on a nation-state division of the world – is a contemporary term that captures the ‘new international’ spirit of global cooperation, peace and justice that Kulka, Jane Addams and other founding WILPF members had in mind. Furthermore, as the term internationalism suggests party politics (e.g. Labour, Socialist or Communist), the word transnationalism better situates these feminist pacifists in their non-party political framework.11

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Mary Church Terrell, the only African-American delegate to attend the Zurich congress, demonstrated there that she too was a transnationalist feminist pacifist. She argued that there could be no world peace without ethnic justice. Her resolution on ‘race equality’ passed unanimously: ‘We believe no human being should be deprived of an education, prevented from earning a living, debarred from any legitimate pursuit in which he [sic] wishes to engage or be subjected to any humiliation, on account of race or colour’.12 However, conflicts within this fledgling transnationalist feminist peace movement soon arose. That is, the activists experienced difficulties in living up to their ideals of a transnational peace culture in practice. Expressing her frustration at what she saw as the movement’s lack of commitment with regard to racial relations, for example, Terrell, still in Zurich, said: ‘[White people] might talk about permanent peace till doomsday, but the world will never have it until the dark races are given a square deal’.13 For a long time this clear-eyed assessment – holding these ‘transnationalists’ to account, in part also because such (‘unsisterly’) criticism was considered too fractious to withstand – was excluded in historical writings by and about WILPF.

The Beginnings of Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Peace Activism Between 1904 and 1914, the number of National Councils that made up the international women’s movement (ICW and IWSA) totalled 26. Its mostly white members came from North America, Europe (including Russia), Australia and New Zealand. Apart from further promoting women’s rights to education, work, the vote and equal pay – examples of admitting women to society as equals – another increasingly prominent issue was peace. During these years, while women’s organizations (and individuals, too) differed as to which subject to concentrate on – women in higher education, women’s suffrage or breadand-butter issues – the supposedly ‘non-political’ issue of universal peace served as a bridge. Consensus could easily be found, for example, in the proposal for a History curriculum that would highlight diplomatic solutions to international conflicts and diminish History’s focus on battles and generals. However, it was often middle-class, educated and white men who headed the numerous national ‘Friends of Peace Societies’ that made up the international peace movement at this time. Female membership was encouraged to the extent that women ‘naturally’ symbolized non-aggressive human nature and morality: ‘[The movement] reasoned that women were more naturally opposed to warfare than were men; gentle and moderate by nature, women could expect from war only anxiety and deprivation of their loved ones’.14 Anna Garlin Spencer, who was among the most active women in the New York Peace Society, harshly criticized the American peace movement’s patriarchal aspects, which saw the group organized around strictly defined male and female social roles and where the woman’s role was subordinated to the man’s: ‘There are four national bodies, all well endowed, and very masculine in their point of view. It would seem they have as little use for women and their points of view as have the militarists’.15 Feminist pacifist Ernestine Fürth, living in Austria, claimed the

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international peace movement had ‘not yet learned to appreciate the value of women’s cooperation’.16 By 1914, however, a growing synergy between the peace and feminist movements was visible. Official representatives of the ICW and IWSA for the very first time helped coordinate the 1914 Universal Peace Congress, scheduled to take place in September in Vienna, and included feminist keynote speakers on the programme. Soon after Austria–Hungary’s July 1914 ultimatum to Serbia, however, the Congress was cancelled. The war halted this collaboration and it has only recently begun to re-emerge. In fact, the outbreak of the First World War led to a major shift in both movements. In part, this happened as a result of prevailing gender norms. Since military service of men was compulsory, male members of the peace movement were enlisted or even volunteered, believing it their duty to defend their nation. Others refused to do so and were arrested as conscientious objectors. Some, such as Austrian Alfred Hermann Fried, went into exile. According to his colleague David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University, Fried ‘was driven from Vienna by the mob’.17 Fried’s peace journal, Die Friedens-Warte (The Peace Watch), was banned, signifying not only that his ideas were censored but also that he could no longer financially support himself as he had for the last two decades. While women could be excused for being ‘essentially’ peaceful and thus have more leeway than men to engage in peace activism, it was regarded as a much more serious threat to the gender and military order when men refused war service, as Lois S. Bibbings’ chapter details in this volume. With the international male-led peace movement broken and the ‘old’ international women’s movement restrained (by choice), a few active and articulate transnational feminist leaders seized their opportunity. Their anger at the outbreak of the war, combined with outrage at their marginalization in political circles and their commitment to working to end the war – in spite of public condemnations of disloyalty even by other feminist international leaders – empowered them.18 What actions did these pioneers of the new women’s peace movement take? What were their gender-based ideas? To what extent did they succeed?

The Formative Years of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1919 Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian suffragist and pacifist (and like Terrell, a participant at the ICW 1904 Berlin congress), was appalled by the outbreak of the First World War. Western civilization was threatened, she claimed, and both sexes were responsible. Her first article on the subject was published in the English-language international women’s suffrage journal Jus Suffragii in early August 1914. Curiously, Schwimmer framed her argument according to accepted gender stereotypes: males as war-prone warriors; females as sheepish observers. In this hour of disaster, greater than any imagination is able to grasp, we accuse men and women alike. We all are guilty and responsible for the flames of hatred

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which may burn down the creation and production of millions of brains and hands, and may kill hundreds of thousands of men, whose destiny should have been to build up civilisation. We all are equally guilty – men because they have maintained that spirit of hatred and destruction as an inextinguishable human instinct, and have incessantly nursed it by organising human society in every respect as an immense attacking body; and we women are guilty because we watched that antisocial course without using all our constructive forces to counter-balance the fatal spirit of destruction.19

According to Schwimmer, even anti-militarist men, such as those in the international peace movement, had proved themselves incompetent and inconsequential: ‘All the chirping, peace voices were drowned by the deafening thunder clap of the first shot’.20 American feminist pacifist Fanny Garrison Villard similarly attacked the peace movement’s lack of activity and conviction: ‘I’ve been member of peace societies for many, many years and they arrive nowhere, as what is happening in Europe testifies. They are weak and ineffectual because they are compromisers’.21 From a gender perspective, both women had in effect described the peace movement as ‘emasculated’. Bolstered by the conventional acceptance of peace-loving womanhood, a small group of feminist pacifists on both sides of the Atlantic – including Hungarian Rosika Schwimmer, Austrian Leopoldina Kulka, German Lida Gustava Heymann, British Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Dutch Aletta Jacobs and American Jane Addams – began actively engaging in peace work. Yet conditions were not easy for them. The women pacifists were denounced, their houses were searched, their journals and letters were censored, and they faced incredibly difficult circumstances in crossing national borders to meet. It was their more outspoken socialist and anarchist colleagues Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, however, who ended up in prison. They founded women’s peace parties, established women’s peace libraries and held a spectacular women’s peace congress at The Hague in late April 1915 that was attended by over 1,000 women (and a few men) from belligerent and neutral countries. On Schwimmer’s initiative, the meeting was followed by the formation of women delegations to all of Europe’s prime and/or foreign ministers and the US President – an absolutely unprecedented female political achievement. ‘Brains they say’, Schwimmer argued, ‘have ruled the world till to-day. If brains have brought us to what we are now, I think it is time to allow also our hearts to speak . . . Let us, mothers, only try to do good by going to kings and emperors, without any other danger than a refusal!’.22 The women directly urged the leaders of each nation to read their Hague resolutions and ernestly consider immediate and lasting peace talks. The prevalent gender (and class) norms enabled such formal visits to occur. Heads of state did not want to lose face by rejecting an audience of white, middle-aged, middle and upper-class ‘mothers’. After all, gendered war rhetoric emphasized men’s duty to protect ‘the women at home’, and this included the courtesy of listening to them on occasion. Simultaneously, virtually all of the (male-dominated) mainstream national newspapers ridiculed the women’s efforts. Stereotypes suggested that women could not possibly grasp the business

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of war and that in any case, these women would not be told the truth. When the women returned home to report on their confidential talks, ridicule often turned into accusations of subversion. Exemplary is the case of the outcry against Jane Addams for ‘strip[ping soldiers] of honor and courage’, which followed her speech in New York’s Carnegie Hall in July 1915.23 In it she repeated a claim she was told about European soldiers who were supplied with alcohol to induce them to fight. In reality, WILPF’s initiative visibly demonstrated transnational feminist pacifists leading and encouraging the nation-states towards a just peace settlement. Their assessments may have been ignored in 1915 (and 1919), but not entirely forgotten, as President Woodrow Wilson’s 14th Point on a ‘general association of nations’ made clear. As German WILPF activist and later President, Gertrud Baer, recalled years later, theirs was ‘the first women’s organization in modern history to embrace the [permanent peace] principles which up to that time had been considered as the domain of man’.24

Nationalism and Prejudice in WILPF in the 1920s For all their idealism, hard work and unification through common wartime experiences, as well as their conventional acceptance of women’s peaceful ‘natures’ and empathy for women on opposing sides of war, nationalism and ethnocentricity troubled the movement in the inter-war period, along with other factors.25 Both Terrell’s and Schwimmer’s alienating experiences of nationalism and ethnic bias from within WILPF’s US Section illustrate this point. Rosika Schwimmer was an assimilated Hungarian Jew who prior to the war had lived and worked in feminist networks all over Europe. Comfortable in Budapest as in Vienna, London, Berlin or Stockholm, she became the leader of the Hungarian feminist suffrage movement in 1897. Inspired especially by the first woman Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Bertha von Suttner, she became interested in the peace movement.26 In 1914 Schwimmer had to flee England or risk internment because of her status as an enemy alien. Indeed, Matthew Stibbes’ chapter in this volume demonstrates the kind of gender-based horrors that civilians faced when interned. Initially welcomed by the leadership of the feminist suffrage movement to the United States in October 1914, Schwimmer travelled the country, met President Wilson and lectured passionately at women’s clubs about the terrifying violence of the war and what ‘neutral’ American women could do to stop it. Her lectures clearly resonated with her large audiences. Based on this welcome, Schwimmer thought she had found a new home in America. Indeed, Jane Addams credited Schwimmer with co-initiating the US Women’s Peace Party in January 1915, which led almost directly to the April 1915 women’s peace congress in The Hague. When right-wing organizations rumoured that Schwimmer was a German spy, however, some leading women in the US, including members of WILPF’s US section, began to doubt her. They and others accused ‘Madame Schwimmer’ – as she was addressed by supporters and foes alike, a title that underlined her ‘foreignness’ – of interfering in domestic affairs.27 Nationalism

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underpinned the targeting and bullying of her, exemplifying the widespread susceptibility to ethnocentricity even from within the women’s peace movement. Her distrust of WILPF’s US section notwithstanding, Schwimmer moved to the US in 1921, at the age of 44, after having fled the anti-Semitic dictatorship of Hungary’s Admiral Horthy. She applied for US citizenship, but a conflict arose based on her activism, her ‘uncompromising pacifism’: she literally refused to swear to ‘take up arms personally’.28 In 1929 the US Supreme Court rejected her application.29 Moreover, the court feared her ability as a writer and charismatic speaker to influence others to refuse military service. The court ruled that: The influence of conscientious objectors against the use of military force in defense of the principles of our government is apt to be more detrimental than their mere refusal to bear arms. The fact that, by reason of sex, age or other cause, they may be unfit to serve does not lessen their purpose or power to influence others.30

The ironic implication of this unprecedented high court judgement was that it advanced sex equality by requiring female citizens to be prepared to defend the nation with weapons, while simultaneously abandoning the constitutionally protected democratic right of freedom of expression. This did not go unnoticed. This decision stained the US’s reputation of being a leader in world disarmament. It also inspired many citizens worldwide to more loudly proclaim their anti-militarism. Schwimmer and her feminist-pacifist citizenship case moreover also exposed weaknesses in the still separate women’s and peace movements: the US National Woman’s Party, for example, claimed hers was a question of pacifism, not feminism, and did little to support her. Likewise, the US Bureau of Conscientious Objectors considered it a case for the women’s movement, since women could not be drafted.31 Schwimmer’s main US supporters were a few courageous transnationalists, like Jane Addams. She never received US citizenship (even though a new decision in 1946 partially overturned the 1929 ruling).32 Across the Atlantic other WILPF pioneers, such as Helene Stöcker of Germany, faced similar marginalization from male-led national peace groups and conservative women’s organizations. Indeed, Stöcker was among the first forced into exile when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. Like Schwimmer, Stöcker too – for her pacifist and feminist convictions – soon found herself stateless and struggling to survive a new world war. Furthermore, silence surrounds the extent to which, though an atheist, Schwimmer’s Jewish background played a role in the tensions arising between her and WILPF’s US section. More evident is her criticism of many female colleagues for not being more committed to non-violence. Yet it should be noted that whereas many of her close WILPF friends in Austria, Germany and Hungary were Jewish, most of her American counterparts came to pacifism via their Christian beliefs. Though the US branch was secular, prejudices may have played a role. Schwimmer was certainly attacked by the anti-Semitic right-wing US media and it appears that only few US WILPF women stood up in her defence. Yet this must be seen also in the political context of the time. The

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US WILPF branch as a whole was attacked by anti-Communist groups in the early 1920s and was intermittently put under surveillance by the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department (precursor of the FBI).33 The branch reacted by largely keeping a low profile for much of the 1920s. The exact intensity of structural ethnic bias in WILPF at this time is thus difficult to gauge. Mary Church Terrell, for example, did not explicitly criticize her German colleagues in 1904 for their prejudices. It is only in the context of her 1940 recollections that these are made clear. Nor did she publicly denounce her US colleagues in Zurich in 1919, who ‘suggested that she delete some of her references to America’s alleged racial prejudice’ and when she did not, simply rewrote her text.34 The fact is, however, that both transnationalist feminist pacifists Terrell and Schwimmer left WILPF’s US section in 1921 without explicitly recording their reasons. Nationalistic susceptibilities were also on display at WILPF’s International Executive Board meetings, which were dominated by British, French and German members. The socialist-leaning German and French WILPF executives, key actors in the reconciliatory actions between the two countries in these years, clashed with their more conservative British and Scandinavian colleagues over the direction of the League. Whereas the former promoted transnational joint conferences with socialists and trade unionists on the dangers of scientific warfare, the latter emphasized the need for more national policy work: applying pressure to members of parliament and the government. The latter also supported the work of the League of Nations – a Eurocentric nation-state body, headed by British Lord Robert Cecil – and downplayed all other peace work, particularly criticism of the League’s weaknesses (a point directed against German and French executive leaders).35 In short, WILPF’s aim at feminist pacifist transnationalism was thus weakened by the majority of the membership’s resilient nationalism and ethnic prejudices.

Shifting Gender Roles and the Maintenance of Separate Organizations Due in part to wartime experiences, gender roles shifted slightly in Europe and the United States during the 1920s. Overall, certain groups of women gained more rights: the vote, employment (by the Second World War, some even became soldiers), marital and citizen rights. Moreover, militarized masculinity as a leading model for men receded, partially due to the fall-out from the overwhelming deaths and injuries to participants in the First World War, as the chapters in this volume on war and disability demonstrate. Yet, even after the armistice, there were ongoing European civil wars (in Russia), wars of independence (in Ireland, Poland and Ukraine) and paramilitary conflicts (in Germany, Hungary). Against this post-war backdrop, the revived male leadership of the European peace movement began to criticize its own ‘soft’ beginnings. In 1924, Carl von Ossietzky, a charismatic leader of the German peace movement (and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate), demanded that it shed, according to him, its ‘feminine sentimentality’. The movement needed followers as rugged and manly

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as German militarists, he argued.36 Women members would (again) end up playing a marginal role. Indeed, one of the most acknowledged leaders of anticolonial civil disobedience in the 1920s was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who strongly objected to his idea of Satyagraha (the ‘truthforce’) being translated as ‘passive resistance’ instead of as ‘militant non-violence’.37 In other words, the social value accorded manliness was still – if not more – palpable, and leaders of the peace movement recognized its viability: they thus sustained rather than dislodged a gender order that valued ‘masculinity’ over ‘femininity’. Understandably, in this context, women too saw value in maintaining a female-only feminist peace movement. In 1920 WILPF’s International Secretary, Emily Greene Balch, made four points in favour of the gender exclusivity of membership: • ‘In war women are freer than men not being wanted as soldiers’. • ‘It is possible to appeal to women as such as the mothers and nurses of [humanity], as the guardians of life’. • ‘Women are coming quite inexperienced and often quite indifferent into political power’. • ‘Women’s organizations call out and give scope for activity on the part of many women who would be in the background and quite inactive in a joint organization’.38 Such arguments continue to form the rationale for maintaining women’s organizations. Thus whereas some of WILPF’s first transnational leaders considered the need for a women-only peace movement expedient and temporary, the organization as a whole has largely remained for and by women. In short, while a separate spheres ideology tended to underpin women’s subordinate position in the late nineteenth century, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom continued to argue for women’s special qualities and the appropriateness of a peace movement untainted by the interference of masculinist agendas. Crucially, feminist peace movements today still draw on gender assumptions about the differences between men and women in arguing for the specific contribution that women can make in forging peace across the globe.

Code Pink: Contemporary Feminist Transnational Peace Action In November 2002, as a direct response to President George W. Bush’s call to invade Iraq, a new feminist peace group – Code Pink – emerged in the US. By addressing the centuries-old differences in sex and gender roles without legitimizing them, their founding statement resembles Rosika Schwimmer’s 1914 appeal: We call on women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq. We call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters . . . and every ordinary outraged woman willing to be outrageous for peace. Women have been the guardians of life . . . because the men have busied themselves making war.39

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This statement also recalls Jane Addams’ idea of transnationalism, or in her words, the ‘new internationalism’ as ‘surround[ing] and complet[ing] national life’: ‘We love our country but we will not wrap ourselves in red, white and blue. Instead, we announce a Code Pink alert’.40 In its critique of militarism, Code Pink recognizes nationalism as a mobilizer and legitimizer of millions of women, while it simultaneously redefines patriotism as no longer based on nation-state centrism (the ‘red, white and blue’ flag). Code Pink defines itself as ‘a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end U.S. funded wars and occupations, to challenge militarism globally, and to redirect our resources into health care, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities’.41 They have over 150 local chapters, and the Internet’s capacity to facilitate transnational communication enables them to send over 150,000 people weekly e-mail alerts. By advocating direct action, Code Pink evokes WILPF’s formative years. Code Pink’s rise to national attention and peace leadership was quick and controversial, and co-founder and speaker Medea Benjamin is often slandered in mainstream media as a ‘radical’ if not imbalanced feminist troublemaker.42 From the outset, she has been a favourite target of US right-wing media and think tanks.43 But as the US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq continued, so too did Code Pink’s protest activities. Objecting to the ‘War on Terror’ and to CIA actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, Code Pink broadened its opposition to war to include indirect hostilities, such as the US government’s support of Israeli policies in Gaza. Furthermore, the activists bring their protests abroad. In March 2009 they organized a 60-person delegation to Gaza, which included African-American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who said: ‘Our purpose was to connect with the women for International Women’s Day, to show our support and to educate ourselves so that we can go back to the United States and work hard on our policies’.44 Other peacemaking delegations have visited Iran, Syria and Thailand. In June 2011, Code Pink participated in the attempted Gaza Aid Flotilla to break the Israeli naval blockade of Palestine. Code Pink’s dress code – to always wear something pink – plays on lingering conventional gender norms: a colour identified with the softer, weaker, feminine sex. Their actions however challenge those norms. ‘Feminine’ peace workers are not expected to use tactics such as grouping naked to spell out PEACE on coastal beaches or trailing public officials and obtrusively thrusting their red-painted hands into their faces. As sociologist Rachel Kutz-Flamenbaum points out, ‘the use of the color pink . . . reassures observers and new adherents that activists can be feminine and soft. Simultaneously . . . civil disobedience . . . confound[s] and challenge[s] normative gender expectations’.45 This tactical ambiguity – mobilizing gender norms while simultaneously eschewing them – mirrors the approach of the early WILPF movement. Indeed Benjamin places Code Pink ‘in a great global tradition of standing up against injustice’.46 Open to all ethnicities and transnational in spirit, Code Pink activists continue many ideas of the 1915–1919 movement. One change, however, is that while currently women-led, feminist men are also welcome members. Furthermore, Code Pink is so far attracting – and maintaining – increased membership by holding their transnational convictions to account.

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Conclusion This chapter has traced the development of WILPF’s transnational feminist peace culture. The intersectional analysis focused on tensions and conflicts within the organization that are often omitted in its own historiography. Drawing on sociology, gender studies and historical methods, this chapter explored the effects of gender roles and norms in wartime and the extent to which they shift and are maintained. This interdisciplinary approach provides new insights into how a feminist women’s peace movement emerged and developed, placing Code Pink (and other contemporary peace groups) into a longer historical context.47 The First World War feminist transnationalists largely came to pacifism through international women’s movements. They considered women’s exclusion from international politics an essential obstacle to peace, which had promoted the spread of militarism and competition over the more ‘feminine’ virtues of teamwork and human solidarity. Women and mothers, they thought, were somewhat less war-prone than men. Code Pink activists, too, recognize and criticize a lingering hegemonic masculinity and nationalism that prizes militarism over what they call ‘life-affirming endeavors’. Against the backdrop of a century marked by enduring armed conflicts, the feminist transnational pacifists discussed in this chapter have sustained their resilience and determination against war and militarism.

Notes 1. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (New York: Humanity Books, 1940/2005), 237–238. 2. Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World, 244. 3. See Kathy Davis ‘Intersectionality as Buzzword‘, Feminist Theory, 9/1, (2008), 67–85. 4. Leslie McCall ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality‘, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30/3 (2005), 1771–1800. 5. This chapter is part of a larger research project supported by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF, Project No. V34-G14). 6. Bericht der Internationalen Frauenkongress Haag vom 28.April-1.Mai 1915 [Report of the International Women’s Congress in The Hague], edited by the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (Amsterdam, 1915), IV. 7. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (Victor Gollanz: London, 1938), 326. 8. That the UNSC Resolution 1325 has been strengthened by several additional resolutions, the last of which was in December 2010 (Resolution 1960), further demonstrates its acceptance beyond the original fifteen member states of the UNSC in 2000. 9. Leopoldina Kulka, Die Fraueninternationale für Frieden und Freiheit [The Women’s International for Peace and Freedom], Die Frau im Staat (July 1919), 3–4 ( 3) (Translation by LRC, emphasis added). 10. Jane Addams. Women and Internationalism, in Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch and Alice Hamilton (eds) Women at The Hague. The International Congress of Women and Its Results (New York: Humanity Books, 1915/2003), 107–115 (108). 11. See Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945’, in Karen Offen (ed.) Globalizing Feminisms,

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

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1789–1945. Rewriting Histories (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), 139–152; see also Jo Vellacott, ‘Transnationalism in the Early Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, in Harvey L. Dyck (ed.) The Pacifist Impulse. Historical Perspective (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 362–383. Report of the International Congress of Women. Zurich, May 12 to 17, 1919 (Geneva: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, undated), 110. Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World, 375. Cited from an article in the main European peace journal of that time, Die Friedens-Warte (The Peace Watch) (1904), in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War. The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975), 165. Jane Addams Papers [on microfilm] (hereafter JAPM), reel 7, letter from Carrie Chapman Catt to Jane Addams, 16 December 1914. E. von Fürth, Austria, Jus Suffragii, 8/12 (1914), 4–5. JAPM, reel 12, Letter to Jane Addams, 24 November 1919. For details see Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung, 1914–1920 (Essen: Klartext, 2008). Rosika Schwimmer, ‘The Bankruptcy of the Man-Made World-War‘, JS 8/12 (1914), 1–2. Quoted in Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham. Feminism & AntiMilitarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago, 1989), 77. Stanford, Hoover Institution, Rosika Schwimmer Papers, Box 1: Villard to Schwimmer, 21 September 1914. Bericht, 174. For a fuller exposé, see Christy Jo Snider, ‘Patriots and Pacifists: The Rhetorical Debate about Peace, Patriotism, and Internationalism, 1914–1930‘, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8/1 (Spring 2005), 59–83. Pax et Libertas 26/1 (January–March 1961), 8. Other inter-war factors – WILPF’s dire economic situation, their shift of focus from ‘soft-policy’ relief efforts (e.g. immediate post-war attempts to guarantee food to European children, promotion of the return of POWs) and peace education to more ‘hard-policy’ issues (e.g. fair-trade treaties, preventing chemical warfare) – also contributed to dividing the wartime unity of WILPF members. See Schwimmer’s speech at WILPF’s fourth Congress, in: Congress Report of the WILPF Congress, Washington, D.C. (1924), 104. JAPM, reels 8, 9, 15, 16 and 18. Schwimmer was also accused by right-wing organizations of being a Bolshevik and a Jew. Transcript of Record, The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Rosika Schwimmer v. United States, filed 31 December 1927, 8. JAPM, reel 19, Letter from Schwimmer to ‘Friends in Many Lands’, 11 February 1928. United States v. Rosika Schwimmer, 279 US 644 (1929), http://supreme.justia. com/us/279/644/case.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 128–131. Based on the decision in the case of Girouard v. United States (which relied on the dissent opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Schwimmer case), it was no longer permissible to prohibit naturalization based on religious objections – though still not atheist ones – to bearing arms.

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33. Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood. Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 1, 84. 34. Joyce Blackwell. No Peace Without Freedom. Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 34. 35. WILPF [microfilm], reel 34, frames 1972–1975. WILPF British Section to International Executive Committee, 27 January 1933. 36. Carl von Ossietzky, ‘Die Pazifisten’ [The Pacifists], reprinted in Bärbel Boldt, Dirk Grathoff and Michael Satorius (eds) Carl von Ossietzky. Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. 2: 1922–1924 (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), 371–375. 37. Mohandas K. Gandhi. An Autobiography. The Story of My Experiments With Truth. Trans. from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1925/1957), 318–19. 38. WILPF [microfilm], reel 1, frames 409–10: Emily Balch’s memo entitled ‘Question as to a separate women’s organization’ to Anne Spencer, 1 April 1920. 39. http://www.clio.revues.org/187?lang=en. 40. http://www.clio.revues.org/187?lang=en. 41. http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?list=type&type=3 [accessed 21 February 2012]. 42. Medea Benjamin had previously cofounded the international human rights organization Global Exchange. In 2010 she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian-leaning peace group. 43. See ‘New Lows in CODEPINK Bashing’ http://www.codepinkalert.org [accessed 21 February 2012]. 44. Democracy Now!, 9 March 2009, www.democracynow.org/2009/3/9/pulitzer_ prize_winning_author_alice_walker [accessed 21 February 2012]. 45. Rachel v. Kutz-Flamenbaum, ‘Code Pink, Raging Grannies, and the Missile Dick Chicks: Feminist Performance Activism in the Contemporary Anti-War Movement’, NWSA Journal 19/1, (2007), 89–105 (95). 46. Democracy Now!, 27 June 2011. www.democracynow.org/2011/6/27/we_are_ eager_to_get_to [accessed 21 February 2012]. 47. The Women in Black against War, founded in Israel in 1988, is another example of a recent transnational feminist peace organization. See www.womeninblack.org [accessed 21 February 2012].

6 Gendering the Politics of War Wounds since 1914 Ana Carden-Coyne In 1916, the newly formed British Ministry of Pensions declared: ‘I think it will be agreed that we should pension all those who are noble heroes’, suggesting the difference between the deserving and undeserving disabled war veteran was privileged in this gendered identity.1 Etched onto King George’s Certificate for the Wounded was a similar message that the scars of war, derived from the masculine event of suffering in combat, must be endured with manly stoicism. Soldiers had ‘sacrificed limbs sight, hearing and health’, and their wounds were ‘the most honorable distinction a man can bear’. Furthermore, the King ‘trusted’ that the rehabilitation services ‘may assist you to return to civil life as useful and respected citizens’.2 Such discourses exposed less the reality than the gendered expectations imposed upon the wounded and disabled, a point taken up in Jessica Meyer’s chapter on representations of war-related mental illness. Soldiers were often perceived as failing the test of manhood when they expressed pain, griped about pensions, or did not appear to heroically overcome their wounds. The First World War established systems of rehabilitation, pensions and medical propaganda that shaped public attitudes to physical and psychological wounding and created the rehabilitation rhetoric of ‘overcoming’ disability as a masculine achievement. While wounded soldiers regarded pensions as their right and the state’s duty to honour their physical and mental sacrifices, military medicine and voluntary agencies emphasized the masculine honour of work and men’s independence from either state or charitable assistance. This gendered discourse of overcoming disability was disseminated through military and civilian hospitals, amongst veteran charities, voluntary agencies and the media. While a man’s capacity to withstand pain tested his fortitude, war wounds were meant to enhance masculinity through successful recovery. Rehabilitation was a gendered process, and military medicine played a crucial role in shaping attitudes to disability. Physical wounds and scars carried the gender symbolism of heroic value, but recovering soldiers were sometimes mistaken for shirkers or received white feathers; such public scrutiny and shaming was distressing.3 In 1916, the military attempted to ensure the heroism of the wounded was recognizable by visibly marking their uniforms with gold wound stripes and 83

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issuing silver honour badges. Combat and non-combat injuries were differentiated as well. Public attention on wounds had the effect of sexualizing the wounded hero. Women flocked to hospitals in hope of romantic liaisons with patients, also publicly recognizable by their ‘hospital blue’ uniforms. In the First World War, military medicine saw wounds as reversing the masculine warrior into the fragility and dependence associated with femininity and childhood. Rehabilitation restored masculinity from this neutered state. This paper explores three aspects of the gendered politics of bodies wounded in the First World War (1914–1918), and reflects on those themes in relation to soldiers wounded in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, since 2001 and 2003 respectively. While historians are usually hesitant to make comparisons with the present-day, in this volume we have ventured to speculate about continuities and changes over the century. Here, I consider medical systems, attitudes to wounded soldiers and experiences of disability in society, provoking historical questions about the social and political schema in which gender ideals frame militarized and wounded bodies. This chapter explores the gendered politics of war wounds in the First World War in the areas of disability pensions and wound compensation, military medical rehabilitation and prosthetics, media discourses and veteran charities. It also considers historical continuities with British and American wounded soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysis of the primary evidence draws on social and cultural history methods. Disability studies are also instructive when considering the embodied reality of wounded and disabled living. Moreover, comprehending the symbolism of wounds requires engagement with cultural theories of the body and pain. Drawing on disability and cultural theory, this chapter discusses the war-wounded body, and considers how gendered ideas underpinned the imagined wholeness of the military body, which, conversely, also shaped conceptions of the wounded body as fragmented. The chapter first examines the First World War when the premise of compensation for body parts was instituted in new legislation under the authority of the new Ministry of Pensions, and how gendered bodily expectations shaped notions of citizenship. Second, this chapter explores the persistence of models of military masculinity in the areas of rehabilitation and prosthetics, the media and veteran charities.

Masculine Body Parts and the Gendered Citizenship of War Pensions Disability philosopher Henri Jacques Stiker in his seminal text, A History of Disability (1999), wrote of the pivotal moment in the First World War, when the mass of maimed war veterans gave rise to an industry of rehabilitation that perceived disability as a lack to be filled and a deficit to be redeemed.4 Networks of military medicine across France, Britain and the United States, created the rehabilitation industry which was premised, I argue, on a gendered logic of the body; while war deprived, medicine restored lost masculine wholeness. Fragmentation from the imagined whole has a particular intensity in militarized identities, as masculinity is especially connected to the body, muscularity

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and the value of wholeness. In the First World War, countless narratives in diaries – and representations in poems, novels and films – expressed the idea that soldier’s amputations represented a loss of masculine bodily integrity. In Britain, medical and charitable networks designed to assist men, such as the British disabled soldier magazine Reveille, reinforced such ideas: ‘the great and growing dread of the battlefield is the fear not of death, but of being maimed’.5 Soldiers’ fears were shared among nurses, physiotherapists and physicians: to lose a leg or arm was to render the male subject helpless, childlike, feminized: some speculated that the patient would be better off dead – the severing of a limb was akin to the unhinging of personal identity and manhood. Although wounds and disabilities feminized the male body, it was not static in this gender reversal. Rehabilitation was a re-masculinizing process. Hence, some patients felt a strong need to counter these assumptions and to reclaim their masculine status as warriors. Wendy Gagen reports the case of a British arm amputee J.B. Middlebrook who renegotiated his masculine identity within hegemonic concepts of the self that prevailed in military medicine. Significantly, Middlebrook was anxious to be seen as normal and to regain his masculinity. As he incorporates his new embodiment, he grows from perceiving his ‘little wing’ as a fragile ‘baby’ that ‘I simply howl at’, to staking a greater claim in his personal identity. He rejects the identity of war cripple, throwing away his cumbersome and painful prosthetic limb, as so many soldiers did (and continue to do today). But the very idea of normalcy – premised on the dialectic of the normal and pathological body – was gendered. The normal masculine body was regarded as whole, engaged in labour, industrially occupied, a breadwinner and physically competent to be a husband, father and masculine head of a household. Middlebrook reclaimed that image of masculinity which had been taken from him.6 The ideal of masculine wholeness was not just the goal of individuals and medical authorities, it was also connected to the gendering of citizenship. Male citizen soldiers were rewarded for military service and compensated for wounds with disability pensions. Financial compensation, however, required a strong burden of proof (that combat wounds – different to injuries – were ‘due to or aggravated by military service’), which was mediated in the closed power circles of the military medical tribunal. Significantly, pensions were premised on the idea of compensating for the loss of wholeness intrinsic to military masculine identities. Physical loss, privileged over mental, also related to masculine productivity, breadwinner status, and even fatherhood, and thus a schema of gendered attributes. However, the military value of body parts was given new financial and symbolic significance because of the mass mobilization of citizen soldiers. In Britain, the Ministry of Pensions was established in 1916 to administer pensions issued by the Admiralty, the Chelsea Hospital and the Army Council. Before 1917, pensions were assessed by a veteran’s earning capacity and ability to earn a living wage. The new ‘standard schedule’, however, was tied to an economic value ascribed to body parts. For instance, the loss of two limbs ‘or more’, total paralysis, and ‘very severe’ disfigurement, equalled a 100% grant. By contrast, an above knee amputation was 60%; below the knee amputation 50%.

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Limbs were the most significant body parts – not just associated with mobility, dexterity and the muscularity required for labour and industrial productivity, but they were symbolic of the visible and sensational experience of wholeness – a condition of masculinity. Amputation of one leg at the hip was scaled as 80% disability; 60% above the knee; 50% below the knee; while amputation of the arm at the shoulder was 90%. Thus an arm at the shoulder removed was a greater loss than a leg at the hip – and was therefore more pensionable by 10%. Medical critics believed that the leg amputee was more capable of earning full wages, whereas few occupations were available to a shoulder amputee.7 It is noteworthy that ‘Lunacy’ was capable of having a 100% rating, however few people were granted full pensions. Rank – and thus class – also valued the body, so that in cases of 100% injury a Warrant Officer Class 1 received 42s.6d, a non-Commissioned Officer class 2 received 35s and a Private received 27s.6d. Furthermore, race affected pension rates. West Indian regiments, for instance, received even less for the 100% disability; the scale was 48: 32: 2 for an officer, NCO and Private. Nonwhite colonial soldiers were often feminized as physically and morally weaker that white soldiers, more likely to malinger and thus less capable of achieving warrior status. By the 1920s, degrees of complexity were added to the value system, however gendered assumptions remained. Some functional losses exceeded 100%, such as loss of genitals and sexual function, as well as ‘total’ incontinence known as ‘feminine micturation’ (involuntary urination due to neurological injury and requiring catheterization). Medical conditions were gendered, pitching certain wounds and disabilities against the industrial model of the soldier’s body as masculine, whole, capable and literally functioning ‘as a man’. To that extent it was not just anatomical injury, but loss of function that was measured. Genital or sexual dysfunction was likened to amputation – a 100% permanent injury to masculine usefulness, and one incapable of being rehabilitated or restored. Significantly for this period, facial disfigurement – around 12% of injuries – was also regarded as a 100% wound. Medical members of the Ministry of Pensions Appeals Tribunal, L.J. Llewellyn, A. Bassett-Jones (Whitchurch Military Orthopaedic Hospital) and W.M. Beaumont (ophthalmic surgeon, Bath War Hospital), concurred that the deformity of a man: . . . unequivocally lowers the sufferer’s economic value in the labour market. A blemish which cannot be hidden entitles the man to an evaluation more liberal than is called for in the cases of scars on parts of the body which are usually clothed.8

While professional confidence in plastic surgery argued that few cases were ‘beyond restoration’, surgeons affirmed how ‘ugly scars’ and ‘deformities’ caused ‘distress and anguish’. With a remarkably capitalist perspective, surgeons recognized that unsightly wounds ‘materially lower the market value of the individual’, as work and marriage were entwined modes of economic and social production. As wounded soldiers returned to civilian life, marriage and children were stressed as markers of successful reintegration, affirming bodily, gendered and heteronormative assumptions about men’s value in society.9

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Despite the emphasis on masculine independence, pension authorities believed that veterans should undergo constant medical examinations. Officials reduced men to untrustworthy soldier-boys or working class swindlers, shirking their responsibilities to industry, family and the state. Sight impairment caused particular concern, regarded as the worst form of dependence, and yet critics of the Ministry of Pensions thought it too lenient, arguing that a soldier who had lost his eye should still work and should not be pensioned at 50% loss-value. Since the Royal Warrant stressed body parts more than functions, the pension was seen as depriving a man of his will to work, encouraging malingering and symptom ‘simulation’.10 Instituting regular medical examinations, the principle concern of pension authorities was to avert benefit fraud. In such cases, they pressed for severe penalties, and even argued for compulsory finger-printing to prevent impersonation. Masculinity as the core of citizenship was always at stake in these debates. Despite this emphasis, medical authorities scorned the public and political reverence for the war disabled: . . . the need for discipline seems to have been forgotten in altruistic enthusiasm for the ‘wounded hero’. But it should be remembered that even in voluntary forces there are many unheroic persons and some dishonest schemers.11

For its failure to legislate on malingering, the British Medical Journal referred to the 1917 and 1918 Royal Warrants as the ‘emasculated successors’ of past decrees, since ‘it is tacitly assumed that all claims are bona fide and nearly all pensioners honest’.12 Heralded as heroes in some quarters, and reviled as fraudulent abusers in others, the emasculated and infantilized veteran was seen as requiring greater intervention by the paternalistic state. However, many men themselves also felt that unemployment, rather than the loss of body parts, was an emasculating social disability. War pensioners often felt that working upheld their dignity and stabilized their place in the home and in society. Disabled men’s capacity to work also realigned traditional gender roles and values in post-war societies. It is ironic, then, that under the 1917 regulations, earning capacity was removed from the criteria of assessment, which was problematic for many disabled men who resisted being categorized as failed masculine bodies.

The Persistence of Military Masculinities since 1914: Rehabilitation, Prosthetics and Charities Rehabilitation was regarded as a gendered transition from the inert state of helplessness to the masculine independence of work. With work linked to personal self-worth, the importance of vocational rehabilitation was emphasized. Remarkably, soldiers did not always embrace official efforts to retrain and employ them. Pressured into retraining courses at the Lord Roberts workshop in Britain or the American Red Cross hospitals, for instance, men were widely known to resist and resent re-education, especially when some felt they required more medical care. Even in hospital, rehabilitation experts believed that too

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much sympathy was emasculating. Dr John Faries of the United States Red Cross Institute for the Blind and Disabled advised ‘the hospital should be a nursery of new hopes and ambitions and not a Bridge of Sighs’. Cheer Up manuals such The Way Out instructed that ‘successful disabled men full of cheer and comfort are asserting the right attitude’.13 Being positive and ambitious signalled the regaining of the masculine dignity from the feminized state of woundedness and victimhood. Doctors particularly worried about the blind soldier wallowing in self-pity, as he ‘broods over his future’, and warned that eye patches could encourage feelings of hopelessness. Moreover, ‘Sympathetic visitors to the hospital ward unwittingly increase his introspection by pity . . . The patient should be encouraged to forget himself and if his eyes permit he should take exercise with cheerful companions’. Recognizing suffering was tantamount to robbing a man of his fighting spirit, which could severely affect his rehabilitation. Eye specialist and pension official Dr W.M. Beaumont ridiculed gymnastic exercise as the ‘sham bicycle and artificial rowing machine’, preferring ‘mild competition’, for ‘it is better for the man to work the machine than for the machine to work the man’. Functional rehabilitation was inextricably linked to the restoration of masculinity – not just industrial labour but the ability to physically demonstrate competitive spirit, as will be seen further on. Some medical experts viewed pensions as deterring independence and drive, countering successful adaptation, encouraging inertia and ‘the necessity to think for a wife and family’.14 Today, rehabilitation remains a coalition between the government, military medicine and charities that highlight efficiency and masculinity; no time wasted, speedy and humane treatment, and the stoic recovery and physical activity of disabled soldiers. Just as in the First World War, sport and physicality were used to show the public that wounded men were not pitiable, hopeless or a burden on the state, but instead were engaged in ‘a keen competition’, as hospital postcards sold to the public claimed. Images played an important role in showing the physical prowess of limbless men, for instance in 1925, when W.J. Bond and A.E. Atherton attempted to break the 10 mile walking record for limbless men [Figure 6.1].15 In the Second World War, as Julie Anderson has recently explained, sport played a major role at Stoke Mandeville Guttman Centre for paralysed soldiers, whose 1952 Games for soldiers with spinal cord injuries paved the way for the modern Paraympic Games. Its gendered purpose was to build upper body strength to improve mobility and thus rebuild confidence in the masculine whole.16 Significantly, although the role of gymnastic exercise and sport in military rehabilitation was the norm for the First World War, it was the paralysed patients themselves who introduced the idea in the 1940s, which Guttman then developed into a comprehensive therapeutic approach. With the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan testing once again the gendered meaning of the wounded male body, paralysed ex-servicemen note that while adapting to wheelchairs is difficult, sport has helped to redefine their identities and self– perceptions: ‘we had to make sense of this and how we viewed our new physical selves’.17 For some military patients, mobility provides normalization and gender confidence; but, as Irving Goffman and the disability theory Tobin Siebers write, it is also a question of ‘passing’ as a strategy of managing the stigma of

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Figure 6.1 Mr W.J. Bond and Mr A.E. Atherman breaking the 10-mile walking record for limbless men. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

‘spoiled identities’ by appearing able-bodied, especially relevant in unpopular wars, when overcoming disability is intensified. Moreover, when the disabled body invests in masculinity it disrupts the difference between disability and ability that underscores the sex/gender system.18 While in the First and Second World Wars there was a plethora of media and hospital imagery of wounded and disabled soldiers, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produced little discourse between 2001 and 2007. Indeed, the British government was reluctant to openly discuss casualties. However, this changed with steep rises in wounded soldiers and compensation cases against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the courts, sparking new media fascination with disabled soldiers to which the authorities felt compelled to respond.19 Thus, in 2009, the Ministry of Defence permitted a BBC camera crew into Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, to follow the lives of twenty-four year old triple amputee Lance Corporal Tom Neathway and nineteen year old blind amputee Ranger Andy Allen. The programme visualized military patients as having the right attitude to overcoming their disabilities. The media praised the programme for providing an ‘insight into the stoicism’ of the wounded and ‘unimaginable levels of bullishness’, yet also recognized that ‘the final scenes perhaps overdid the neat sense of closure’ and that follow-up programmes would be needed. Blog respondents stressed their humbled admiration for the men’s courage, pride in the armed forces, the nation and in the NHS – a symbol of British medical democracy and citizenship.20 Wounded certainly signalled the shift in the MoD’s willingness to publicly discuss the extreme impact of war, while emphasizing the sophisticated medical care that helps these young men overcome their injuries. The programme, however, barely acknowledged the gendered impact on the two men or indeed their mothers and girlfriends as they are transformed into

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principle carers, and who the state relies on to bridge the gap between welfare and independent living. The focus on the men overcoming their disabilities is portrayed as the triumph of the individual supported by military medicine; the role of women is silenced from a gendered understanding of the impact of war and the long-term care needs of disabled soldiers, once they have left hospital. Indeed, military doctors such as Colonel Tim Hodgetts (Clinical Director, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine) stress that even ‘casualties’ with penetrating brain injuries, multiple injuries, limb amputations and chest wounds, have ‘made a full recovery’.21 Overcoming wounds with masculine fortitude and cheerful gratitude remains a powerful rhetoric of military masculinity and motivational technique in rehabilitation. Increasingly, the media has played an important role in shaping the public image of the disabled hero, while galvanizing public sympathy for veterans’ appeals against MoD compensation awards, such as in the Daily Telegraph Justice for Wounded campaign (2009).22 Bilateral amputee and former Royal Marines Commander Ben McBean was famously dubbed ‘Prince Harry’s Hero’, because he met him as a seriously injured patient during his medical transport from Afghanistan. Reporters described McBean as a ‘battler’ and a fighter, while snaps of him giving a ‘thumbs-up’ gesture on the operating table were circulated. During and after his rehabilitation, McBean participated in many sporting events, and the press praised McBean for his competitive transition ‘from the front line to the finish line’. Yet some interviews were conducted with the Navy press officer present, who admitted: ‘If Ben were to say marines were dying out there for nothing, that wouldn’t be a good thing’.23 Furthermore, the heroic image was also used in the tabloid press to support his court case against the Ministry of Defence, which was refusing his claim for multiple injury compensation beyond the allowed three.24 The new willingness of wounded soldiers to use the civil courts to appeal against pensions exposes a failed relationship with the government, however, and not necessarily with the military. Some disabled ex-servicemen continue to draw on military models of masculinity despite their civilian identity. The rehabilitation discourse of overcoming adversity is seen as transforming lives while also being incorporated into new professional or working identities. Wounded men often reiterate the rehabilitation discourse of overcoming, drawing on longstanding tropes of ‘carrying on’, ‘soldiering on’ and ‘cracking on’, which is reinforced in the contemporary media. The military identity of the disabled hero has a powerful resonance that some soldiers harness while others resist. Some wounded and disabled, however, negotiate a precarious and ambivalent transition from the militarized to the civilian body, not always comforted by the discourses of masculinity that prevail. Since 2008, the Ministry of Defence has funded a military adventure training programme called Battle Back, which highlights the disabled ex-serviceman’s physical overcoming, while also singling out high-achieving candidates who could potentially train for the Paralympics. Press interviews emphasize how rehabilitation ‘gets your life back on track’, how adventure training and controlled risk affirms confidence through physical challenges. While soldiers who fail the tests of masculine embodiment may no longer be accused of ‘embarrassing their government’ (as Head Surgeon of an American

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military hospital did in 1918), there are some inflections that are familiar, and reveal allegiances between military medicine, volunteer charities like BLESMA (British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association) and the Ministry of Defence. Fred Hargreaves of the Battle Back programme stated in the press: ‘Above all, it seems to me, this is about attitude’.25 Yet the emphasis on sport, adventure and risk also essentializes masculinity and adds pressure to conform when issues of gender roles, psychosocial adaptation and prosthetics use can be difficult for many ordinary veterans. Nevertheless, military medical ideas of overcoming and individual will, and rehabilitation’s discourse of modernity, often contradicts soldiers’ complex responses to wounding, to the state and indeed to the prosthetics industry, especially as young men grow older and struggle with physical ailments and many other social, economic and emotional problems associated with the long-terms consequences of severe injury.

Full Metal Warriors and Prosthetic Virility The contemporary focus on technology and prosthetics harks back to the cyborg fantasies of the First World War. In 1916, the Ministry of Pensions invested research funds into the cinematized stump, while defining disability in relation to a ‘theoretically perfect machine’. Sigmund Freud wrote that man was becoming a ‘prosthetic god’, and artists of Weimar and New Objectivism compared the reality of disabled veterans’ lives with the promise of a mechanized body and new masculinity – cool forms devoid of sentimentality and human emotion.26 In recent times, the US Defence Department has funded DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), committing $US80 million to the programme Revolutionizing Prosthetics, which has constructed a futuristic nostalgia for boyhood games in the Luke Skywalker Arm. Functional realities aside, the military spends part of its budget reassuring the public – in press releases to the media – that a prosthetic future is within reach. In both the US and UK, the successful adaptation of men into masculine cyborgs has been highlighted in conjunction with triumphant stories of the return to normal functioning in mastering prosthetic limbs. The re-gendering of amputees through the masculinity of prosthetics has been a longstanding rehabilitation strategy since the First and Second World Wars, repeated in British and American military hospitals, prosthetics manufacturers, and the media; masculine wholeness could be engineered.27 As David Serlin argues, American images circulated after the Second World War emphasized masculinity reconstructed within the victorious national economy.28 Technology made the fragmented disabled more whole, more of a man – this was not just normalization, but the hyper-masculinity of the virile warrior as a machine. Prosthetic virility was a commercial and political representation distinct from the subjective experiences of disability. Repeating the same rhetoric given to military patients in the First World War, prosthetics are today seen as both ‘enhancements’ as well as ‘substitutes for missing limbs’. Indeed, in the Second World War military medicine argued your body parts – and you – were replaceable.29 Yet just as men rejected their prosthetic limbs in favour of more easily manageable crutches, in recent times a preference for usable low-tech

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solutions has been noted. The Open Prosthetics Project, whose lead engineer, Jonathon Kuniholm, lost his arm in Iraq, has based one design on a 1912 German ‘trautman’ hook. While rehabilitation today may be technologically driven – in conjunction with the insistence of correct attitudes of willpower and overcoming – between 40–46% of arm amputees reject their prosthetics. Yet medicine and psychology insists this rejection is a failure to be overcome from several perspectives: comfort, fit, maintenance, useabilty, motivation and expectation – setting realistic goals. Maladjustment is a pathological term rather than an indicator of agency.30 While some soldiers find this cyborg masculine aesthetic appealing, others admit wearing prosthetics purely cosmetically, when in public, to ‘avoid embarrassment’ as a missing hand is ‘very obvious’.31 Since the First World War, the vision of prosthetics has been linked to virility and hyper-masculinity, as images of disabled heroes as super-automatons boosted a version of war as not disabling but improving a man’s masculine image. In Britain, the history of prosthetic discourse has maintained this persistent bravado throughout the twentieth century. Whether in the prosthetics industry, the military, or the media, the fantasy of the full metal warrior captures the sentiment that technology and the right attitude not just erases the wounds of war but reinforces the masculine self-worth of the disabled individual. Indeed, The Telegraph applauded a group of disabled soldiers, who demonstrated: . . . the principle that the best way to cope with adversity is to smile through it, light-hearted banter sprinkles the conversation. An amputation below the knee is referred to as a ‘BK’, and dismissed as a mere ‘flesh wound’. With the high-tech artificial limbs now available, we are a world away from the grainy photos of First World War amputees.32

Yet historians note that while the technology has changed, there is remarkable continuity in the gendered discourses of military masculinity and rehabilitation to an extent that the First and Second World Wars have cast long shadows on current gendered strategies of overcoming the wounds of war. Alongside the promise of prosthetics, a further aspect of masculine competence concerns sexuality. In the First and Second World Wars, rebuilding the masculine sexuality of the wounded was underpinned by anxieties about impotence, marital fitness, depopulation and unemployment – rebuilding muscles was a major focus of that sexualization. Against this rhetoric was the reality of wounded men’s ongoing illnesses and the impact on families. Relationships could be strained, as women had to cope with new physical and financial concerns, as Jessica Meyer has shown.33 In the contemporary media, the tabloid press, although a major avenue of lobbying and fundraising, often reiterates myths of soldier sexuality. The Sun’s ‘Help Phwoar Heroes’ (a sexualized expression) posed tabloid model ‘stunners’ with a selection of disabled soldiers at Headley Court rehabilitation centre, offering Lieutenant Corporal Terry Byrne ‘Great Service’. While Tom Neathway (from the BBC Wounded programme) was described as being on a ‘dinner date’ with ‘Page 3 girls Sam, Danni, Peta and Becky’. Indeed, with a view of her cleavage, we are told how ‘Big hearted Danni stroked Jay’s hand as she ate Christmas pudding with him’. What cannot

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be discussed is that many wounded are indeed young, single men (largely under twenty-five), and that studies confirm their deep anxieties about relationships, ‘attractiveness and sexual competence’, and ‘confidence in body image’.34 Yet the media persists with images of sexual bravado, while emphasizing domestic harmony and marital stability, and contrasting the ‘horrors’ of Afghanistan with the ‘normal life’ of home.35

The Gendered Politics of Veteran Charities Many British veteran charities in existence today were established in the First World War, such as the British Legion, BLESMA (British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association), and Combat Stress (formerly the Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Society). Historically charities both sympathized with men’s vulnerability while mythically representing their heroism. A further paradox was that while worrying about dependence, malingering and self-pity, charities lobbied for better services and pensions. Though wounded men were treated as occupying a state of emasculated child-like dependence, charities also tried to discourage soldiers’ and public perceptions that disability meant burdensome helplessness. Nevertheless, the idea of the state failing the military body has also been the quiet substance of the disabled veterans’ movement that lobbies governments, challenges pension awards in the courts and raises funds for benevolent assistance. As we have seen, in previous world wars, medical and charitable agencies both infantilized and feminized the frail wounded, playing up the image of victimhood. In hospital, occupational therapy was a feminized rehabilitation technique that involved small manual tasks that could be undertaken while bed-ridden, such as embroidery, sewing, jewellery-making and basket weaving. Men enjoyed making what they called ‘fancy work’, producing beautiful objects they were proud of which were sold for hospital fundraising. Toy-making was a common occupational therapy and commercial activity of the First World War disabled, depicted in John Hodgson Lobley’s painting The Toy-Makers’ Shop (1918). A group of bandaged, facially-wounded patients from the specialist plastic surgery facility, Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, which served up to 5,000 patients; wearing hospital blue uniforms, the patients sew teddy-bears, while a stuffed toy monkey looks on with a macabre stare. Feminine therapies would lead to heavier physical tasks and vocational retraining in masculine industries such as carpentry and mechanics. Today, the ‘Help for Heroes’ charity includes a Teddy Bear as its campaign mascot, which is sold to the public, and instructs disabled men how to ‘bear up’. In 2008, the Army Benevolent Fund hired Flat Five Creative Agency to launch a national press and direct mail campaign with the figure of ‘Out of Action Man’ in camouflage dress, with an action man figure as an amputee on crutches (no prosthetics here) and with his arm in a sling or sitting a wheelchair. With the headline ‘War is not a Game of Toy Soldiers’, the campaign was the Fund’s most successful, raising £750,000. To an extent, this campaign exposes some of the tensions in charitable representations that reinforce the image of child-like dependence when seeking public donations and support.

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The British Legion has been a lobbyist for better compensation for soldiers since the First World War. Its recent Honour the Covenant campaign argued for ‘the nation’s debt to our wounded heroes’. In concert with media campaigns, the success saw, as Chris Simpkins stated, ‘more than 25,000 people who contacted their MP by letter, call or personal visit’, produce a ‘tidal wave of support’.36 The Legion – and BLESMA – has had a major historical role in mediating between soldiers’ needs and the state, but have also managed precarious relationships to both; while criticizing the government, it can never criticize war, especially as ex-military personnel often occupy the internal leadership and management of voluntary agencies. Yet, it is often difficult to maintain a heroic stance about war when over time some ex-soldiers and their families have become disaffected by the government rationale, the military hierarchy, and the toll and illegitimacy of the given war (e.g. Military Families Against the War). Thus veteran charities have historically delivered ambiguous images of disabled veterans, as heroic and masculine, or fragile and vulnerable, and as a failed state of military embodiment for which the government must compensate. The soldier is both hero and victim. Disability scholars have pointed out the way that cultural narratives construct the disabled body as not just abnormal but ‘extraordinary’, a spectacle of abject otherness, even within the humanitarianism aimed at helping disabled people.37 Veteran charities, in conjunction with the media and rehabilitation authorities, heavily invest in gendered codes of normalcy, simultaneously aware of the radical impact of war wounds on the body, finances, families and social existence. In Britain, the emotional and financial gap between the state and families must be filled by charities, which has been a government strategy since the First World War.38 Yet, the question remains of just how much gendered constructs of military masculinity can compensate for the injustice of war and the significant losses born by the body and mind, personal identities and livelihoods, and indeed the ongoing impact on relationships and families.

Conclusion The longstanding historical rhetoric of military medical rehabilitation since the First World War reinforced the gender ideals of overcoming disability and stoic warriorhood. The historical framework of the pension system and its compensation structure – based on the valuation of body parts as units of loss of bodily integrity – privileged a vision of the soldier’s body as whole and masculine, and yet when compensating losses imagined the body not as a whole but as a compilation of parts. Holistic connections between the mind and body were avoided and complexly rich versions of masculinities were reduced to the military model, which also perceived the disabled body as lacking masculine wholeness. While disability scholars discuss the emotional denial of limb loss and the imposed and internalized performance of heroic cheerfulness as a coping strategy, military culture supports the ideal of overcoming wounds and their gendered limitations in its medical and media strategies. Moreover, the

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maintenance of military masculine identities – especially by stressing individual coping strategies – orients the social and cultural structures of militarized embodiment away from its political significance. The media, the military and charities invest in narratives of triumph over adversity, of suffering and martyrdom, and oscillate between images of victimhood and heroism. In doing so, they coalesce to present gendered notions of wounding and disability and thus, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder suggest, the ‘attendant social and political contexts’ [of war] are ‘overshadowed by the emotions of pity and/or sympathy’.39 It is precisely these strategies, however, that are mobilized to shore up disabled ex-servicemen’s claims upon the state and society. Despite its ambiguous gendered state, wounded heroism continues to have cultural and political clout. Finally, while the visible physical wound is celebrated in public and national discourse, it is also used to validate war and nationalism, and often to silence criticism of the military. War is normalized in the configuration of the prosthetic body as normative, enabled masculinity. Yet both visible and invisible wounds cannot always be mourned. Indeed, the emphasis on overcoming injury may circumvent real insight and acknowledgement about the impact of war. The wounded body thus continues as a political object – both valued and devalued – while individuals negotiate an often precarious relationship to the state and the military.

Notes 1. Review of the Royal Warrant, March 1917–1918, PRO, PIN 15/2627. 2. Official certificate from King George, issued by Buckingham Palace, 34 November 1918. 3. Nicoletta Gullace, ‘White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (April 1997), 178–206. 4. Henri Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1999) 122–24. 5. Civilian, ‘The Return of the Officer’, 86. 6. Cited in Wendy Gagen, Wendy, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European History Review, 14 (2007), 525–42. 7. Reviews, ‘War Pensions’, BMJ, 5 April, 1919, 413. 8. W. M. Beaumont, ‘Pensions in Relation to the Eye’, in Llewellyn J. Llewellyn and A. Bassett-Jones (eds) Pensions and the Principles of their Evaluation (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1919) 605. 9. Surgeons H.P. Pickerill and H.D. Gillies. Cited in Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009) 107. 10. Review, British Medical Journal, June 7, 1919, 710. 11. Reviews, “War Pensions’, BMJ, April 5, 1919, 413. 12. Reviews, “War Pensions’, BMJ, April 5, 1919, 413. 13. John Culbert Faries, PhD, ‘Three Years of Work for Handicapped Men: A Report of the Activities of the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men’, (New York, 1920) 16.

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14. W. M. Beaumont, ‘Pensions in Relation to the Eye’. 15. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. 16. Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation: Soul of A Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 17. Jonathan Bell, ‘Giving Disabled People a Sporting Chance’, BBC News, 1 December 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11886716 [accessed 21 February 2012]. 18. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008) 97, 174. 19. In 2009, 279 injured servicemen and women appealed against awards under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS). In Sean Rayment, ‘Hundreds of injured troops in fights with MoD over compensation payments’, Telegraph, 22 August, 2009. 20. James Walton, review of BBC One’s Wounded, 11 March 2011, The Telegraph. 21. Neil Tweedie, ‘What Price A Soldier’s Leg or his Eye?’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2009. 22. Aislinn Simpson, ‘Marine Ben McBean: most severe injuries still only merit half maximum compensation’, Telegraph, 7 August, 2009. 23. Caroline Scott, ‘One Year On: Ben McBean – from front line to finish line’, The Sunday Times, 8 March 2009. 24. Luke Salkeld, ‘Prince Harry’s ‘hero’ pal fights for more compensation after losing two limbs in Afghanistan’, The Daily Mail, 20 Aug, 2009. 25. Sarah Sims, ‘We follow wounded heroes as they attempt to step back into normal life after the horrors of Afghanistan’, 31 July, 2007. 26. Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body, 190; Carol Poole, Disability in Twentieth Century German Culture, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 27. David Serlin, ‘Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetic after World War Two’, in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, (New York University Press: New York and London, 2002) 45–69. 28. David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 29. Messinger, ‘Anthropology’s Contribution to Psychoprosthetics’, 114. 30. Pamela Gallagher, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Psychosocial Perspectives on Amputation and Prosthetics’, Disability and Rehabilitation 26, 14/15, (2004) 827–830. 31. Cited in ‘Hand Transplant shows promise’, CNET news, 31 July, 2009. 32. Elizabeth Grice, ‘Hi-tech prosthetics are getting our injured back on their feet’, The Telegraph, 19 January, 2010. 33. Jessica Meyer, ‘Not Septimus Now: Wives of Disabled Veterans and Cultural Memory of the First World War in Britain’, Women’s History Review, 13/1, (2004), 117–138. 34. Carol Bodenheimer, Anthony J. Kerrigan; Susan L. Garber; Trilok N. Monga, ‘Sexuality in persons with lower extremity amputations’, Disability & Rehabilitation 22/9, (2000), 409–415; Sigmund Hough and Silvia DeGirolamo, ‘The Experience of Military Sexual Trauma and Rehabilitation for Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury/Dysfunction’, Sexuality and Disability, 25/2, (2007). 35. Sarah Sims, ‘We follow wounded heroes as they attempt to step back into normal life after the horrors of Afghanistan’, 31 July 2007. 36. The Guardian, ‘Higher Payouts for British Troops Wounded on Duty’, Wednesday, 10 February 2010.

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37. Rosemary Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 38. Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). 39. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Synder (eds), The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, (Michigan: University of Michigan 1997) 11.

7 The Not Dead: War Disability in Film and Literature from the First World War to the Present Jessica Meyer

On Remembrance Sunday, 2007, Channel 4 (UK) broadcast The Not Dead, a collaboration between poet Simon Armitage and director Brian Hill. Their seventh collaboration, the piece combined Armitage’s poetry with film documentary. The story was based on the memories of three veterans, who had served in campaigns across the second half of the twentieth century, including Malaya, Bosnia and Afghanistan, and now suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the documentary, the ex-servicemen spoke to the camera, accompanied by archival and contemporary images. The following year Pomona Books published Armitage’s poems under the same title.1 In addition to the eight poems that appeared in the film, the collection includes an introduction by Armitage, arguing that his film and book project were parallel cultural genres to the war poetry of the First World War: ‘The Not Dead was a war film . . . and in keeping with the literary tradition, the mode of expression was verse’.2 The ex-servicemen in his poems were, he says, ‘like Owen and Sassoon before them’, suffering from psychological disabilities as a consequence of war.3 This identification serves two purposes. The Not Dead both evokes the historical power of the war poets as witnesses to conflict, and also draws on the cultural understanding of that conflict as one in which soldiers were victims of the state.4 Armitage uses history to enlist the reader’s sympathy for servicemen of later conflicts. At the same time, Armitage locates both the act of witnessing and the experience of suffering within a particular understanding of gender. ‘The Army,’ he writes, ‘is a MAN’S WORLD’ (his emphasis).5 Authority as a narrator of war experience belongs explicitly to the men who were there, an idea that has dominated literary and televisual representations of warfare in Britain throughout the twentieth century.6 Armitage and Hill subvert this construction of soldiers by focusing on the experiences of men suffering from psychological and emotional 98

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disabilities.7 The men discuss ‘feelings of vulnerability insecurity and fear on national television’, something which, for Armitage, ‘constitutes, in my view, a supreme act of bravery’.8 The authority of experience is associated explicitly with the wounded ex-serviceman, inverting the gendered heroism of the healthy soldier. Armitage and Hill further subvert normative gendering of soldiers and the disabled through their focus on the men’s reintegration into civilian life. While five of the nine poems in the collection describe combat scenes, the other four are concerned with the serviceman’s struggles to reintegrate into civil society following discharge. In the film, archive footage of conflict illustrates the spoken words, while the interviewees appear in civilian clothes and settings. Veteran Rob Tromans wears a tracksuit and is shown running with his dog along a canal; Cliff Holland wears a civilian shirt and blazer; Eddie Beddoes walks hand in hand with his wife. The impaired veterans seem caught in a liminal space between active service and full reintegration into civil society. This liminality is highlighted by the lone female voice and face of Laura, Eddie’s wife. She symbolizes the familial care and love disabled men need in order to reintegrate into society, a status explicitly contrasted with: . . . Britain itself, its majors and generals bemused, irritated and embarrassed by these broken men, the mother country washing her hands of those soldiers who escaped death only to return home as ‘untouchable’, as haunting and haunted ghosts.9

Armitage is highly critical of what he sees as the attitude of the British state in casting off war disabled men no longer deemed capable of playing a man’s role. Yet in the figure of Laura, this artistic project is situated within a powerful cultural tradition that uses the problems of reintegrating war-disabled men into civil society to reinforce gender roles of masculine responsibility and feminine care as the basis for civil order, emphasizing Ana Carden-Coyne’s argument in this volume that the rehabilitation of the war disabled is a gendered process. It is within both middlebrow novels of the inter-war years and post-1945 social problem films – rather than war films and war poetry – that this gendered narrative of reintegration developed. Drawing on disability studies, films studies, sociology and social history, this chapter examines The Not Dead in relation to key representations of war disablement, Warwick Deeping’s First World War novel Kitty (1927) and William Wyler’s film about disability in the wake of the Second World War, The Best Years of Our Lives (1947). It investigates the ways in which prescriptions of appropriate masculinities and femininities have remained central to cultural understandings of post-war social reintegration, and how the nature of relations between the two genders has changed over time.

The Not Dead Citing Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Armitage acknowledges the influence that First World War poets continue to have on literary imaginings of war.

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‘Today,’ he writes, ‘the poets of the trenches . . . continue to hold their place within the canon of English literature.’10 These links are evident within The Not Dead cycle, as Armitage’s poem Albion evokes a similar image of boys playing war games to Robert Graves’ poem The Next War (1918). At the same time, Armitage’s cycle presents a more complex understanding of war disability and its effect on gender relations than, for instance, Wilfred Owen’s poem Disabled (1917), where the physically-impaired protagonist appears a childish figure now that he is no longer fit for service, and is abandoned or pitied by those, mainly women, who encouraged him to enlist. By contrast, Armitage’s veterans are psychologically impaired, a condition that brought stigma and accusations of childish dependence to men in the wake of the First World War.11 Here, however, here they are presented as far from childish in their efforts to live ‘normal’ lives. At the same time, the inclusion of a female voice in the cycle deepens its understanding of gender relations from simple resentment of ‘the giddy jilts’, who inveigled the serviceman into joining the army but whose eyes, now he is disabled, ‘Passed from him to the strong men that were whole’.12 The complexity of gender relationships is demonstrated most clearly in The Not Dead by the three poems relating the experiences of Eddie Beddoes. Beddoes served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, a role that he felt conflicted with his military training. Instead of combat: You clean your weapon make camp, drive around, stand guard, stand down Sit with a gun in your hand and your thumb up your arse Or you try to get shot at – just for a laugh.’13

The combat poem ‘Black Swans’ describes some of the violence Beddoes witnessed in Bosnia, and his sense of helplessness at being unable to retaliate. The second poem ‘Scarecrows’ describes the emotional aftermath of this experience in the form of suicide attempts, either real or imagined – a hosepipe in a car, pills and vodka, slit wrists, hanging and, finally, taking ‘up your gun/ and shoot yourself stupid, blank after blank/ over and over again till the hands don’t shake/ and the nerves don’t feel’.14 In the film, this passage is illustrated literally, with Beddoes holding a gun in a field and firing repeatedly into the air. The sound and image are shocking, reinforcing the violence implicit in these suicidal thoughts. Beddoes is clearly deeply troubled. As well as self-harming, in his actions and thoughts, he also ‘wake[s] in sweat/ with hands in a knot around Laura’s neck’, one of several incidents of domestic violence he admits to in the course of his on-screen interview.15 However, the poem is written in the second person, addressing ‘you’ who commits these acts of violence. The poem’s speaker is clearly an older figure, addressing his younger self as ‘son’ in the first verse. This doubled self, depicted in the doubling of Beddoes’ image on screen, symbolizes the mental division and nightmares that are symptoms of PTSD. At the same time, the use of ‘son’ depicts the suicidal identity as an immature one.16 Psychological disability, and the actions it provokes, is equated with regression and childishness. But the mature poetic voice offers the potential for redemption that is not available to Owen’s disabled serviceman. Beddoes, the viewer and reader is reassured, through his visual on-screen presence, has matured to

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the point where he is able to view and narrate the experiences of his destructive younger self. He has grown up. In this he marks a shift from the childlike dependence that has been associated with disabled servicemen from the First World War, even as he reveals the confusion of gender and maturity that war disability continues to cause.17 Alongside his psychological injuries, Beddoes suffered a bullet wound that mutilated the right side of his face and torso, described in ‘Manhunt’, the final poem of the cycle. The poem focuses on the body, where the corporeal and inanimate intertwine. Beddoes has a ‘porcelain collar-bone’, rungs for ribs, a ‘fractured rudder of shoulder-blade’ and the scar across his face is a ‘frozen river’. Meanwhile the bullet that caused all this damage has become ‘the foetus of metal beneath his chest’, a murderous inanimate object that becomes a living thing nurtured by the injured body in a way that also feminizes it, turning it into a bionic form neither man nor woman, human nor inhuman.18 Even his psychological impairment takes on a physical form, becoming ‘a sweating, unexploded mine/ buried deep in his mind, around which/ every nerve in his body had tightened and closed’.19 The encompassment of the inanimate within the body, both corporeal and emotional, echoes the amputee’s struggle to come to terms with his new embodiment, living with phantom limbs and adapting to artificial limbs or prosthetic body parts.20 The physical focus of ‘Manhunt’ emphasizes a unique element in the cycle – the voice of Laura, Eddie’s wife, who also recites in the film. As the veteran’s wife, she speaks about the physical aspects of war impairment rather than the psychological damage of which her husband and the other veterans speak. Hers is a perspective defined entirely by her role as carer, yet it is the only female perspective given an actual voice. While female grief is spoken of by Cliff Holland, a veteran of the Malay campaign, and shown in images of grief-stricken Bosnian women,21 the dominant female image of the film is that of the caregiver, a role that defines her primarily as domestic.22 Laura becomes the voice and face of all women struggling to help the psychologically disabled ex-servicemen they love to return to family life. She tries ‘to reach [Eddie], touch him, love him, and make him human again’.23 This role is not as simple as this description might indicate. Her status as carer is complicated by his new role as the nurturer of the ‘metal foetus’ in his chest. She becomes the secondary parent ‘pictur[ing] the scan’ and only achieves this status ‘after passionate nights and intimate days’.24 She takes on the appropriately feminine role of lover, thereby enhancing her husband’s claims to masculinity but as must abjure the role of mother that he has had forced on him by his wound. In doing so she becomes a necessary adjunct to his identity. ‘My wife is one of my biggest saviours’, Eddie concludes. ‘I couldn’t function without her’.25 Within the poetry cycle, dutiful Laura is contrasted with another female figure, Britannia, who, in the opening poem, is constructed as an unfaithful female lover: When we were young and fully alive for her, We worshipped Britannia. We the undersigned

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put our names on the line for her. From the day we were born we were loaded and primed for her. ... So why did she cheat on us? ... From runways and slipways Britannia cheered, but returning home refused to meet us . . .. Two-timing, two-faced Britannia deceived us.26

Armitage’s Britannia parallels the women of Owen’s Disabled, as disabled men appear passive and women as unfaithful and uncaring. Yet through both ‘Scarecrows’ and ‘Manhunt’, Armitage presents more complex gender roles and relationships, such as the active but destructive man, and the self-effacing woman who acts as both secondary parent and lover in support of the wounded man. While, as Carden-Coyne argues in this volume, cultural narratives of male ‘recovery’ from war disability can ignore women’s roles as carers, they are nonetheless persistent cultural archetypes that have developed across the twentieth century. Since the 1920s, cultural responses to the problems posed by returning ex-servicemen have employed the tropes of unstable masculinity, feminine care, and the economic and emotional dependence of the disabled body in their constructions of narratives of rehabilitation.

Kitty In the wake of the First World War, constructions of archetypal gender relationships in a rehabilitative context emerged in the middlebrow novels that proliferated in Britain. These were both popular sellers and ‘a vigorously active, committed effort to offer an exegesis of change in modern society’.27 While their conclusions might be classified as melodrama in their attempts to reach resolution, their depictions of disabilities in post-war society derives from the need to assert traditional moral certainties within that society that was at the heart of the middlebrow creative endeavour.28 In these works psychological disability became a metaphor for social dislocation among all returning servicemen.29 The most interesting example of this is the character Alex St. Clair, in Warwick Deeping’s novel Kitty (1927), whose shell shock symptoms include infantile regression. Halfway through the novel, however, a physical shock helps Alex recover, although his psychological impairment remains in the hysterical paralysis of his legs. This diagnosis marks him as feminized through the identification of hysteria as a female complaint.30 Yet he is even more clearly infantilized by his condition as it allows his mother to keep him imprisoned in a room described as a nursery, where she cares for him in a manner that Deeping depicts as damaging to his mental health.31 He is only cured, when, after being removed from his mother’s care by his wife, Kitty, and required to help her earn a living, he attempts to rescue her from drowning, forcing him to use his legs. Economic responsibility helps him to regain his emotional health, but it is masculine action that redeems his body from its regressive state.

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Alex’s status as an ex-serviceman in post-war society is reflected in his relationship with these two women. During his initial regressive phase, he remains entirely under the control of his dominant mother, who treats him like a child even when he regains his mental capacity. Later, he remains physically dependent but becomes economically self-sufficient.32 He thus regains his masculine self-respect, but it is only once he is forced into a physical act of independence that he can be perceived as fully reintegrated into society and the novel can be brought to its conclusion. The novel presents the disablements of impairment as childishness and dependence. By contrast, social reintegration could only come through self-sufficiency, both physical and economic. While obsessive maternal love could be dangerous, encouraging dependence, feminine love and support was viewed as necessary to eventual independence and successful reintegration.33 Unlike obsessive maternal love, Kitty’s love tempers care with sexuality. Although only implied, the couple have sex for the first time the night after they open their riverside café. Heterosexual union and economic independence signal Alex’s masculine maturity in partnership with his wife, rather than dominated by her.34 Alex gains his final independence not only from his psychological disability, but also from Kitty’s control. In the moment that he first tries to walk, Kitty realises that ‘He would be . . . less intimately dependent upon her. He would be able to go his own way, or what might appear to be his own way’.35 Her dual role as lover and mother has been brought to a successful resolution through his ‘cure’. This, in turn, allows her to lay claim to a normative femininity, as a dependent wife, and thus the reestablishment of the gender order. Similarly, in The Not Dead, the figure of the supportive wife contrasts with monstrous femininity. Britannia symbolizes perverted femininity that ignores, infantilizes and undermines the disabled ex-serviceman. Rehabilitation can, in both works, only be achieved through a balanced relationship with women found in the mature domesticity of marriage. What Deeping makes most explicit in Kitty, however, is the role that economic independence plays in such rehabilitation, a role that, since the end of the Second World War, has become more problematic. By contrast, the physical union between lovers, only implied in Kitty, is the centre of Eddie and Laura’s contemporary relationship. In ‘Manhunt’ the physical exploration of the maimed male body by the female touch represents the beginning of the healing process for the damaged mind. The nature of male responsibility and female support has shifted, even as the context of social reintegration through gender relations remains.

The Best Years of Our Lives While novels such as Kitty (1927) used psychological disability as a metaphor for damaging social dislocation and unbalanced gender relationships that could be associated with all returning servicemen, the developing technology of film provided a space in which impairment and disability could be explored visually. As Sonya Michel suggests, ‘disabled veterans rendered visible (and thus all the more cinematic) the battle scars other soldiers carried hidden’.36 This in turn objectified the disabled male body and exposed to a gendered narrative of normalization through domesticity.37

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After the First World War, however, the majority of war films focused on trench experience, with war veterans and the disabled becoming the ‘forgotten men’.38 This included the most notable film to depict disability, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), the highest-grossing silent film of all time. While the penultimate scene focuses on the amputated leg of the protagonist, James Apperson, a scene that has fixed the film in cinematic history, the majority of the film is more concerned with his earlier combat experience. The film does not grapple directly with issues of rehabilitation and integration. It is notable, however, for the drama of the scene in which Apperson’s disability is revealed visually to both his family and the audience. This dramatic trick of delayed revelation has become a cinematic standard, one that is used effectively by Hill in The Not Dead. Although Beddoes is interviewed on camera from the beginning of the programme, it is not until more than halfway through that the audience is shown the extent of his facial scarring. Although his testimony has been about psychological problems, it is only at this point, that the audience is made fully aware that he has suffered a disfiguring physical injury. This delayed revelation heightens the visual impact of Beddoes’s scars and undermines the significance of physical disability to the struggles of rehabilitation, relative to the psychological disabilities that are the film’s focus. Hill uses the cinematic trope to subvert its traditional message of shock and horror, instead using it to emphasize the psychological damage that physical injury causes. While The Big Parade (1925) established some of the visual traditions that continue to inform depictions of physical disability on screen, it was in the wake of the Second World War that disability became a focus for such depictions. War disability was not, however, the subject of combat films, which continued to focus on the build-up to and experience of battle, but of a different type of Hollywood production described variously as ‘social problem’, ‘women’s’ or ‘normality’ films. Due to this varying classification, and the equivalent literature representing disabled ex-servicemen, an interdisciplinary reading of depictions of war disability is most useful. Depending on the disciplinary approach, the same films are analysed in very different ways. For historian David Gerber, ‘social problem’ films examine disability in relation to insensitive institutions such as military medicine, and yet entertain by focusing on ‘individuals who are embedded in private dramas of blocked ambition, failed marriage, sexual disloyalty, frustrated romance, and family misunderstanding’.39 For film and gender historian Sonya Michel, these are women’s films, whose melodramatic structures focus on personalities and whose conservative social message was aimed predominantly at women.40 For sociologist of disability Paul Darke, they are ‘normality’ films, ‘a genre . . . that specifically uses abnormal – impaired – characters to deal with a perceived threat to the dominant social hegemony of normality’.41 A similar variety of approaches can be seen in discussions of post-First World War popular novels, which have been approached from the perspective of social commentary and gender relations.42 A relatively small number of films form the basis for these varying analyses, of which the most significant post-Second World War film is undoubtedly The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), directed by William Wyler. As Gerber has argued, what made The Best Years of Our Lives so notable was the visual and

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emotional treatment of the character Homer Parrish, played by a real doublehand amputee, who uses hooks as prostheses. The impact of his amputation is highlighted by the camera work of cinematographer Gregg Toland which ‘focussed on the body . . . in [a] protracted, delving and – some would feel – intrusive manner’.43 Toland emphasizes the physical acts that Homer can accomplish with his aesthetically unpleasing but practical hooks, including opening a pack of cigarettes, target shooting and placing a wedding ring on his bride’s finger. Such bodily focus defines Parrish as a rehabilitative success story, a man who, through a series of masculine actions, has come to terms with his physical being to the extent of entering into the normative masculine state of husband. He thus ‘has a much wider social significance in that [he] offer[s] a clear solution to a wider social, non-narrative specific situation – the classification and taxonomy of disabled people’s relative worth’.44 His disability is visually resolved into a ‘good’ abnormality that allows him to fit, with some success, into post-war society. Emotionally, however, the depiction of Homer’s masculinity remains ambivalent. Despite his developing dexterity throughout much of the film, he ‘refuses to plan for the future, whether regarding a job or his life with Wilma [the girlfriend who becomes his wife]’.45 He is happy to rely on his state pension for financial support and on his parents and sweetheart for emotional support, an attitude of dependence at odds with contemporary understandings of appropriate masculinity as self-supporting. The on-going threat posed by disability culminates in the key scene where he admits the extent of his physical and emotional vulnerability to Wilma in his bedroom. The scene is initially imbued with a sense of sexual and violent menace, with both the intimate location and the highlighting of a rifle and bayonet on the wall creating a sense of unease in the viewer, particularly in light of Homer’s earlier target shooting. Yet for all the implied threat, the scene climaxes not in Homer’s assertion of his masculinity through either sex or violence, but in his admission that, when he takes off his hooks at night with the help of his father, he is left ‘dependent as a baby’. Wilma reassures him that his injuries have not altered how she feels about him; they kiss passionately and the scene closes with her tucking him into bed. While the kiss demonstrates the heteronormative message common to many post-war disability films, that domesticity and sexual ‘normalcy’ will rehabilitate the disabled man, the act of tucking him in creates a more problematic image of childish dependence that is never fully resolved. As Michel argues, ‘Wilma’s behaviour . . . is part maternal, part sexual. She tucks Homer in like a child and kisses him goodnight like a lover . . . They have achieved what amounts to a mother-child reunion’.46 Thus, despite his growing dexterity and responsibility, Homer remains throughout childlike in his dependence on his sweetheart who must assume the dual role of mother and lover. By the film’s end, Homer has assumed the mature role of husband, casting Wilma in the role of wife, reflecting ‘an intellectual and cultural climate that made women’s role in the recovery of disabled veterans especially problematic’, requiring the subordination of ‘their own dreams, ambitions, and desires to those of the veterans’.47 Yet Homer’s role as provider, crucial to the image of the independent mature male, remains in doubt as there is no indication that he has any

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plans for future employment. Physical abnormality thus remains, in part, socially abnormal through continuing dependence on both a woman and the state. The film serves as an interesting comparison with depictions of Eddie and Laura. Like Homer, the character-disabled actor, Eddie, the disabled veteran and interviewed filmic subject, is shown engaging in a series of masculine actions, including acts of violence. A scene where Homer fires a rifle at a wall repeatedly is echoed by Eddie’s firing of his pistol into the air. The potential for sexual menace associated with disability is also felt, although these are told rather than shown when Eddie discusses the acts of domestic violence he has committed against Laura, influenced by his PTSD. ‘I have never physically beaten her. But I have threatened her and I have assaulted her.’48 In both the cases of Homer and Eddie, the actions of the war disabled are structured as implicitly violent, creating a dramatic arc that, in the fictional narrative, is defused and resolved through domesticity, albeit an ambivalent form. In reality, however, the potential for violence is never fully defused. ‘Invited to make himself comfortable [for his interview], Eddie half-demolished the room he was filmed in, kicking at doors and furniture until it looked like the scene of some unspeakable Bosnian massacre. Then he was ready to start.’49 This use of violence as a way to control frightening situations is typical of responses of ex-servicemen suffering from PTSD.50 The most striking similarities between fiction and documentary can be seen, however, in the depictions of femininity. Wilma, like Laura, must engage with multiple feminine roles, including lover, parent and nurse, in order to help Homer reintegrate into civil society. Her success is marked when he achieves, at least in part, the socially acceptable role of husband in the final wedding scene. The corollary is that, at the same moment, she fully achieves the socially acceptable role of wife. Laura is similarly defined by her relationship with Eddie. Although marriage is less emphasized, a photograph is shown of the couple on their wedding day, with him in military uniform and her in a white gown. Laura is seen walking hand-in-hand with her husband, and she is interviewed almost exclusively alongside him. In the story of post-war disability that both The Best Years of Our Lives and The Not Dead tell, the woman’s role is a vital one, but one that is entirely defined by the man’s status as a soldier and, eventually, as a disabled ex-serviceman.

Conclusion Social problem films, like social problem novels, were, as Michel has argued, attempts to educate men and women about appropriate gender roles in post-war society, addressing concerns about potential social disorder caused by years of warfare and domestic separation. In such narratives, physical and psychological disability in war became a symbol for the dislocation of all returning servicemen as much as representations of issues surrounding impairment and disability itself. At the same time, representations of disability in a melodramatic style reinforced notions of normality, be they socially or bodily appropriate. The striking difference with The Not Dead, is that the documentary interviews ground the poetic device in the reality of people living with PTSD, a style of representation

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that domesticates disability.51 Yet there is symbolism here, too, expressed in the opening poem read by all three men, in which they come to stand for all those living war disabled, who are ‘not dead’, those servicemen traumatized by war and unrecognized by society, beseeching: ‘So what shall we do with the not dead and all of his kind?’.52 What an interdisciplinary reading of the cycle, documentary, film and novel show is how consistent the artistic answer to that question has been across the twentieth century in terms of both representations of disability and gender relations. Like Deeping and Wyler, Armitage and Hill construct war disability as problematic, and women as central to the care and rehabilitation of disabled former servicemen. As film and disability studies demonstrate, whether the medium is literary or visual, symbolic or realist, disabilities caused by war problematize the masculinity of former soldiers in ways that are socially difficult and potentially violent. Social history and sociology illuminate continuities in the role of women as carers and the issues of dependence that disability can create. Social disregard for the war disabled may be constructed as feminine, echoing Owen’s ‘giddy flirts’ of the First World War, but love and care are also embodied by women, especially wives. The poetic cycle and television programme differ from earlier representations in the nature of the domestic partnership. In the modern welfare state, economic self-sufficiency is not quite the concern it was in inter-war Britain, and is thus absent from The Not Dead. Instead sexual relations, which were only implied in Kitty and The Best Years of Our Lives, are explicit. Rehabilitation is defined predominantly through sexual rather than economic ‘normalcy’, a major shift over the course of the twentieth century. Yet the historical vision of the rehabilitation of those wounded in the service of the state remains influential today. The security of a stable heterosexual relationship continues to be a central element in the solution to the problem the disabled ex-serviceman poses to post-war societies. The answer to Armitage’s bitter question must include not only the ‘not dead’, but their wives and lovers as well, as was the case in the wake of the First World War.53

Notes 1. The author would like to thank Simon Armitage and Pomona Books for permission to quote from The Not Dead. 2. Simon Armitage, The Not Dead (Hebden Bridge: Pomona Books, 2008), xi. 3. Armitage, The Not Dead, xi. 4. Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 1–30; Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 215. 5. Armitage, The Not Dead, xii. 6. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale; Emma Hanna, The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 74–8. 7. The collection was written with the assistance of Combat Stress, a charity that supports servicemen suffering from psychological impairment due to service. 8. Armitage, The Not Dead, xii. 9. Armitage, The Not Dead, xiii.

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10. Armitage, The Not Dead, ix. 11. Jessica Meyer, Men of War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 107–8. 12. Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’, lines 27, 43–4 in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, John Stallworthy (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), 152. 13. Armitage, ‘Black Swans’, lines 2–5. 14. Armitage, ‘Scarecrows’, lines 28–31. 15. Armitage, ‘Scarecrows’, line 23–4; The Not Dead, directed by Brian Hill, Century Films for Channel 4, 2007, 1:20:00. 16. Hill, The Not Dead, 1:08:25. 17. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 74; Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 105–7; Seth Koven, ‘Remembering and Dismemberment: crippled children, wounded soldiers and the Great War in Great Britain’, American Historical Review, 99/4, (October 1994), 1170–1. 18. Armitage, ‘Manhunt’, line 19. 19. Armitage, ‘Manhunt’, lines 23–5. 20. See Wendy Jane Gagen, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J.B. Middlebrook’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire, 14/4, (2007), 525–541. 21. Hill, The Not Dead, 49:00–50:00. 22. Rosemary Crompton, Employment and the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–61. 23. Armitage, The Not Dead, xiii. 24. Armitage, ‘Manhunt’, lines 18, 2. 25. Hill, The Not Dead, 1:27:30. 26. Armitage, ‘The Not Dead’, lines 7–25. 27. Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 15. 28. David A. Gerber, ‘Introduction’ in Disabled Veterans in History, David A. Gerber (ed.) (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 11; Bracco, Merchants of Hope, 55. 29. Examples of psychological impairment in middlebrow literature of the period, include Chris Baldry in Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (1918) and George Fentiman in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928). 30. Elaine Showalter, ‘Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties’ in Behind the Lines, Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (eds) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 64. 31. Warwick Deeping, Kitty (London: Cassell and Company Limited, 1930), 165–6. 32. The initiative to work is hers, emphasizing the extent to which the aftermath of war created new burdens for women as household providers. See Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–137. 33. This understanding of psychological disability was also expressed by members of the medical profession. In a letter to The Lancet in 1918, Dr A.J. Brock argued that ‘The neurasthenic is very apt to use his relatives merely as props or drugs, to pander to his feeling of helplessness; sometimes relations (and, of course, also other friends) become such a nuisance in this way that the patient has to be forcibly isolated from them by imposition of the “Weir-Mitchell treatment”.’ (A.J. Brock, ‘The War Neurasthenic: A Note on Methods of Reintegrating him with his Environment,’ The Lancet, 23 March, 1918, p. 436. The Weir-Mitchell involved complete rest and

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34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

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isolation for the patient whose every action was prescribed and monitored by the doctor.) Deeping, Kitty, 352. Deeping, Kitty, 368, 372. For an overview of cultural responses in Britain, see Hynes, A War Imagined; Sonya Michel, ‘Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3/1, (July 1992), 114. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 157–8; Michel, ‘Danger on the Home Front’, 120–1. Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge, 1997), 149. David A. Gerber, ‘Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in “The Best Years of Our Lives”‘, American Quarterly, 46/4, (December 1994), 554. Michel, ‘Danger on the Home Front’, 114. Paul Darke, ‘Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability’, in Tom Shakespeare (ed.) The Disability Reader (London: Continuum, 1998), 184. See Bracco, Merchants of Hope and Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Gerber, ‘Heroes and Misfits’, 557. Darke, ‘Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability’, 187. Gerber, ‘Heroes and Misfits’, 560. Michel, ‘Danger on the Home Front’, 118. Michel, ‘Danger on the Home Front’, 111–12. Hill, The Not Dead, 1:20:00. Armitage, The Not Dead, xiii. Tracy Xavia Karner, ‘Engendering Violent Men: Oral Histories of Military Masculinity’ in Lee H. Bowker (ed.), Masculinities and Violence (London: Sage, 1998), 224–30. Hanna, 64; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography’ in Sharon L. Snyder et. al. (eds) Disability Studies (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 69. Armitage, ‘The Not Dead’, line 44. Jessica Meyer, ‘ “Not Septimus Now”: Wives of Disabled Veterans and Cultural Memory of the First World War in Britain’, Women’s History Review 13/1, (2004), 117–37.

8 Emotional Women and Frail Men: Gendered Diagnostics from Shellshock to PTSD, 1914–2010 Hazel Croft

For nearly a century, the image of the shell-shocked soldier, mentally broken and emasculated by the ravages of trench warfare, has been a potent symbol of the psychological impact of war. Research on gender and the trauma of war has also focused on the way that shell-shock destabilized masculinity. This chapter investigates the gendered framework of the psychiatric diagnosis of servicemen and servicewomen, as well as male and female civilians, from the First and Second World Wars to the recent wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). By providing an historical overview of masculinities and femininities, this chapter charts both the persistence of gendered explanations for war-related psychiatric injuries across a century of conflicts, and the instabilities and changes in the ways that gendered diagnosis has been applied to and experienced by soldiers and civilians. Historical attitudes and practices provide crucial explanations for the continued gendering of diagnosis. Some accounts view ‘war trauma’ as a universal response to war, emerging as a result of any armed conflict, though with different names. By contrast, this chapter historicizes the way the psychological injuries of war have been interpreted. ‘Shell-shock’ in the First World War, ‘war neurosis’ and ‘battle fatigue’ in the Second World War, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in recent conflicts, are not merely different names for the same phenomenon. Although each configuration of psychiatric injury draws on previous concepts, trauma has to be situated in the particular social, cultural and political circumstances, and the specific war zone context, in which it is interpreted.1 The interdisciplinary approach of this chapter combines this historical insight with anthropological studies and gender theories. While much has been written about psychiatric injury in the First and Second World Wars, historians have yet to analyse the wars of the last two decades. Social and medical anthropologists, 110

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however, have undertaken cross-cultural and socially-situated studies, comparing the historical construction of trauma with the rise of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category.2 This chapter draws on sociological and historical approaches that analyse gender not as a biological given or a fixed and static category, but as a constructed, relational and dynamic concept that, as Jeanne Boydston has argued, must be critically ‘reassessed with respect to time, place and culture’.3 The chapter begins with a discussion of debates about shell shock and masculinity, before examining how British psychiatric diagnosis in Second World War Britain gendered male and female military personnel and civilians. It compares psychiatric views of psychologically frail servicemen with that of ‘over-emotional’ servicewomen, and with psychiatric attitudes to male and female civilians, and the notion of psychological resilience. The second half of the chapter considers whether the almost universal diagnosis of PTSD in recent conflicts has challenged or reinforced gendered interpretations, particularly in light of the growing number of military women diagnosed with PTSD. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of whether an individualized Western model of trauma is appropriate for understanding the experience of women civilians, increasingly caught in the frontlines of wars and civil conflicts.

Neurotic Male Soldiers: ‘Weak’ and ‘Feminine’? The gendering of psychiatric disorders in war has been almost exclusively applied to the shell-shocked male soldiers of the First World War. Elaine Showalter famously contended that gender was a crucial factor both in the development of war neuroses and in how the medical profession interpreted soldiers’ disorders.4 Men broke down because, in the relentless horrors of the war, they could not meet the heroic ideals of manliness. Shell-shock represented, Showalter argued, ‘a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of “manliness” itself’.5 Hysterical paralysis, blindness and muteness, for instance, were symptoms previously attributed to disordered women. Showalter argued that shell-shocked men performed a ‘body language of masculine complaint’ against the terror of modern war and military expectations of masculine restraint and self-control. Moreover, psychiatrists interpreted their behaviour as ‘feminine’. Like hysterical women in the nineteenth century, hysterical soldiers were seen as ‘simple, emotional, unthinking, passive, suggestible, dependent and weak’.6 Showalter’s thesis has been the touchstone for much research since the mid1990s, developing and modifying her analysis. Challenging her argument that medicine feminized mentally-ill soldiers, Laurinda Stryker contended that military psychiatrists stressed the manliness of shell-shock victims. Stryker argued that the most severe hysterical symptoms were seen as ‘potent proof of an underlying commitment to ideals of courage and duty’.7 Jessica Meyer’s study of pension records also suggests that shell-shock was not simply gendered along a male/female dichotomy. Psychiatrists drew on discourses of masculine maturity, which normalized shell-shock as a treatable medical condition and helped men to regain a sense of their masculine identity.8 Military psychiatry and the

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state were far more committed to rehabilitating soldiers than locking them away in asylums or awarding disability pensions. Moreover, officers were far more likely to be diagnosed with the anxiety disorder neurasthenia, rather than hysteria, in keeping with middle-class notions of duty, respectability and the greater responsibility that officers bore. In Germany too, wartime mental disorders were not always diagnosed as masculine failure. Paul Lerner argues that hysteria was not explicitly feminized. German psychiatrists replaced femininity with class as the main interpretation of diagnosis.9 In Russia, psychiatric casualties were only rarely regarded as emasculated. Doctors tried to preserve their patients’ masculinity and, as Laura Phillips suggests, ‘they often saw war as more abnormal than the patients themselves’.10 There was not a straightforward diagnosis on the basis of gender, and not all male soldiers who suffered from shell-shock were considered feminine. The social, cultural and national context was important, and class assumptions were especially influential within military hierarchies. Moreover, there was not one psychiatric view of shell-shock, but many competing and overlapping claims as to its origins and symptoms. Gender was not always explicit in diagnosis or in psychiatrists’ proclamations, but was often implicitly linked to wider social ideas about masculinity and femininity. In a culture where femininity was associated with weakness and masculinity with strength, and yet in a period where women were performing masculine tasks on the home front from munitions work to aeroplane mechanics, the military viewed soldiers’ nervous disorders as the ‘weakness’ of individual will.11 Significantly, the role of heredity and predisposition, implicitly connected to the mother, would gain increasing relevance in diagnosis through the rest of the twentieth century. In contrast to the First World War, the gendering of psychiatric diagnosis during the Second World War has seldom been analysed.12 As Jessica Meyer’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, the First World War framed the ways in which the psychological disorders of war have been subsequently understood. Though the Second World War also involved mass mobilization, blurring the boundaries between military and home fronts, larger numbers of women were mobilized, shifting the gendered dimensions of psychiatric diagnosis. How did the analysis of the psychiatric disorders of male frontline troops compare with women in paramilitary service roles, and with male and female civilians who experienced bombing raids? Psychiatric casualties were not viewed within a ‘crisis of masculinity’, despite the fact that numbers in some battle zones doubled the 1914–18 war.13 This does not mean that psychiatric diagnosis was any less gendered than before. Instead, it reflects the interpretation of the Second World War at the time, and in its subsequent memorialization and historiography, as a ‘good war’. Even military defeat, such as the retreat from Dunkirk, was interpreted as heroic, despite the high levels of psychiatric casualties.14 During the war military psychiatrists drew on theories of constitutional predisposition, which located the origin of nervous disorders in pre-existing physical or psychological problems within the individual. The attribute of predisposition has to be seen in the context of a masculinized and hierarchical military culture, which was determined not to repeat the ‘shell-shock’ episode. Psychiatrists who treated military casualties on

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the frontline and in military hospitals were an integral part of the military establishment. Diagnosis and treatment was thus shaped by and subordinated to the values and requirements of the military. Above all, psychiatrists saw their primary role as getting men back to active duty, and, as Joanna Bourke has argued, most did so with more relish and with less sympathy for neurotic soldiers than their counterparts in the First World War.15 Even the group therapies and psychodynamic treatments the army deployed at military hospitals were run along military lines, with the primary aim of getting men back to the front.16 Although many military psychiatrists recognized that all soldiers had their breaking point, these conditions were viewed as merely the precipitating factor for the development of pre-existing physical or psychological disorders.17 Theories of predisposition located the cause of mental disorder not in the war’s traumatic events but in the failings of the individual man. Predisposition was also a way in which the threat to heroic notions of masculinity posed by the psychologically traumatized soldier could be dealt with in wider society. In the United States, predisposition allowed blame to be shifted from war onto the family’s failings, especially the mother who mollycoddled her son and deprived him of toughness.18 During the war, many psychiatrists argued that the experience of violent and traumatic events played little part in the development of mental disorders in frontline troops. ‘Only in a minority of patients were the more violent stresses of the war the main precipitating factor’, wrote the neurologist Eliot Slater in an influential study of 2,000 neurotic soldiers in 1943. Predisposition entailed both explicitly and implicitly gendered assumptions and judgements about the soldier’s pre-war physical and psychological traits, family background, personality and lifestyle. It was not just the soldier’s medical or psychiatric background that was judged, but his whole personality. Slater contended that nearly all soldiers with neurosis showed ‘a feebleness of will and purpose, coupled with tendencies to worry, pessimism and moodiness or hysterical traits’.19 Judgements about physical and sexual inadequacies underpinned assessments of soldiers’ psychological frailties. Psychiatric journals described men who broke down in war as ‘weak’ or as having ‘a feminine type of build’.20 Slater singled out soldiers he judged as sexually ‘impoverished’ and ‘inadequate’ as being more prone to neurotic breakdown.21 Such men failed to match up to notions of what constituted a ‘real’ man physically, sexually and psychologically. Homosexual traits were often implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, identified in ‘neurotic’ men, who were viewed either as sexual aggressors or as ‘passive’ prey to the advances of other men.22 Psychiatrists also turned to psychoanalytic theories of ‘the unconscious homosexual factor’ to explain why some men failed to match-up to military masculinity.23 Even military psychiatrists who praised the courage of war neurotics still believed their weak and insecure personalities made them unsuitable for battle. R.G. Gillespie’s case studies included an ‘air-gunner’ Sergeant, described as ‘timid, anxious, a poor mixer, emotional, and meticulous in his habits’, and an Officer who had been nervous as a child and who at school, ‘was the butt of others, as he always dressed differently’.24 Personal pre-histories were easily mapped onto present diagnoses, and which no longer exempted the middle classes as had often been the case in the First World War.

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For other psychiatrists, neurosis in frontline troops was seen as a form of malingering, more common among the other ranks. For military psychiatrist J. A. Hadfield, even the severest traumatic experiences did not cause neurosis, but were rather ‘simply tags on which the patient conveniently projects his previously existing problems’.25 Neurosis was seen as an excuse to evade military duty, reflecting the soldier’s unconscious desire to flee from battle. Although experiencing violent events caused many men to become what psychiatrist Harold Palmer called ‘bomb happy’, only the insecure, weak and over-dependent types, in whom ‘an unwillingness to fight was predominant’ would go on to develop a serious neurotic disorder.26 Such judgements about frail constitutions, insecure personalities and cowardice were explicitly gendered, and dominated the psychiatric view of male soldiers who broke down. How did military psychiatry deal with the nervous disorders of an increasing number of women who joined the military services?

Servicewomen: ‘Hysterical and Rebellious’ During the war servicewomen faced many of the same conditions of military service and duty as their male counterparts. Although women recruited into the military served in ‘auxiliary’ and non-combatant services, many were posted overseas and faced similar conditions to male soldiers who suffered nervous disorders, without experiencing combat. Military psychiatrists viewed servicewomen’s nervous breakdowns as confirmation that women were biologically and temperamentally unsuited for military service. Psychiatrists did not believe that military women were more likely to experience nervous breakdowns than men, especially given that most did not experience frontline battles. Nevertheless, psychiatrists made highly gendered judgements about women’s physical and psychological characteristics. The belief that women were biologically unsuited for military service – particularly when it disrupted their reproductive role – was often explicit in psychiatric judgements. A study of one thousand women in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force highlighted the problems caused by ‘the subordination of traditional female values and primary biological functions in the compulsory interruption of the reproductive career at its optimum point’.27 Psychiatrists thus drew on theories first developed in the nineteenth century which viewed work, education and strain, for instance, as destabilizing women’s entire nervous systems, making them more susceptible to mental disorder.28 Psychiatrists also viewed women as being temperamentally as well as physically unsuited for the rigours of military life. Servicewomen’s nervous disorders were seen as an expression of resistance to regimentation and discipline. According to the military psychiatrist D.N. Parfitt, ‘the female service neurotic is more rebellious than the male, who has longer experience of discipline’.29 Parfitt complained about his resistant female patients: ‘In 10 per cent of the women one met wilfulness, rudeness and downright rebellion in association with hysteria or near malingering’. Women were ‘prone to hysterical reactions under service conditions’, he argued, because they had ‘an incomplete acceptance’ of compulsory national service.30 Psychiatrist Linford Rees argued that the main factors

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in servicewomen’s neurotic disorders were ‘domestic and marital problems, wartime separations, regimentation and unsuitability of service employment’.31 He even considered that ‘a greater degree of conformity in dress, regime and daily routine than women are accustomed to’ could cause resentment and stress in women, which led to neurotic reactions. Rather than viewing women as heroic or patriotic, psychiatrists questioned women’s motives for joining the military. Rees claimed women joined up for glamour and excitement, out of ‘pique’ following a row with a fiancé or to escape their families.32 Women who thrived in military service could also overcome the ‘unwonted attributes of femininity’ with ‘an opportunity for meeting a desire for masculine identification’.33 Though based on highly gendered assumptions, servicewomen’s perceived masculinism was not necessarily regarded as pathological. In the US Army, psychiatrists often sought to channel servicewomen’s ‘homosexual tendencies’ (whether perceived or real) into performing positive roles within the military structure, particularly at times of severe personnel shortages.34 Masculinity was valourized in male troops and, to a limited extent, tolerated in female service personnel. Femininity, on the other hand, was seen as a pathological trait in ‘weak’ male soldiers, and viewed as ‘proof’ of the unsuitability of the majority of women to perform traditional male duties and to adapt to military hierarchy and discipline.

On the Home Front: Stoic Women and Weak Men Significantly, psychiatrists’ attitudes were more positive towards female civilians, reinforcing the emphasis on psychological resilience. Psychiatric notions of female emotionality and a tendency to panic, which had dominated views of female civilians in the First World War, shifted in the early years of the Second World War when predicted levels of mass civilian psychiatric casualties failed to materialize. During the London blitz Felix Brown, a psychiatrist at Guy’s Hospital, remarked that: Women seem to be by no means a weakening element in the general population, in fact the male cases of emotional shock and psychoneurosis seen resulting from air raids outnumber the females in the ratio of 30 to 18.35

Other doctors believed the war improved the mental health of women previously thought to be emotionally vulnerable or prone to hysteria. As one GP noted, ‘Women who were normally classed as hysterical by the doctors usually stood up to the bombs astonishingly well’.36 According to a Bristol-based psychiatrist, the ‘more ordered life’ offered through war work and civil defence removed the insecurity which could lead to neurosis in younger women. ‘Uniforms and badges have a certain glamour, and endow the wearer with a sense of importance and recognition of personal worth or indispensability previously not accorded’, he claimed in a medical journal.37 In the context of the dominant discourse of national unity on the home front, and in their desire not to attribute psychological problems to the war, psychiatrists and GPs emphasized women’s psychological strength rather than their

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weakness, and their stoicism rather than their emotionalism. The immediate political concern to uphold morale on the home front and the practical exigencies of wartime psychiatric practice shaped this approach. Psychiatrists assumed that any nervous shock after bombing raids was transient, as civilians had no ‘secondary gain’ in prolonging their symptoms. Unlike male troops, they could not flee the battle and, unlike servicewomen, civilians could not escape duties. Thus the discourse of malingering which permeated the psychiatric judgements of both male and female military personnel could not be applied to civilians. Moreover, as noted by psychiatrist Henry Wilson, emergency psychiatric clinics treated patients swiftly, with a sedative and a cup of tea, and sent patients away without any follow up treatment or care.38 It is also important to distinguish between the rhetoric of stoicism generated by psychiatrists writing in wartime medical journals, and their practice towards their female patients. The majority of civilian women, like the military cases, were diagnosed as predisposed to neurosis. Significantly, the rhetoric of resilience did not extend to all civilians. Male civilians who suffered nervous disorders failed to match up to the ideals of manliness which, as historian Sonya Rose has argued, coalesced with the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz.39 Men unfit for military service were singled out as a particular problem – ‘The civilian population was becoming a dumping ground for Service rejects’, as one government report on neurosis concluded.40 Indeed, cases of ‘weak’ civilian men who suffered nervous reactions to bombing raids appeared in psychiatric journals throughout the war. The case studies recounted by psychiatrist Harry Stalker were typical. A forty-four year old man, who had served in the First World War and who had been captured as a prisoner of war, was diagnosed with anxiety. ‘As a child he was timid, being afraid of strangers of the dark, and of blood. He cried easily and was “ragged” at school’, wrote Stalker. Another case was a fifty year old man who ‘drank more than he should, felt sexually impotent and had never married’. A third case was a twenty-eight year old conscientious objector, who as a child had ‘feared his father’ and had ‘important difficulties in his sexual life’. All of these cases, Stalker opined, ‘had abnormal, even grossly abnormal, previous personalities’.41 Importantly, his previous war service did not qualify as heroic. Similar to what Matthew Stibbe shows in this volume, the man’s prisoner-of-war (POW) status feminized him as captive and failed resistor. Thus a medical history of predisposition was projected onto his past. Class complicated psychiatric views of gender as well. Fears about the high rate of nervous disorders among working-class women in factories were the main motivation behind the commissioning of a major wartime government survey into neurosis in the civilian population.42 In the 1946 report, government concerns about high levels of absenteeism in war industries merged with concerns about the suitability of women for male jobs. Young girls were often viewed as undisciplined and disruptive, especially recruits from domestic service or rural areas. Although industrial psychiatrists expressed concern about the social hardships working-class women faced in combining excessive working hours with maintaining family responsibilities, they did not question women’s primary responsibilities as caregivers and mothers.43 Similarly to servicewomen,

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female factory workers had encroached into traditionally male jobs, and psychiatric concerns centred on whether women could cope with male jobs and retain their femininity. Psychiatric judgement of male and female behaviour during the war intertwined with other social factors, such as class and nationality, and with what Paul Lerner has described as psychiatry’s ‘ever-present political and economic dimensions’.44 The rhetoric of resilience did not reflect a fundamental change in psychiatric views. Rather, it reflected a wider social process in which, as the historian Penny Summerfield highlights, contradictory demands were placed on women during the war. Women were expected to be mothers and carers, maintaining the home for their menfolk, and yet at the same time expected to perform public duties for the war effort.45 Psychiatric discourse both reflected the gender instabilities created in the heightened atmosphere of the war, and also reinforced dominant discourses concerned to preserve gender hierarchies. At a time when women in civil defence renegotiated their citizenship in gendered terms, as Lucy Noakes and Susan Grayzel argue in this volume, civilian psychiatry sought to explain female resilience in gendered ways. Women were praised for being psychologically resilient, but only if they remained within the established boundaries of acceptable feminine behaviour.

PTSD: The Reconfiguration of Gendered Diagnostics If the Second World War did not fundamentally challenge the gender bias of diagnosis, what impact has the rising number of women in the military had over the past four decades? In the Vietnam War (1966–1975), 7,500 American women served in a military capacity, mainly as nurses, although some estimates have put the combined figure of military and civilian women in the combat zone between 33,000 and 55,000.46 Although the numbers are small compared to the estimated three million male combat troops, US servicewomen witnessed many of the same horrific deaths and injuries as male troops, as well as facing similar difficulties of adjustment and lack of support when they returned to the US.47 Yet until the 1980s there was a virtual public silence about the traumatic experiences of servicewomen in Vietnam. The pervasive image of psychologically-damaged Vietnam veterans in popular representations, especially films, remained overwhelmingly masculine.48 Women’s voices were also marginalized in the Vietnam veterans’ campaigns for recognition and compensation in the social crisis in US society which followed the war, and which led to the official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980. The development of PTSD has been viewed as representing a ‘paradigm shift’ in psychiatric conceptualizations, from a focus on predisposed factors within the individual to a focus on the traumatic event itself.49 Since the 1980s, PTSD has become the overriding diagnosis for the psychiatric disorders of war – at the same time as the numbers of American and British women serving in combat zones has risen dramatically, particularly in the first Gulf War (1991), and the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Yet, the ways in which gender has shaped the construction and application of PTSD have rarely been analysed. It has been estimated, for example, that over 200,000 women served in

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the US military’s war and occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2008.50 More than this, the changing nature of warfare means that these servicewomen are no longer performing peripheral roles and face the same dangers as their male counterparts. In Iraq, although women were excluded from combat units, urban guerrilla warfare meant that women in ‘support’ units undertook roles such as guarding military convoys, taking part in house raids, and flying helicopters and planes, facing the same danger of coming under direct fire or being injured in roadside bombs as their male ‘combat’ counterparts. Indeed, many of these women have been killed or injured, and frequently witnessed the deaths and physical mutilation of both fellow troops and Iraqi civilians.51 Some women have even been platoon leaders of all-male units, encountering the same risks under enemy fire as men. Though the US combat exclusion policy restricts women’s careers, it continues to be debated at the highest military and Congressional level. While women can occupy some combat roles in the New Zealand and Canadian armed forces, recent political debate to review the ban in the Australian army caused great consternation.52 How has military women’s increased exposure to traumatic events in combat zones shaped and changed the interpretation and diagnosis of PTSD? There has been a plethora of psychological studies over the past two decades examining gender differences in the prevalence and treatment of PTSD in war veterans. The results of these studies have been mixed, with no consistent findings on whether male or female troops are more likely to develop PTSD.53 Earlier studies, such as the National Vietnam Readjustment Study, found a higher prevalence of PTSD in men, with 15% of returning male veterans being diagnosed with PTSD compared to 8% of women.54 More recent studies of Iraq veterans, where women played frontline roles, found higher rates of PTSD in female veterans. Studies of British troops, however, have underplayed gender differences, emphasizing the intensity and frequency of combat experiences as the main factor in PTSD symptoms.55 Neither has there been any agreement about the relationship of gender to the trauma experienced by those soldiers who perpetrate, as well as witness, violence and atrocities, as suggested in Phoebe Godfrey’s case study in this volume. Clearly, gender bias remains a crucial factor in patient–practitioner interactions. Over the last decade, military psychiatrists have increasingly emphasised pre-war factors to explain the development of PTSD. An official US Department of Veterans Affairs report on women veterans’ health in 2010 highlighted that both women and men with ‘assault histories’ prior to combat had over double the rates of ‘new-onset’ PTSD.56 By focusing on factors in the individual’s past, such as childhood sexual abuse, as the major risk factor in the development of PTSD, military psychiatry has again shifted the blame for psychological disorders away from war itself, despite the initial focus on traumatic experience. Far from being a ‘paradigm shift’, in military psychiatric practice, PTSD shares many of the individualistic assumptions about trauma which dominated theories of constitutional and psychical predisposition in the Second World War.57 In recent years, individual predisposition has been emphasized as the major factor in developing PTSD. A factsheet produced by the US government’s Department of Veteran Affairs in 2007, in language similar to that of Second

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World War psychiatric journals, highlighted ‘familial predisposition’ – including ‘lower intelligence’ and childhood abuse – as being as important as combat for the development of PTSD.58 Significantly, this renewed emphasis on predisposition has also entailed a continuation of class and gender in diagnosis. Socio-economic background, poor education, instability and abuse in family life have been considered potent predisposing factors. In some psychological studies, women are regarded as more prone to childhood abuse and vulnerability than men, and thus viewed as more predisposed to trauma.59 Despite PTSD’s official status as a diagnosis, the stigmatization of psychiatric illness in the military shows no signs of diminishing. PTSD, along with depression, is still viewed as ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’, in the military establishment and among troops. One major American medical journal argued: ‘Within the military culture, “succumbing” to PTSD is seen as a failure, a weakness, and as evidence of an innate deficiency of the right stuff’.60 In Britain, Susie Kilshaw’s study of soldiers with Gulf War Syndrome shows that dominant forms of masculinity in the military frame all illness as feminine weakness.61 In contrast to the wider public acceptance of PTSD as a legitimate response to traumatic events, the military establishment, and many soldiers themselves, still view psychological disorders as malingering, and as the failure of strength and masculinity. As Kilshaw writes, ‘Within the military, psychiatry itself is seen as soft, and engaging in its practice is seen as a way of shirking duties’.62 In such a masculinized culture, it is little wonder that both male and female troops fail to report psychological problems and seek medical assistance. According to one report between 50 and 60% of traumatized soldiers in the US army are too ashamed to seek help or fear they will jeopardize their future military career.63 Some accounts suggest that women veterans are even more reluctant than their male counterparts to report PTSD symptoms. Many female veterans in the US report that military psychiatrists are often dismissive and insensitive to their psychological problems.64 A female veteran’s reluctance to seek help is compounded if she is one of the increasing numbers of women who have suffered rape or serious sexual assault at the hands of male soldiers whilst on military duty. Female veterans face the double stigma of psychiatric illness and sexual assault. Moreover, the continued emphasis on pre-war factors in the development of PTSD, particularly in the context of the still highly masculinized culture of military life, ensures that gendered presumptions and discrimination still dominate women’s experiences of military psychiatry. How does the diagnosis of civilians caught on the front line of contemporary wars and civil conflicts in the non-Western world compare with the gendering of diagnosis in the military? PTSD also dominates the diagnosis of the psychological disorders of civilians in war. The rise of ‘globalised biomedical psychiatry’ has led to rapidly expanding Western-led trauma programmes, which approach trauma through what psychiatrist Derek Summerfield calls ‘a gaze borrowed from the psychiatric clinic’.65 This approach imposes an individualized conceptualization of trauma that often fails to acknowledge both the culturally-varied ways that trauma is experienced and the social factors which can help people to resolve trauma.66 This Western medical gaze is also highly gendered, too often viewing female civilians as passive victims rather than as

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active participants. Women civilians often play a major role in the resolution of trauma and in the rebuilding of post-conflict societies, as psychological and anthropological studies of violent conflicts in Lebanon, Dafur and Afghanistan have shown.67 For women involved in the Palestinian Intifada, for example, social support and political commitment to the struggle have acted as important coping mechanisms in the face of violent and traumatic events.68 Westernised trauma programmes, similar to military psychiatry, focus on the problem of the individual’s adaption to war, rather than on the transformation of social and political conditions or of the system of gendered relationships, which shape the experience and resolution of traumatic experiences.

Conclusion Over the last century, significant changes have occurred in the conduct of war and in the gendered framework of the military. The gendering of diagnosis has also been transformed by the changing nature of the proliferating wars and civil conflicts across the globe. Increasing numbers of women are on the frontlines of Western military interventions and in civil conflicts, both as soldiers and civilians. The psychological effects of armed conflict can no longer be viewed, if they ever could, as an exclusively masculine experience. Despite such momentous changes, there are also striking continuities in the way the psychiatric effects of war are interpreted. Psychiatric intervention continues to focus on the ‘problem’ of the individual’s inability to adapt to the conditions of war, and the rationale of predisposition allows for continued discrimination against women based on gendered assumptions. This chapter has drawn on anthropological studies and utilized gender theory to show how the continued focus on the individual incorporates rather than challenges gendered assumptions and biases about male and female behaviour in war. As Joan Busfield has argued, although psychiatric diagnoses formally adhere to notions of scientific neutrality, in the social context in which they are formulated they cannot avoid ‘incorporating, reproducing and sustaining class and gender divisions’.69 Military psychiatry is above all about ensuring serving soldiers are fit to fight and that veterans are treated and recuperate with less reliance on pensions. In military culture, men who suffer psychiatric illness are still viewed as frail and women as over-emotional. While psychiatrists certainly care about their patients, wider social and political questions remain about how and why wars are fought, and the brutalizing and sexist culture of military life. As the centenary of the First World War approaches, it is striking how little has fundamentally changed in the gendered interpretations of military psychiatry.

Notes 1. Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale, ‘Trauma, Psychiatry and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical Introduction’, in Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age 1970–1930, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–27. 2. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5.

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3. Jeanne Boydston, ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’, Gender and History, 20, (2008), 559. 4. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, (London: Virago Press, 1987), 167–194. 5. Showalter, The Female Malady, 172. 6. Showalter, The Female Malady, 175. 7. Laurinda Stryker, ‘Mental Cases: British Shell Shock and the Politics of Interpretation’, in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18, (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 163. 8. Jessica Meyer, ‘Separating the Men From the Boys: Masculinity and Maturity in Understandings of Shell Shock in Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 20, (2009), 1–22. 9. Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930, (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 8, 16. 10. Laura Phillips, ‘Gendered Dis/ability: Perspectives from the Treatment of Psychiatric Casualties in Russia’s Early Twentieth-Century Wars’, Social History of Medicine, 20, (2007), 334. 11. Joan Busfield, ‘Class and Gender in Twentieth-Century British Psychiatry: ShellShock and Psychopathic Disorder’, in Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody, (Amsterdam & New York: Rodophi, 2004), 309. 12. An exception is Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, (London: Granta Books, 1999). 13. Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Psychiatric Battle Casualties: an Intra- and Interwar Comparison’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 178, (2001), 244. 14. Jones and Wessely, ‘Psychiatric Battle Casualties’, 244. 15. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, 259. 16. Nafsika Thalassis, ‘Soldiers in Psychiatric Therapy: the Case of the Northfield Military Hospital, 1942–1946’, Social History of Medicine, 20, (2007), 357. 17. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses, (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1945), 82. 18. Hans Pols, ‘The Repression of War Trauma in American Psychiatry After WWII’, in Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (eds), Medicine and Modern Warfare, 2nd edition, (Amsterdam: Rodophi, 2004), 251–276. 19. Eliot Slater, ‘The Neurotic Constitution: a Statistical Study of Two Thousand Neurotic Soldiers’, The Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, 6, (January–April, 1943), 1. 20. A.A.W. Petrie, ‘Types of Psychopathic Personality’, Journal of Mental Science, 88, (October, 1942), 493. 21. Slater, ‘The Neurotic Constitution’, 4. 22. Petrie, ‘Types of Psychopathic Personality’, 493. 23. Edward Glover, War, Sadism and Pacifism: Further Essays on Group Psychology and War, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 118. For an historical account of psychiatrists’ attitudes towards homosexuality, see Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 149–174. 24. R.D. Gillespie, ‘War Neuroses After Psychological Trauma’, British Medical Journal, 1, (12 May, 1945), 655. 25. J.A. Hadfield, ‘War Neurosis: A Year in a Neuropathic Hospital’, British Medical Journal, 1, (7 March, 1942), 321. 26. Harold Palmer, ‘Military Psychiatric Casualties: Experience with 12,000 Cases’, The Lancet, 2, (13 October, 1945), 457, 454.

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27. S.I. Ballard and H.G. Miller, ‘Psychiatric Casualties in a Women’s Service’, British Medical Journal, 1, (3 March, 1945), 294. 28. See Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Women: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 29. D.N. Parfitt, ‘Psychoneurosis in R.A.F. Ground Personnel‘, Journal of Mental Science, 90, (April, 1944), 571. 30. Parfitt, ‘Psychoneurosis in R.A.F. Ground Personnel‘, 571. 31. Linford Rees, ‘Neurosis in the Women’s Auxiliary Services’, Journal of Mental Science, 95, (October, 1949), 895. 32. Rees, ‘Neurosis in the Women’s Auxiliary Services’, 888. 33. Rees, ‘Neurosis in the Women’s Auxiliary Services’, 887–888. 34. M. Michaela Hampf, Release a Man for Combat: the Women’s Army Corps during World War Two, (Kohn: Bohlau Verlag, 2010), 262–267. 35. Felix Brown, ‘Civilian Psychiatric Casualties’, The Lancet, 1, (31 May, 1945), 691. 36. George Franklin, cited in Melitta Schmideberg, ‘Some Observations on Individual Reactions to Air Raids’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 23, (1942), 174–175. 37. R.E. Hemphill, ‘The Influence of the War on Mental Disease: A Psychiatric Study’, Journal of Mental Science, 87, (April, 1941), 180. 38. Henry Wilson, ‘Mental Reactions to Air Raids’, The Lancet, 1, (7 March, 1942), 284–287. 39. Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 152. 40. C.P. Blacker, Neurosis and the Mental Health Services, (London, New York & Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1946), 1. 41. Harry Stalker, ‘Panic States in Civilians’, British Medical Journal, 1, (1 June, 1940), pp. 887–889. 42. Blacker, Neurosis and the Mental Health Services, 1, 22. 43. Ling, ‘Industrial Neuroses: Analysis of 100 Cases’, The Lancet, 1, (24 June, 1944), 831. 44. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 2. 45. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 14. 46. Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1966–1975, (Boston & Toronto: Little Brown, 1987), 4. 47. Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 10–11. 48. Carol Lynn Mithers, ‘Missing in Action: Women Warriors in Vietnam’, Cultural Critique, 3 (1986), 84. 49. Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘A Paradigm Shift in the Conceptualization of Psychological Trauma in the 20th Century’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21, (2007), 16. 50. Helen Benedict, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, (Boston: Bacon Press, 2009), 3. 51. Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, 5. 52. Lance M. Bacon, ‘Rules limiting female GIs’ careers could change’, Army Times, 17 April, 2011; ‘Gillard backs women in combat’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April 2011. 53. Charles W. Hoge, Julie C. Clarke and Carl A. Castro, ‘Commentary: Women In Combat and the Risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Depression’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 36, (March, 2007), 327.

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54. Alan Fontana and Linda Spoonster Schwartz, ‘Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Female Vietnam Veterans: A Causal Model of Etiology‘, American Journal of Public Health, 87 (1997), 170. 55. Hoge et al., ‘Commentary’, 328. 56. D. L. Washington et al., ‘Systematic Review of Woman Veterans Health Research 2004–2008’, Department of Veteran Affairs, (Washington, 2010), 25. 57. Patrick J. Bracken, ‘Post-Modernity and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, Social Science and Medicine, 53, (2001), 741. 58. Brett T. Litz, ‘The Unique Circumstances and Mental Health Impact of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq’, National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Department of Veteran Affairs, (2007). 59. See, for example, Daniel W. King, Lynda A. King, David W. Foy and David M. Gudanowski, ‘Prewar Factors in Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Structural Equation Modelling with a National sample of Female and Male Vietnam Veterans’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, (1996), 520–531. 60. Matthew J. Friedman, ‘Acknowledging the Psychiatric Cost of War’, New England Journal of Medicine, 351, (1 July, 2004), 77. 61. Susie Kilshaw, ‘Gulf War Syndrome: A Reaction to Psychiatry’s Invasion of the Military?’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32, (2008), 224. 62. Kilshaw, ‘Gulf War Syndrome’, 224. 63. Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, 200. 64. Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, 203. 65. Derek Summerfield, ‘A Critique of Seven Assumptions Behind Psychological Trauma Programmes in War-Affected Areas’, Social Science and Medicine, 48, (1999), 1457, 1449–1462. 66. Derek Summerfield, ‘Conflict and Health: War and Mental Health: A Brief Overview’, British Medical Journal, 2, (22 July, 2000), 233. 67. Kenneth E. Miller and Andrew Rasmussen, ‘War Exposure, Daily Stressors, and Mental Health in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings: Bridging the Divide Between Trauma-Focused and Psychosocial Frameworks’, Social Science and Medicine, 70 (2010), 8; Catherine Panter-Brick, Mark Eggerman, Viani Gonzalez and Sarah Safdar, ‘Violence, Suffering, and mental health in Afghanistan: A School-Based Survey’, The Lancet, 374, (2009), 814. 68. Vivian Khamis, ‘Post-Traumatic Stress and Psychiatric Disorders in Palestinian Adolescents Following Intifada-Related Injuries’, Social Science and Medicine, 67, (2008), 1200. 69. Joan Busfield, ‘Class and Gender in Twentieth-Century British Psychiatry’, 316.

9 Masculinities, Ethnicities and the Terrorist in Cyprus (1950–1959) and the War on Terror (2001–) Gabriel Koureas

In April 1955, the British colonial administration reported that the group known as EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston – National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), led by Greek army officer Colonel George Grivas or ‘Dighenis’, were launching full-scale attacks on British human and infrastructure targets. This included blowing up British aircraft, bombing the Governor’s house, killing a young off-duty soldier and disembowelling two others, and kidnapping an elderly local Briton.1 By 1956, the conservative British press referred to EOKA as an ‘utterly ruthless and brutal band of terrorists whose methods arouse widespread disgust and fear’.2 Colonial authorities circulated a discourse that described the insurgency as terrorism. The use of this term was heavily debated within the political hierarchy of the Colonial Office. Initial descriptions of the insurgents as ‘outlaws’ were rejected in favour of the term ‘terrorist’, which, it was felt, carried far less romantic notions.3 By using this term, government officials intensified claims that EOKA was spreading terror on the island with indiscriminate attacks on military targets and British, Greek and TurkishCypriot civilians. The term terrorist, however, not only established a political position but also promoted certain ideas of masculinity on both sides of the conflict. This chapter discusses the consequences of the invisibility and visibility of the image of the terrorist during and after the war of independence from the British colonial authorities in Cyprus, which erupted into violence between the island’s Greek and Turkish populations in 1955, continuing sporadically to the present day.4 The chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws from gender and queer studies, history and visual culture theory, in order to understand the role of masculinity and national identity in Britain and Cyprus, and to reveal the gendered meanings that saturate debates around the terrorist male body in 124

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colonial wars of independence and more recently, in the War on Terror. The colonial wars of independence in the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as challenging notions of masculinity established in the First and Second World Wars, and challenged in the Vietnam War. Acts of terrorism are seen as threatening Western masculinities because these acts are the ultimate manifestations of hyper-masculinity, the willingness to give up one’s life in an act of powerful violence, to serve a perceived greater goal. As a result, the body of the terrorist needs to be made invisible and discredited. Gender theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, and this ritual is socially compelled in part by the force of compulsory heterosexuality. Gender identity depends on performative acts that give the ‘illusion of naturalness’.5 Indeed, this illusion is used to establish what sociologist Robert Connell calls ‘hegemonic masculinity’, and is expressed within a web of power relations that are in a continual state of flux and transformation.6 Writing in relation to the French colonial wars of independence, Franz Fanon demonstrated the ways in which political resistance was founded upon a reconstruction of masculinism and a restructuring of gender relations.7 Such restructuring has grave consequences in post-colonial nationalisms in countries that adopt masculinist discourses to restore damaged masculinity and lost honour and to promote extreme political ideas. While masculinities are changeable, definitions of terrorism are equally malleable and the literature on terrorism reflects this ambiguity.8 Common principles nevertheless frame terrorism’s politics as pre-mediated, directed at civilians, and not committed by the government or army. The goal of terrorism is regarded as inspiring fear and, most importantly, that terror precedes both rational calculation and emotion.9 However, as Stephen Morton has argued, this focus on the emotional and aesthetic connotation of terror is to the ‘detriment of the geopolitical context of its production’. Most importantly, for Morton, the relativist argument that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’, ignores the fundamental point that terrorism is the ground upon which political sovereignty and freedom was and is defined in colonial history and in the present.10 Issues of gender and terrorism are also closely linked with ideas of progress and civilization. Judith Butler has argued that hegemonic conceptions of progress are defined over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for the purposes of self-legitimation. Furthermore, ‘progressive’ politics relies on a conception of freedom that emerges through time and establishes a set of cultural norms. Debates around issues of terrorism and masculinity during the colonial wars of independence, and more recently the War on Terror, rely on such ideas of progress.11 Butler is referring to the images of torture that circulated from the Abu Ghraib prison in order to show the relationship between the hyper-masculinity of the US army and those of the tortured populations of Iraqi prisoners. Sociologist Suki Ali argues that the signs of the barbarian become tools of the civilized, and the masculinities that are imagined are formed through conventional understandings of the ‘Orientalised Other’ in debates on terrorism.12 Sixty years ago, during the anti-colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, similar debates on progress, civilization, terrorism and masculinities were conducted

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in the House of Commons, the British press and novels of the period. The history of these wars has been erased from British cultural memory. Indeed, the writer Günter Grass has recently stated that ‘Germans, who lost the war, had the chance – were forced – to think about the past. The winners didn’t. Perhaps in time, your country, England, will think about its colonial crimes’.13 This chapter explores this forgetting in British cultural memory and the ways in which the memory of the war of independence from British colonial rule in Cyprus has formed the foundation of national identity in independent Cyprus since 1960. The themes of terrorism, gender and the mutilated male body during the Greek Cypriot insurgency will be examined specifically through an analysis of two museum displays. Bringing together sociology, gender studies, political theory and visual culture studies, the complexities of gender, terrorism, masculinity and memory are explored. The first image is from a display at the Imperial War Museum (IWM, London), depicting the war of independence from British Colonial rule in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959. The display shows the military machinery and ammunition used by the British and Greek Cypriots during the uprising of Greek Cypriots against colonial rule, as well as some of the declarations and pamphlets distributed by the main political and military wing of the resistance group EOKA. The display is tucked away in the basement of the IWM as part of a small exhibition on liberation wars from British colonial rule. The invisibility of the theme of British colonial wars, especially in a museum dedicated to remembering ‘imperial war’, and indeed the absence of the human figure of the terrorist or experiences of terrorism, contrasts with the dominant cultural memory of the two world wars exhibited throughout the IWM, whose combatants are heroized. The second museum context is the representation of the uprising in Cyprus. In 2002, the National Museum of Struggle (NMOS) moved to its new building in the Greek-speaking south of the divided city of Nicosia. The museum was established in 1961 to commemorate the war of independence from British rule and excludes any other conflicts before or after that event, although the history of the island has been a continuous history of war. In striking contrast to the IWM’s representation of the same conflict, victims and perpetrators of terrorism, and especially the mutilated male bodies – whether tortured, blown up or hanged – take centre stage in the display. Most importantly, these were colonial police images that the British authorities used in order to document the atrocities and capture the terror that EOKA spread around the island. Similar images were published in the British press at the time in order to demonstrate to the British public what visual culture theorist W.J.T. Mitchell calls the ‘unimaginable and unspeakable’, since terrorists speak the language of the unspeakable and perform and stage the unimaginable.14 Seen from a contemporary Cypriot perspective, the images offer instances of hyper-masculinity, heroic deeds, holy warriors and martyrs. For the colonial administration and the British public, they visualized the invisible Cypriot terrorists hiding in the mountain range of Troodos, and killing their victims indiscriminately in the main towns of Cyprus. Produced by the British administration and disseminated in the British press these propaganda images aimed to establish the unspeakable

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evil and injustice of what the British political discourse defined as terrorism. This chapter investigates the consequences of exhibiting the mutilated male body for the identity of a nation that, since its independence in 1960, has been in a continuous state of conflict and, conversely, the absence of the male mutilated body from museum displays in Britain.

Contesting Masculinities: British and Cypriot Visions of Antiquity Within the British establishment there was considerable debate and disbelief as to why the uprising happened. The novelist Lawrence Durrell, who was living on the island when the conflict broke out and was appointed as Director of Information services in 1954, could not comprehend this ‘grotesque’ and ‘unreal’ uprising. Cyprus, he felt, had for generations ‘been the calm un-emphatic hush of an island living outside time but within the cherished boundaries of a cherished order’, was irreparably changing.15 Writing for The Observer, Durrell wondered why the Cypriots wanted what they called Enosis (Union with Greece), when they knew that they would be faced with economic problems and poor administration if Greece took over the administration of the island. He concluded that ‘it was all founded in a childish bad dream’ from which they will wake up one day in order to realize that they could enjoy ‘perfect freedom within the Commonwealth’. Durrell then proceeds to blame the Colonial administration, including himself, for ‘our failure to project the British ethos, to make available to the Cypriot the amplitude of our own civic and cultural resources’. Most importantly, for Durrell, ‘the basic failure lay somewhere in our inability to include him, and his set of values, in the British family’.16 Durrell’s paternalist view of Cypriot men as locked in a childlike state – in need of guidance, support and inclusion – also informed the main attitudes of the British government at the time. Interestingly, the British found it difficult to comprehend what was happening and why Cypriots wanted independence. Reaching for the very tools of colonial hierarchy that often paralysed their powers of analysis, they felt surprised that ‘the colonial child’ could engage in acts of terrorism, which The Times described as a ‘definite policy of murder’.17 In his opening address to the House of Commons on the ‘Cyprus problem’ in December 1955, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Harold Macmillan used similar paternalistic language to Durrell in order to defend British colonial authority: . . . there are some people who seem to think that this is merely a question of Great Britain being in what I might describe as the position of an ageing parent with an adolescent son—‘The boy is of age; give him his freedom and have done with it.’18

However, according to Macmillan the situation was not as simple as that, since while other colonies were ‘primitive’ and gradually ‘brought to responsibility by British tutelage’, the ‘inhabitants of Cyprus were civilised when the inhabitants of Britain were primitive’.19 Macmillan was addressing the dilemma that the colonial authorities faced from the moment they colonized the island in 1878,

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and the romantic notion they had of the island as the cradle of classical Greek civilization.20 Colonial administrators were usually educated in the Classics in public schools, and taught to aspire to ideals of ancient Greek masculinity such as fortitude, endurance and fair competition. Now they were suddenly faced with the reality that Cypriot men did not conform to their mythical island or their projected fantasy of classical Greek masculinity.21 By contrast for the men of EOKA, Greece was the motherland and classical antiquity served as the model of warriorhood and the fighting spirit. Rather than idyllic, ancient Greek masculinity offered a source of inspiration for their militarism and, most importantly, for their freedom-fighting masculinities. Significantly, the military leader of EOKA, Grivas Dighenis, used these very same ideals in order to recruit and inspire the male population of the island. In a series of leaflets distributed around the island he asked the men to remember the richness of Greek history and in particular those important men who fought through the centuries for the freedom of the Greek nation. Special emphasis was accorded to the famous battles from Greek antiquity – Marathon and Salamina – and the heroism of Leonidas’ three hundred men. For Dighenis, this inspiration emphasized how ‘only with blood’ can freedom be gained. His rhetoric compared British with Greek Cypriot masculinities: while the former was seen as ‘unfair’ and ‘un-masculine’, the Greek Cypriot soul was ‘heroic’, striving for freedom even if this entails ‘blood and death’. In a leaflet aimed at the youth of Cyprus he specified the ideals of masculinity that were required for the struggle: work, discipline, self-sacrifice, unselfishness. He went as far as to declare that peace negotiations lead nowhere and it is only with blood that freedom can be achieved, and ‘wounds are medals’ which can be worn with pride.22 Ana Carden-Coyne has demonstrated the connections between the commemoration of the First World War and ancient Greek ideals of the death of the warrior. The physical beauty of a young man who died in battle revealed his warrior status, his virtue and innate goodness. By naming the Cypriot fighters terrorists, the British distinguished themselves as true heroes.23 For the British authorities and press there was one significant problem with representing the uprising: the men they were chasing were invisible.24 All the authorities could see was Dighenis’ leaflets and read his fearsome rhetoric. The guerrillas’ invisibility posed not only strategic, military problems in locating an enemy hidden in the mountain ranges of the island, but also posed the problem of a recognizable ‘other’ with which an image of the enemy could be constructed. Unlike in the two world wars, the colonial wars were establishing a new kind of warfare where the enemy was invisible and the battlefield was without definite borders. As The Times argued, the ‘island’s terrorists, emboldened by their comparative immunity from arrest, are daily becoming more audacious in their outrages’.25 The military authorities had to resort to animal hunters in order to be able to trace the terrorists. The Daily Express reported that ‘forty hand-picked men were taught in the Troodos Mountains how to track and capture EOKA terrorists in their hide-outs’. The chief instructor was the ‘white hunter of the Empire who since 1926 had captured lions, rhinos and human killers by the marks they leave behind’.26 Moreover, the animal hunter symbolically attempts to re-establish the masculinity of the army that can no longer

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be established in the battlefield, but which instead relies on the prowess of the animal hunter. In addition to employing such means of counteracting the illusiveness of the guerrillas, the authorities concentrated on the two leaders of the uprising, Archbishop Makarios and General Grivas Dighenis.

The Protagonists of the Conflict From the outset, the Colonial authorities saw the religious leader Archbishop Makarios as the instigator of the uprising. The Times published an article that claimed to ‘unmask’ Archbishop Makarios through a number of documents the colonial forces captured. The article printed Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd’s statement that these ‘authentic’ documents contained ‘irrefutable proof’ that Archbishop Makarios was ‘the leader of the terrorist campaign in Cyprus’. The claim to ‘authentic’ documents enabled the Colonial Secretary to justify the deportation of Makarios to the Seychelles.27 Debating the situation, respondents in the House of Lords painted Makarios as ‘the militant priest’ and, according to Lord Milverton, a ‘multiple murderer’.28 By the end of 1956, Makarios was branded the arch-terrorist, filling in the invisible body of the terrorist fighter who had evaded capture. The choice of Makarios, in contrast to General Dighenis, is also interesting in terms of masculinity. The representative terrorist was shrouded in church robes, thus denying the image sexual potency and power. By contrast, the figure of General Dighenis in military uniform posed a threat for the authorities with the projection of his military masculinity. The description of Dighenis that the authorities circulated for his arrest fitted the British image of the virile, masculine man. The strong face, bushy eyebrows and firm jaw-line was erased from public display in order to be replaced by the church robes of Makarios. The British press recognized this threat to British masculinities and instead attempted to paint an image of Dighenis as the ‘fascist style leader’ of EOKA. The Observer published an extensive profile of Dighenis presenting him as a fascist, paranoid leader who was ‘said to bear a personal grievance, amounting at times to a mania’. The article also analysed the captured diaries of Dighenis, painting a portrait of a selfish and vain man. His career in the Greek army during the German occupation of Greece was used as an example of his collaboration: ‘For instance he has the relatively rare capacity to kill in cold blood. Destruction appears not to worry him in the least. At one stage, he planned to poison all the wells used by British troops’. Most alarmingly, according to the journalist ‘the hedonistic temperament of the Cypriots did not readily conform to his [Dighenis] fierce dictum’.29 The profile concludes with the fact that Dighenis had no private life, no children and ‘for the brooding lonely Grivas, the struggle is everything’.30 Grivas was painted not as a heroic individual determined to achieve his goal whatever the cost, but someone who kills in cold blood and carries deep anxieties. Most importantly for British propaganda, Grivas’ stated lack of procreative power is presented as a failure of heterosexual masculinity. By contrast, the British soldiers fighting on the island were represented as the epitome of the perfect ‘boy next door’. The Daily Express, in a full-page spread, issued the photographs of thirty-five servicemen serving in Cyprus. The

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article introduced the latest achievements of the soldiers on Troodos Mountain, resulting in the capture of a number of guerrillas and ammunition: There’s the postman. Perhaps he once delivered a letter to you. There’s the shop assistant [. . .]. Against a background of the bomb and the knife [. . .] the boy next door is growing up.31

Under each of the photographs the men gave was a short statement about their experiences in Cyprus: ‘Bombs are inconvenient when you’re drinking in the bar’; ‘It’s tough but I like it’; ‘I think the terrorists are a bit of a joke’; ‘What a lot of places the terrorists stop me seeing’.32 The efforts of the troops were not only presented as a rite of passage into manhood but, most importantly, as normalizing masculinities embedded within family values and the work ethos of everyday life. Unlike the Cypriot ‘terrorists’, British soldiers were proud to make their faces publicly visible. The face provides in this instance a familiarity, a reassurance, a testament to the ‘spirit in which Britain’s youth accepts national responsibilities’ according the Daily Express.33 Thus both invisible and visible bodies were used in war propaganda, mobilizing different discourses of masculinity for military and public opinion purposes. In order to further discredit the ‘terrorists’, the idea of ‘irresponsible masculinities’ emerged during this period.

Executing Irresponsible Masculinities The idea of responsible and irresponsible masculinities emerged from debates on the death penalty in the House of Commons in 1956, when Members of Parliament discussed the imposition of the death penalty for certain murders associated with law and order, including murders by shooting and by explosion.34 When Kenneth Robinson MP asked if the situation in Cyprus can be used as an example of the death penalty acting as deterrent to political terrorists, Major Lloyd-George MP, the proponent of the amendment, argued that the situation in Cyprus could not be compared to the situation in Britain, since ‘there is a totally different population here’ and ‘fortunately our own people do not go in for that kind of thing, although other people do’.35 Dr Horace King MP went on to add that ‘if we do not have acts of political terrorism in this country it is not because of the death sentence we impose for it but because of the mature democracy that we have been able to build up’.36 What these exchanges reveal is that the immature manhood of Cyprus needed to be executed in order to progress. Indeed executions by hanging took place throughout the four years of the uprising, between 1955 and 1959. What the authorities soon realized, which was widely publicized in the press, was that the hanged men became martyrs in the eyes of their fellow countrymen. The Manchester Guardian reported on the long appeal case and eventual execution of Michalis Karaolis: ‘Karaolis was looked upon as a hero for his silence concerning the identity of his protector during the period when he went into hiding between the murder and his arrest’. The article continues to say that ‘the exposure of his protector would

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almost certainly have counted as a mitigating factor in his silence’.37 In an earlier article the Manchester Guardian reported that ‘if we hang these two, the Greek Cypriots, far from being deterred are likely in future to name their children and their streets after them. Movements like EOKA need such martyrs’. The article concluded that ‘on grounds of principle we should avoid thrusting martyrs between us and a population with whom we hope to be reconciled’.38 Indeed, many streets on the island and in Greece were subsequently named after Karaolis, and numerous volumes of poetry and prose have been dedicated to his memory.39 Significantly, those pardoned by the British authorities just before their execution are hardly mentioned in the Cypriot literature on subject.40 It is only death that confirms heroism, martyrdom and masculinity. The case of Michalakis Rossides, who received a pardon after he was sentenced to death by hanging, is a useful point of discussion. Similar to Karaolis’ charge, he was convicted for killing Private Ronald Shilton of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, who EOKA claimed to have executed in reprisal for the hanging of Karaolis. On his arrest, Rossides confessed that he had killed Shilton under threat of death by two persons known only by code names, who had brought Shilton to be held hostage in April 1956. Rossides admitted that in May the two men returned and took both him and Shilton to a field where there was a grave ready, compelling him to shoot Shilton. Rossides claimed, and the Court believed him, to have become very friendly with Shilton while holding him hostage and he would never have killed him but for EOKA’s threats. Rossides was sentenced to death by Special Court on 6 June, 1957.41 Rossides’ defence concentrated on the fact that he became very friendly with Shilton, which his attorney described as brotherly.42 In his statement, Rossides said: . . . one day at about noon a car van came and brought me Ronnie Shilton. They told me to hide here until they bring me orders. When they brought me ten pounds, they told me to feed this man and give him everything he wishes. We stayed there for a number of days and I became very friendly with Ronnie. We sleep in the same bed . . .43

Then the orders came to kill the man he called ‘Ronnie’: Well when they told me to kill him I told them that Ronnie was my friend. They told me it is an order and soldiers must obey orders. Well when Ronnie saw the pistols he told me he was not angry with me because you are a soldier and I know that orders must be obeyed. He was dead. From that day for six days I was not able to eat and not sleep. All night I was looking at Ronnie’s face. That’s the only thing I ask God to forgive me. [. . .] At the time I fired the shots I afterwards put my head in my hands. I did not see them put the soil over him. I was unable to do the job.44

Rossides felt great emotion and guilt about what had occurred. The testimony reveals how the ‘terrorist’ and the British soldier suddenly depart from the norms that defined their masculinities. Instead, emotionality and the sharing of certain moments, fears and anxieties, pervades the record. However, Shields was

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a deserter, who had been abducted by EOKA while absent without leave from his unit, and this factor is erased from British and Cypriot memory. Interestingly, a secret memo from the Commissioner’s office to the Attorney General states that ‘the effect upon public opinion of the crime of which Rossides stands convicted is not what might normally be expected in a civilised society’, and that a murder perpetrated by EOKA ‘automatically results in the murderer being considered a hero’. As the murder was revenge for Karaolis’s hanging, it was ‘therefore fully condoned by the public’. The memo concludes that ‘consequently if the sentence in this case is carried out public reaction would follow’.45 We will never know if this was the actual reason for the outcome of the case, as no further evidence exists in the archive. However, what we do know for certain is that neither Rossides nor Shields were turned into heroes. Their masculinities did not conform to the masculinities of the terrorist or the ‘boy next door’ British soldier, and could not be used for political purposes. ∗

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The four years war of independence became a landmark in the cultural memory of Cyprus. In 1993 the Cypriot Government under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education and Culture formed the Council of the Historical Memory of the Struggle of EOKA. Its aims were to recognize the contribution of the fighters and promote the memory of the struggle. The Council published a 700-page volume, which includes memoirs, fiction and poetry inspired by the events.46 They also instigated an art collection related to the memory of the conflict, and commissioned the new building for the National Museum of Struggle, as well as a considerable number of memorials to individuals who fought during the period. Why was there a revival of the memory of the conflict at this particular period? This strategic remembering came twenty years after Turkish forces invaded the island in 1974, occupying the northern part of the island. The Greek-Cypriot government was seen by many as giving in to Turkish demands for the recognition of a separate Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus. The memory of the war of independence served to legitimize Greek-Cypriot identity, to construct and reconstruct the wounded national pride. In this instance, the Greek lineage of the island needed to be established as well as ideas of heroism, fortitude, endurance and unconquerable masculinities, which the war of independence provided. This is very clearly demonstrated in the National Museum of Struggle. First, a short tour of the museum: a spiral walkway leads the visitor through the four levels of the museum. The first level provides an introduction to the war of independence and associates the history of Cyprus with the ancient Greek civilization, establishing a firm historical background on which to lay claim for what follows. The second level provides an iconography of the demonstrations that were almost a daily occurrence during the period and life-size replicas of youths demonstrating. The third level provides a very different visual picture with details from the guerrilla warfare and its consequences. The photographs of dead bodies in various degrees of mutilation are paraded in front of the eyes

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of the visitor and along the walkway. The museum has filled the majority of its space with photographs of dead bodies of guerrillas. This procession of the dead leads to the last level, which has been transformed, into a shrine for all those who died. The photographs of the dead line the walls, with a candle in front of each photograph. What is striking, however, are the three ropes hanging in the middle of the room similar to those used by the British to execute the enemy ‘terrorists’. The actual execution place, located in the main prison building, has also been transformed into a shrine with a small memorial outside dedicated to those who were hanged by the Colonial authorities. What are the implications of exhibiting such images? For the cultural theorist Susan Sontag, atrocity images can arouse a morbid ‘scopic pleasure’, yet they nevertheless provide an ‘ethical value’. However, as Sontag warns, the pacifist value of such images is not always clear. Their appeal can also provoke hatred for the enemy, spur patriotic feeling and trigger vengeance.47 In the case of the Museum of Struggle, and since museums are spaces in which cultural icons are constituted, the mutilated dead male body becomes the cultural icon of the present, reflecting the ruins of the divided city of Nicosia which has been divided into the Turkish-speaking north and Greek-speaking south since the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. Considering the gendering of the terrorist, some similarities between the Cyprus war of independence and the War on Terror can be drawn. Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London (IWM), Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell’s art installation, entitled The House of Osama bin Laden (2003), is instructive. During 2002 the artists spent time in Afghanistan recording visits to, among other places, a murder trial in the Supreme Court of Kabul, the site of the statues of Buddha at Bamyan that were destroyed by the Taliban and, according to the IWM website, ‘after a long and dangerous journey, the former home of Osama bin Laden at Darurtah where he lived for a brief period in the late 1990s’.48 The images of the house are strikingly similar to those produced by the Colonial authorities in Cyprus while searching for ‘terrorists’: empty rooms in semi-derelict houses, with some traces of the recent passing of human life. In both cases the body of the terrorist remains invisible, haunting the empty spaces with absent masculinity. While this chapter was being written, American forces captured and killed Osama Bin Laden during a raid of his house in Pakistan. What is most striking from the incident is the decision of US President Barack Obama not to allow the publication of post-mortem images of Osama Bin Laden’s dead body. The President justified his decision by arguing that graphic images of someone who was shot in the head could be used as propaganda tools or as incitement to further violence. Significantly, the President stated: ‘We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies’.49 Instead, the photographs and videos that the media were allowed to circulate were those of the empty house where Bin Laden was killed. Images demonstrated the force of the attack, with the walls of the house blown out, and the furniture and evidence of daily life scattered throughout the rooms. One photograph captured the invisible terrorist through the eyes of the US

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administration: President Obama with his staff watching the raid on-screen, while the viewers could not see what was they were apparently witnessing. Perhaps, those images will never be seen. Instead, their facial expressions and contractions, and bodily postures, acted as a mirror for the viewer. In a room full of men and just two women, it is the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, who appears distressed, bringing her hand to her mouth as though silencing a scream. This silent scream appears like a haunting scream for the terrorist rendered invisible through the President’s decision not to publish the images. Interestingly, the depiction of President Obama appears small and withdrawn in the left corner, yet also surrounded by military men that signify the hegemony of American military masculinities over that of the first black American President. Thus the image also encapsulates an important instance of competing masculinities in American racial politics. The President ordered the attack, finally avenging 9/11 in killing Osama Bin Laden, which reinforced his masculinity within the United States during a period when his own image and popularity were deteriorating. However, the President was not presented as the main protagonist of the event. His masculinity needed to be contained, mirrored by his position in the corner of the image. Centre stage, however, was the military administration that executed the operation, appearing to reassert its authority and masculinity as the most important army in the world. By contrast to the President and to military masculinities, the depiction of Hilary Clinton – often regarded as a tough, masculinized woman – needed to be played down. The gesture of shock she displays not only emphasizes the enormity of what is taking place in the screens, but also re-feminizes her image. Hence, this mass-distributed image orchestrates and performs both masculinities and femininities and, most indicatively, demonstrates their embodied gender performance through the invisible body of Osama Bin Laden, which was secreted away to be buried in the ocean, thus sealing its invisibility forever. Similarly, the absence of bodies in the current Imperial War Museum display can be attributed to the idea that the mutilated bodies of Western, first world citizens, cannot be visualized, due to the social ethics that value some bodies over others, and the emphasis on individuality in the Western world.50 Hence, their absence from the IWM becomes a civilizing ritual. Moreover, their absence from the IWM reinforces the idea of the regular and irregular army. In the Theory of the Partisan (1963), the political theorist Carl Schmitt argued that irregular combatants, as opposed to soldiers in uniform, demand a rethinking of the ‘enemy’ and the ‘political’ because their non-identification relies on invisibility: ‘secrecy and darkness are their strongest weapons’.51 More recently, political philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues that the crux of the matter is in the complex relationship between bodies and war. The image of the warrior disfigured through war represents the antithesis of the ‘body politic’ through public health, pathologies and therapies.52 However, the body of the warrior that is in hiding, as in the instance of the ‘terrorist’, poses a logistical problem: How can the invisible body be made visible? Would images of mutilation suffice? Instead of concentrating on the mutilated body what needs to be re-configured is the relationship of masculinity to the body politic in order to demystify the hegemony of heroic masculinities as exemplified in the two world wars and their

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orchestrated commemoration and performatively established masculinities. This might reveal the precariousness of masculinities on both sides of the conflict. It is through this precariousness, as demonstrated in Rossides’s court case, for instance, that ideas of progress, terrorism and masculinity can be challenged and a de-mystification of heroic and terrorist masculinities can take place.

Notes 1. S. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 199. 2. Daily Express, 11 May 1956, 2. 3. Public Record Office (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 926/563. 4. For a detailed analysis of the war of independence in Cyprus see, N. Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union with Greece, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978); R. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 1954–1959, (Press?Oxford, 1998); S. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995). 5. J. Butler, ‘Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification’, in M. Berger et al. (eds), Constructing Masculinity, (London: Routledge, 1995), 31. 6. R.W. Connell, Masculinities, (Oxford: Polity, 1995); M. Roper and J. Tosh, ‘Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, in M. Roper and J. Tosh (eds) Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800, (London: Routledge, 1991); H. Brod and M. Kaufman (eds), Theorising Masculinities, (London: Sage, 1994). 7. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1963]). 8. See for example: A.L. Ferber and M.S. Kimmel, ‘The Gendered Face of Terrorism’, Sociology Compass, 2/3, (2008), 870–87; G. Chaliand and A. Blin, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda, (Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University of California Press, 2007); W. Laqueur, ‘Postmodern Terrorism’, Foreign Affairs, 75/ 5, (1996), 24–36; S.J. Brison, ‘Gender, Terrorism, and War’, Signs, 28/1, (2002), 435–7; M. Blain, The Sociology of Terrorism: Studies in Power, Subjection and Victimage Ritual, (Florida: Universal Publishers, 2009); J. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer tTmes, (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 9. G. Chaliand and A. Blin, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda (Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 2007). 10. S. Morton, ‘Terrorism, Orientalism and Imperialism’, Wasafiri, 22/2, (2007), 36–42. 11. J. Butler, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time’, British Journal of Sociology, 59/1, (2008), 1–23, 1–6. 12. S. Ali, ‘Troubling Times: A Comment on Judith Butler’s ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’, The British Journal of Sociology, 59/1, (2008), 35–9, 37. 13. Gunter Grass interviewed by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, 30 October 2010. 14. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Unspeakable And The Unimaginable’, ELH, 72, (2005), 291–308, 298 15. L. Durrell, ‘The Turn of the Key’, The Observer, 28 July 1957. 16. L. Durrell, ‘The Cyprus Tragedy. With Love from Aphrodite’, The Observer, 14 July 1957. 17. The Times, 22 June 1955.

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18. Harold Macmillan, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 05 December 1955, vol.547, cc32-156, cc33. 19. Harold Macmillan, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 05 December 1955, vol.547, cc32-156, cc34. 20. T. Morgan, Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 21. J.A. Mangan and J.Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality. Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 22. G. Dighenis, ‘To the Cypriot Youth’, no date, in Maratheftis M. and IoannidouStavrou R. (eds), Collection of Writings from the EOKA Struggle, 44. 23. A. Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 24. The Times, 22 June 1955. 25. The Times, 5 September 1955. 26. ‘The White Hunter Goes to Cyprus’, Daily Express, 18 September 1956. 27. The Times, 27 August 1956. 28. For example: Lord Winster, 14 September 1956 vol 199 cc859-904, cc860; Lord Milverton, House of Lords Deb 14 September 1956 vol 199 cc859-904, cc882; Lord Milverton, House of Lords Deb 14 September 1956 vol 199 cc859-904, cc882. 29. The Observer, 27 July 1958. 30. The Observer, 27 July 1958. 31. Daily Express, 3 January 1956, 3. 32. Daily Express, 3 January 1956, 3. 33. Daily Express, 4 January 1956, 3. 34. Major Lloyd-George MP, Hansard, HC Deb 04 December 1956 vol 561 cc1073-198, cc1073. 35. Major Lloyd-George MP, Hansard, HC Deb 04 December 1956 vol 561 cc1073-198, cc1173. 36. Dr Horace King MP, Hansard, HC Deb 04 December 1956 vol 561 cc1073-198, cc1174. 37. The Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1956. 38. The Manchester Guardian, 9 May 1956. 39. See for example M. Maratheftis and R. Ioannidou-Stavrou (eds), Collection of Writings from the EOKA sSruggle and Stylianou, Dying for Greece, (Nicosia: K Epifaniou, 2001). 40. For example Stylianou dedicates 10 pages out of a total of 568 pages to those who were pardoned. 41. Cyprus State Archives, 1297/57/67, Telegram to Colonial Office, 08 October, 1957. 42. Cyprus State Archive, Criminal Appeal No.2103 in the Supreme Court, 50. 43. Cyprus State Archive, Criminal Appeal No.2103 in the Supreme Court, Exhibit 8, 58. 44. Cyprus State Archive, Criminal Appeal No.2103 in the Supreme Court, Exhibit 8, 59. 45. Cyprus State Archive, Memo from Commissioner’s Office Famagusta to Attorney General, 1297/57/66, 07 October, 1957. 46. M. Maratheftis and R. Ioannidou-Stavrou (eds), Collection of Writings from the EOKA Struggle. 47. S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 70. 48. http://collections.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.913, [accessed 21 February 2012].

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49. President Obama interviewed by Steve Kroft, CBS News, 04/05/2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20059739-503544.html, [accessed 21 February 2012]. 50. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006) 51. C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (New York: Telos Press Pub, 2007), 26. 52. A. Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 67–8.

10 Where the Boys Are: Militarization, Sexuality and Red Cross Donut Dollies in the Vietnam War Kara Dixon Vuic

I would like to let you know that we’re taking time out from our everyday Army life to write you a letter & thank you for the enjoyable times . . . your girls always give us. I’ve been here for 11 months & I must say – I’ve found myself looking for the girls to come many times . . . I’m sure all of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st ABN Div. feel the same way about your girls. Thanks for listening & remember like we say here: Stay alert, Stay alive & keep the Donut Dollies coming. GI Ken Cotton, March 1970.1

‘Girls’, teased a 1966 Washington Post article, ‘do you want to go where the boys are?’.2 In its shrewd reference to the popular 1960 film Where the Boys Are, this question conjured images of college-age women seeking fun, adventure and romance in exotic places. The ‘boys’ to which the article referred, however, would not be found on the Fort Lauderdale beaches as they had been in the film. The boys were in Vietnam. In its tempting blend of information and recruitment appeal, this ‘for and about women’ feature article explained that young women could go to South Vietnam, as though on a holiday, as part of the Red Cross Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas (SRAO) program. Called ‘Donut Dollies’ by American soldiers, Red Cross hostesses operated recreation centres on American military bases, where US soldiers could access snacks, games and social interaction with American women. To reach troops in the field, the women mobilized the clubs, travelling via jeep and helicopter to remote firebases and landing zones, board games and smiles in tow. During the programme’s seven years in Vietnam (from 1965 to 1972), 627 women operated twenty Red Cross clubs and logged more than two million travel miles in clubmobile visits to all parts of the country.3 But as the appreciative GI Ken 138

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Cotton wrote to Red Cross officials, the ‘girls’ who delivered ‘enjoyable times’ were the programme’s main attraction and a source of wartime motivation for American soldiers. Donut Dollies continued a long tradition in American wars of women entertaining soldiers on foreign battlefields. Beginning with US entry into the First World War in 1917, organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association, United Services Organization and Red Cross sent women to staff recreation programmes for soldiers stationed abroad. Women employed by these organizations opened canteens and clubs where soldiers hoped to find a friendly face, coffee and donuts, and momentary reprieve from the war. Although programmes varied from war to war, they consistently rested on military and civilian understandings of gender roles in which women represented a supportive home front and the antithesis of martial masculinity. Even as wars often produced dramatic gender changes, particularly through the militarization of women in the armed forces and munitions work, recreation programs mobilized conventions of femininity for the benefit of soldiers’ morale and morality. As the United States fought an increasingly controversial war in Vietnam, women’s symbolic support of the soldiers held great importance for military commanders. This chapter examines how, even as the social and cultural movements of the era called traditional gender norms into question, the military and Red Cross attempted to re-fashion conventional gender norms and wartime roles for women. In moving notions of wartime femininity from their usual site on the home front (as Lucy Noakes and Susan R. Grayzel examine in this collection) to the warzone and in performing gender in the support of

Figure 10.1 Donut Dolly Charlene McClintic distributes Christmas gift bags to a line of American soldiers at the Nashua Fire Support Base in December 1967. As Donut Dollies continued a history of women’s morale-building services, their feminine appearance and holiday cheer contrasted sharply with the war. Photograph by Bob Woodbury. Courtesy of the American Red Cross. All rights reserved in all countries.

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war (in contrast to other women’s use of gender to oppose war, detailed here by Laurie R. Cohen, and images of female fighters, as explored in an earlier chapter by Libby Murphy), Donut Dollies both upheld and expanded common notions of women’s wartime obligations. Yet, while the SRAO programme promoted traditional images of women as idealized supporters of the nation’s soldiers, this chapter also questions how the changing gender and racial climate of the 1960s and early 1970s limited the Red Cross’s ability to re-fashion older gender roles.4 The feminist movement’s challenge to traditional gender roles proved one major obstacle to the programme’s conservatism. As the war continued, the growing anti-war movement (particularly the female ‘hippie’ as the symbol of home front opposition both to the war and the troops) and the rise of the civil rights and black power movements also offered challenges to the programme’s attempts to create a supportive and traditional image of women. Even more, although the Red Cross carefully couched recreation work in a language of respectability, sexual appeal underpinned this programme in which women served as symbols of men’s heterosexual desires. Efforts to professionalize recreation work failed to overcome the power of this symbolic purpose and did not guard the women against propositions from soldiers who assumed the women’s motives to be less than altruistic. Despite the Red Cross’s best attempts to legitimize the tantalizing ways in which it placed Donut Dollies before the troops, to many the SRAO programme seemed retrograde and a thinly veiled militarization of women’s bodies in support of a controversial war. To analyse the gendered underpinnings of the SRAO programme, the military and US foreign policy, this chapter draws upon historical methodology as well as new cultural and feminist studies of foreign relations and imperial politics. This interdisciplinary approach aims to uncover the centrality of gender in war making, military conduct and the exportation of US culture in imperialistic ventures. This chapter also rests on a women’s studies and feminist analysis of the SRAO programme to explore the ways in which the state mobilized and regulated women’s bodies in an effort to promote conventional gender roles at a time of great social and cultural change. By combining an analysis of archival sources with oral histories, this work balances the organizational and personal history of the SRAO programme while allowing for a more nuanced comparison of the programme’s mission and the lived experiences of women. Moreover, by drawing connections between the SRAO programme and similar programmes in prior and subsequent wars, this chapter places the experiences of the Vietnam War’s Donut Dollies in the broader context of the nation’s regulation of sexuality during wartime, evolving gender roles, and changing understandings of women’s relationship to militaries and the state. In considering all of these questions, the chapter begins with a history of the military and Red Cross’s intentions for the SRAO programme. It then explores the tensions that changing gender and racial norms posed to the programme, followed by an examination of the tensions and problems of the programme’s sexual basis.

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Femininity and Morale As in prior wartime recreation programmes, the US military and the Red Cross envisioned the Vietnam-era SRAO programme as a way to distract soldiers from both the brutality and the boredom of war. In its June 1965 request to the Red Cross for the programme, the military projected that US involvement in Vietnam would continue for a ‘long duration’ and anticipated the difficulty of maintaining the morale of troops not engaged in combat.5 Believing that its soldiers needed wholesome diversions during periods of inactivity, the military funded and constructed Red Cross recreation centres in locations across South Vietnam. It furnished the equipment, supplies, communications, billets, transportation and security necessary for the programme to operate.6 In Da Nang, Chu Lai, Tuy Hoa and Pleiku, recreation centres typically opened six days a week and allowed the soldiers stationed nearby to drop in for refreshments, games and holiday parties. Additionally, each day pairs of women boarded helicopters and trucks to travel to remote firebases and landing zones where they engaged soldiers in audience participation trivia-style games and then travelled to an additional four or five stops before finishing the day’s work.7 In providing outlets of activity and sources of distraction for the troops, the military and Red Cross sought to create a domestic atmosphere that would make the men feel more at ease and supported in their mission. ‘One purpose of the program’, the Red Cross explained, ‘was to provide recreation centers with a homelike, comfortable atmosphere where young servicemen could relax in their

Figure 10.2 Soldiers at Rach Kien are treated to a program given by Donut Dollies Eileen Conoboy and Robin Brown. The Red Cross and the US military intended the women to provide soldiers with a reprieve from the war, even as they lived and worked in a militarized environment that literally surrounded them. Photograph by Mark Stevens. Courtesy of the American Red Cross. All rights reserved in all countries.

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off-duty hours and forget some of the tensions of war’.8 Women, in the minds of Red Cross officials – and American soldiers – added ‘a bit of warmth and grace to the landscape of war’.9 As one Red Cross press release reasoned, ‘the sight of these pert American girls in their fresh, light blue uniforms is a reminder that there will be a refreshing break in the military routine’.10 Women represented the antithesis of the militaristic environment, even as they transformed it through their feminine appearance and behaviour. Margi Ness, a Donut Dolly stationed at Da Nang in 1970, explained that ‘What a guy likes is to see us doing something girlish—walking, smiling, talking. I think they just like the action and attitude of a girl’. Noting the ways the women’s appearance and behaviour combined to counter the military environment, Ness emphasized, ‘I’m not being egotistical. It’s not just the looks, it’s the things you do’.11 Throughout a controversial war in which the United States struggled to legitimize its mission in Vietnam, Donut Dollies domesticated military bases in ways that demarcated boundaries between the savage war in the jungles of South Vietnam and the civilized, familiar and feminine Red Cross clubs on the American bases. More than mere distraction from the war, however, Donut Dollies provided tangible support for the American war effort. In a war with unclear goals, the military and Red Cross relied on women to embody symbols of obligation, longing and domesticity. None of these symbolic functions was new for recreation programmes that had consistently positioned women as symbol of what soldiers fought for. Literary scholars and historians have found that soldiers’ motivations rest in personal – not ideological – reasons, including the desire to return home to conventional domesticity. As Robert Westbrook argues in his examination of the meaning female pin-ups held for soldiers, women ‘functioned as icons of the private interests and obligations for which soldiers were fighting’.12 Donut Dollies understood this symbolic purpose. ‘As silly as this may sound’, Jeanne Christie explained: we personified the American women to the men. We were their homes, their sisters, their mothers, their wives, their girl friends. We were reminders of what they had lost and what they had to continue on for.13

Despite the availability of trained chaplains and medical personnel who could have provided therapeutic services, military commanders utilized Donut Dollies to lend a sympathetic ear and to affirm the soldiers’ martial masculinity when their units had ‘suffered heavy losses’.14 The women had no special training in counselling, and many like Mary Blanchard Bowe found this part of their work to be especially difficult. ‘Does a smile and a game really take away the tragedy of fighting a war?’, she wondered.15 Still, military commanders believed the women who embodied femininity and home were an important symbol of support for the men, particularly during frustrating and traumatic times. As Jenny Young, a Donut Dolly in 1968 and 1969, reasoned, ‘Maybe through us’, troops ‘got a small, much needed, female reaffirmation of their self-image’.16 Femininity, valued by military commanders to offset the masculine military environment, in times like these also functioned to bolster soldiers’ masculinity.

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While the SRAO programme cast Donut Dollies as idealized representations of conventional American womanhood and home front support, both of these notions came under increasing attack as the feminist and anti-war movements gained speed. To many in these movements, the mobilization of women to maintain soldiers’ morale symbolized much that was wrong with American culture. Most notably, the women’s liberation group New York Radical Women charged in its protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant that the pageant winners’ tour of Vietnam ‘to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit’ made the women ‘Mascots for Murder’.17 While SRAO officials insisted that Donut Dollies were ‘professional’ recreation workers who performed a vital role, the women’s image and roles appeared regressive in the context of rapidly evolving gender norms. ‘I couldn’t believe we were really being trained to go to a war zone and play games with soldiers’, Leah O’Leary exasperated. In her mind, ‘half of American womanhood was burning their bras and finding their feminist voices, the other half were out on the picket lines and marching in anti-war demonstrations, while I was going off to play games and “skits” with G.I.s in Vietnam’.18 Even if O’Leary overestimated the percentage of women who engaged in such activities in the era, her statement suggests the degree to which she judged her own wartime work as traditional and militarized by comparison.

Alluring Respectability The Red Cross fostered a particular brand of conventional femininity, lauding the Donut Dollies as exemplars of respectable American womanhood. SRAO participants had to be single, healthy, college graduates between twenty-one and twenty-four years old. By contrast, recreation programmes during the First and Second World Wars had utilized married women older than twenty-four and relied on a combination of women’s alluring and maternal qualities to distract soldiers from disreputable forms of entertainment available off-base.19 By the Vietnam War, however, SRAO director Mary Louise Dowling argued simply that the programme employed only young women because most American military personnel were young men. Nonetheless, the age and marital requirements created a corps of young, eligible women who could no longer remind the soldiers of their mothers as women had in earlier wars.20 The Donut Dollies’ age and marital status positioned them as potential sexual and emotional targets for soldiers who otherwise had very little contact with American women. Yet, the line between respectable attraction and scandalous sexual activity was fraught with tension. Eager to recruit young women about to embark on their postgraduate lives, the Red Cross described Donut Dollies as a blend of primness and exotic spunk: ‘ “Sugar ‘n’ spice and everything nice”—plus a dash of mud, a sprinkle of monsoon, a spray of dust, and a coating of sweat from a searing tropical sun’. In search of adventure and eager to support the troops, she embraced the challenge of working ‘out in the boondocks’ and in ‘getting as near the front lines as security permits’.21 The Red Cross even hinted at the sexualized nature of the programme by pointing out that Donut Dollies lived ‘in a tent

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surrounded by 20,000 American fighting men’.22 Careful to avoid sounding too risky or too disruptive of wartime gender roles, the organization minimized any danger the women would face in their work by reaffirming the programme’s conservative regulations. One newspaper article about the programme featured a Donut Dolly who complained that the 7:00 PM curfew would be ‘hard on [her] bridge game’ and surmised that she would ‘have to learn to knit all over again’.23 Even with references to demure domestic hobbies, none of these descriptions portrayed the SRAO programme as boring or conventional but as a daring way for adventurous and independent-minded women to participate in the war. While mobilizing women for a fundamentally traditional wartime role, the Red Cross embraced language that, as Cynthia Enloe warns, masked women’s militarization as liberation.24 Careful to emphasize the programme’s conventionality, the Red Cross defined wartime recreation as professional respectable work, beginning at orientation. ‘There was a genteel quality about the program and the way we were treated’, Donut Dolly Leah O’Leary remembered. ‘As I recall, they called us “ladies” a lot’.25 Jeanne Christie received similar training in ‘What good, proper young ladies should do, how you should act, how you behave, what you don’t say, when you don’t take a drink and when you do take a drink, how you drink it, what you say to off-color remarks’.26 For Penni Evans, orientation emphasized that Donut Dollies should ‘be nonsexual symbols of purity and goodness . . . be sister, mother, girl next door, but don’t have affairs’.27 Indeed, the directives about ‘affairs’ reveals the crux of the problem for the Red Cross. While crafting a youthful and attractive image for its Donut Dollies, it also had to carefully create an image of sexual purity around the women. Once in Vietnam, the Red Cross imposed a curfew (midnight, or military curfew, whichever was earlier) and ordered that men were restricted from the women’s billets (and that women were not to enter men’s billets).28 Still, the Red Cross could not monitor every aspect of the women’s lives, and only expressly forbid them from having relationships with married men.29 Although many women formed romantic attachments, as Leah O’Leary explained, Red Cross protocol held that the women were to be available ‘for all the men, so all “special relationships” were discouraged’ by rotating women to two to three new assignments throughout their year tour.30 Middle-class controls of gender and femininity required the women to remain unattached to individual soldiers but act as symbols of desire for all. Even as the Red Cross crafted an aura of virginal femininity around the women, that image at times contradicted the women’s primary role as symbols of domestic womanhood and underscored the difficulty of rendering these liaisons non-sexual even by imposing rules on the women. Sexual tension also blurred expectations that the women provide engaging entertainment for young men and yet remain disengaged professionals. When Donut Dollies in Nha Trang staged ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women in Vietnam’ fashion show for one hundred US soldiers, a Red Cross article noted that ‘the sight of American girls in minidresses was great’. In addition to modelling the ‘latest styling from Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand’, the women ‘showed what the female figure could do to such mundane garb as combat

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fatigues, flight suits, and bell-bottom trousers’. ‘Man, that’s the best-looking GI issue I’ve ever seen’, one appreciative soldier remarked.31 Highlighting both humor and allure in the image of women donning military uniforms, the fashion show reinforced the separation of women from the war effort even as it relied on them to embody heterosexual desire among the troops and to reinforce the militarized gender order that relegated them to a secondary status in the nation. Yet, even as official duties highlighted sexual appeal, the Red Cross also struggled to enforce its vision of respectable femininity. When Donut Dollies quickly discovered their original work uniform of a knee-length light blue dress to be impractical for work around helicopters, the Red Cross agreed to change the uniform to culottes, a compromise that allowed the women to appear to wear a skirt but have the security of a centre seam.32 Still, some women complained it was dowdy and hemmed their uniforms shorter than the guidelines, much to the displeasure of the Red Cross.33 In 1971, the Red Cross again conceded to the women’s demands and allowed them to hem their uniforms two to two and a half inches above the knee in part to ‘appear more current and attractive in style’.34 These struggles to regulate a professional and conventional, yet attractive, feminine appearance, reveal the Red Cross’s difficulties in positioning the women as attractive objects of longing for soldiers while maintaining an aura of respectability around them. Given the precarious state of race relations in the Vietnam-era military, the Red Cross’s emphasis on feminine attractiveness yielded complicated problems of race and sexual appeal. Amid the civil rights movement, public focus on

Figure 10.3 Eileen Carney chats with soldiers from the 1st Air Cavalry division at An Khe in October 1967. Donut Dollies struggled to balance their charge to provide friendly conversation, even as the racial makeup of the armed forces complicated the use of women as sex symbols. Photograph by Mark Stevens. Courtesy of the American Red Cross. All rights reserved in all countries.

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the disproportionate number of black troops in the ranks, and the rise of the black power movement’s ‘black is beautiful’ mantra, the programme’s inability to recruit even a small number of black women made questions of race paramount.35 Not long after the SRAO programme began in Vietnam, frustrations with the racial makeup of the Donut Dollies led GI Henry J. Thomas to write a letter to the editor of Ebony. The 1st Cavalry Division had opened a Red Cross recreation center at An Khe, which Thomas noted, was staffed by ‘three lovely young ladies’, all of whom were white. Thomas believed that ‘the prejudices among white GIs prevent the women from displaying the same wholesome, friendly attitude toward Negroes’. His preference for black Donut Dollies also stemmed not only from exclusion but also from racial solidarity. As Thomas explained in his letter to Ebony, ‘We would like someone we can identify with, who will remind us of the girl we left behind’. ‘To be perfectly honest’, he clarified, ‘ “Miss Ann” doesn’t remind me of the soul sister I left back home in Birmingham’.36 Black Donut Dollies found that black troops identified more with them because they were more familiar, and as an affirmation of black culture. Barbara Lynn knew she would be the only ‘soul sister’ in Vietnam in 1967–68 and expected to be popular among the ‘brothers’. But, she conceded, she ‘never dreamed that my being there would mean so much to them . . . The white girls at the Center were nice, they said, but seeing a “sister” when you came back from the rice paddies was something else’.37 The SRAO programme amplified the already heightened racial tensions that plagued US society and the military by introducing racial and sexual politics to the intensely masculinized environment of the war zone. While in many ways the programme facilitated male bonding through recreation and a shared fondness for the young women, it also introduced questions of inter-racial sexual appeal and competition that divided the men by race.

The Dangers of Sexual Appeal Whatever efforts the Red Cross made to professionalize their work and appearance, placing young women near often-desperate men sexualized their work. In South Vietnam, Donut Dollies were vastly outnumbered by men and, apart from nurses, among the relatively few American women posted there. Women felt the pressures of the hyper-sexualized military environment. ‘With so few women and so many sex-starved G.I.s’, Leah O’Leary explained, ‘a lot of experiences were sexualized’.38 Summarizing her experiences in the war as ‘being sexually harassed in one form or another every day and sometimes several times a day’, she observed, ‘Sex was everywhere’.39 While serving Christmas dinner, for example, O’Leary avoided asking the troops if they preferred chicken breasts or legs but instead simply asked them if they wanted ‘this’ or ‘that’.40 ‘All conversations had a sexual subtext’, she explained. While doing programmes with troops on clubmobile runs, she learned not to open the visit by asking “How’re you doing, fellows?” because she knew the answer would be ‘ “WITHOUT!” ‘We all knew what they meant’, she clarified. ‘We were standing up there as a reminder of what they were without’.41 One soldier put the matter more

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bluntly to Penni Evans. The women, he told her, were ‘’not doing us a bit of good . . . You are a bunch of cock-teasers, and you shouldn’t be here’.42 The sexualized nature of the women’s work, combined with the tense militaristic environment, placed women in a position of having to fend off unavoidable, and often undesired, sexual attention. ‘Free time’ was never really free time’, Jeanne Christie noted. ‘Regardless of where you went or what you did, you were always singled out—round-eye, Donut Dolly’.43 This constant pressure on the women created a heightened sexual climate and a volatile situation in which any statement or gesture was sexualized. In some ways, the SRAO programme neatly meshed into a history of state mobilization of women’s sexuality in support of American wars. Military commanders had for many years believed that soldiers needed sexual activity to be effective fighting men, and on occasion, had even regulated prostitutes for their units. The American public was not often keen on the idea of the military providing prostitutes for soldiers, but it did endorse the mobilization of American women as symbols of idealized femininity to contrast the sexualized roles ascribed to women of other nationalities who provided (regulated or unregulated) sexual services to the soldiers.44 In South Vietnam, for

Figure 10.4 In her short skirt and sunglasses, this Donut Dolly exudes the youthful femininity idealized in the Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas program. The expectation that Donut Dollies serve as objects of heterosexual desire, however, often placed the women in a precarious position among an army of men who frequently misunderstood their purpose in the war. Courtesy of the Carter Taylor Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Ref. VA061576.

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example, American servicemen frequently expressed delight at seeing ‘roundeye’ American women whom the Red Cross and military intended to represent a wholesome femininity worth fighting for. Still, in the military’s masculinized environment and in a war in which Vietnamese prostitutes were easily accessible, the line between respectable and available femininity frequently blurred in the minds of many American soldiers. It did not matter how much the Red Cross emphasized the professional nature of the women’s work or how carefully it regulated their uniform length, nor did it matter that the military provided security at the women’s billets to protect them from, as O’Leary described them, ‘our own American “boys” from back home’.45 The SRAO programme placed the women in an untenable position between two very different kinds of wartime mobilization of femininity. Donut Dollies understood both the nature of this sexualized environment and the ways that their work placed them in volatile situations. Several women described incidents in which the soldiers embraced the opportunity to act chivalrously toward them, but as Jeanne Christie explained, situations could change rapidly.46 She explained that ‘rape did happen when [soldiers] would get skunk drunk or stretched to their psychological limit and just go crazy’. Suggesting that the military could not protect the women from such encounters, she reasoned that ‘If a girl happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could happen’.47 Christie’s characterization of men’s aggression drew upon naturalized notions of male soldiers’ sexuality that held sexual activity as a necessary and bolstering part of martial masculinity. As historian Joanna Bourke has found, military officials assumed soldiers needed sex and that they could not be held responsible if they resorted to force to get it.48 Other women bear out this notion. Cherie Rankin explained that the women ‘were constantly being put in situations with men who were horny as hell. Men who were angry, who had had all sorts of miserable things happen to them, who were disoriented for all kinds of reasons’.49 Having barely escaped molestation at the hands of two American soldiers, she described the inherent conflict between her work as a Donut Dolly and her desire to protect herself. ‘Now here’s the conflict; you’re supposed to be nice to the guys. You never know if you’re the first American woman they’ve seen, so you always tried to be friendly’.50 Charged with being supportive and warm to American soldiers, the women walked a fine line between platonic friendship and sexual appeal. Regardless of the women’s intent, American soldiers frequently misunderstood the women’s proscribed duties as a sexual invitation. The very nature of the Donut Dollies’ work placed them in a precarious relationship with the military and made their purpose in the war unclear to many soldiers, some of whom assumed the women were prostitutes. Jenny Young recalled that many of the troops she encountered ‘made the assumption that we were making big money on our own in the evenings by being call girls for the officers’.51 The troops’ assumption startled her. ‘I couldn’t believe it’, she explained. ‘I thought how could anybody think that of us?’ She equated trying to change the men’s assumptions to ‘whistling in the wind’, but she was not alone in her experiences.52 Other women understood the men’s confusion over their role as Donut Dollies and the symbolic meaning they held in the

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hyper-sexualized environment. ‘I felt I really did understand the men’s perceptions of us’, Rankin admitted. ‘It’s reasonable to think “What would healthy, intelligent American women want to be running around a war zone for—unless they’re making money out of it?” ’53 Such rumors fuelled the sexual tensions around what roles the women were meant to perform. Leah O’Leary found herself propositioned by a young soldier whose unit told him that the women functioned as prostitutes for sixty-five dollars (the equivalent of one month’s combat pay). She later dismissed the behaviour after the soldier apologized, but her response suggests the degree to which the programme’s positioning of women as the men’s confidants, supporters and symbols of heterosexual desire blamed the women for any harassment or attacks they endured.54 ‘The military was very nasty about [rape]’, according to Jeanne Christie who noted that the military responded as if ‘naturally it was always the woman’s fault’.55 After Cherie Rankin was attacked by two US servicemen, she debated whether to report the incident because she feared that an investigation might make an already tough experience in the war worse for the men. Indicative both of the degree to which she internalized the naturalization of men’s aggressive sexual desire and her perception that her allegations would not result in justice, Rankin discussed the incident with her unit director and a lawyer on the base, then decided against reporting the incident.56

Conclusion In a controversial war, amidst a feminist movement and growing national attention to both racial discrimination and racial pride, the SRAO programme faced several difficulties in its attempt to resurrect a historical supportive wartime role for women. The Red Cross sought to reinstate a conventional image of American femininity that relegated women to secondary positions in the nation at a time when burgeoning second-wave feminism challenged the very ideas on which the SRAO programme rested. The Red Cross vainly attempted to appeal to young women through modern notions of wartime adventure, even as it casted recreation as the professional work of educated and capable women. However, as Donut Dollies soon learned, even the Red Cross’s efforts to deem their work respectable could not separate them from the militarized and sexualized environment in which they lived. Nor did the programme’s experiment with integrated entertainment solve questions of race and sexuality. In short, the programme demonstrates the inability of the military and the Red Cross to mesh a conservative image of women’s roles in society with a rapidly changing society and culture. More problematic for the Donut Dollies was their placement in a confusing and often dangerous situation. American soldiers stationed in Vietnam inherited a longstanding military association of soldiering and sex, lived in a warzone flooded with prostitutes, and sometimes enjoyed the company of American women whose work obligated them to treat the soldiers with kindness and warm sensibility. As the Red Cross and the military mobilized women’s bodies as literal and figurative influences for soldiers, it sexualized the women’s work in ways that placed them in real danger.

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The Vietnam War SRAO programme marked the military’s last sexsegregated recreation programme. The 1973 advent of the all-volunteer military led to even more integration of women into the armed forces and made such sexualized recreation programmes more obviously problematic. Though the wars in Iraq (2003–10) and Afghanistan (2003–) have enabled an unprecedented number of female soldiers to enter the US military, as Phoebe Godfrey shows in this volume, even intelligence officers are expected to mobilize their sexuality and gender as a ‘weapon of war’. At the same time, in the presence of female soldiers, popular recreation programmes for troops continue to offer scantily-clad women as legitimate entertainment. In the years since the Vietnam War, the United Service Organizations has sent famous actors, musicians, sports figures and comedians to entertain American soldiers stationed in warzones. Although the USO utilizes both men and women in its programmes, and although the audience comprises both men and women, female entertainers continue to hold a symbolic importance that betrays the sexual nature of military culture. As President George H.W. Bush explained at an October 2008 USO benefit, ‘The moment things began to turn around in Iraq is when the USO deployed Jessica Simpson’.57 In the President’s mind, a female pop-singer who had famously posed in an American flag-bikini, camouflage pants and dog tags on the cover of the popular men’s cultural magazine GQ assumed a symbolic role in boosting the morale of thousands of male soldiers then stationed in Iraq.58 The military’s continued reliance on conventional ideas of women’s bodies as sexualized entertainment – even as women comprise approximately 14.5% of the active duty forces – reveals the ways that gender and sexuality remain a fundamental component of military policy and culture. Even more, the lingering influence and importance of sexualized images of women during wartime raises questions about the connections between such objectification of women’s bodies and recent reports that one-third of military women endure sexual harassment.59 If the US military hopes to truly integrate women in all areas of the armed forces and aims to seriously address rising rates of sexual assault, it needs to carefully consider the ways that soldiers’ recreation militarizes and devalues women.

Notes 1. Handwritten letter to ‘Dear Sir’ from Ken Cotton, March 3, 1970, 900.616 SEASIA – SRAO July 1968–1972, RG 200 Records of the American National Red Cross, 1965–1979 (hereafter RG 200), National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NACP). 2. Winzola McLendon, ‘It’s Not Paradise, But the Men are There’, Washington Post, 13 January, 1966. 3. Cited in a letter from Mary Lou Dowling, Feb. 16, 1972, ‘Cross Reference Sheet’, n.d., 900.3 SEASIA – SRAO Personnel; ‘Red Cross Clubmobile Girls Coming Home from Vietnam’, 26 May, 1972 press release, 1, 020.101 SRAO, both in RG 200, NACP. 4. Stur argues the SRAO programme symbolizes the breakdown of Cold War domestic gender ideology. Heather M. Stur, ‘Perfume and Lipstick in the Boonies: Red Cross SRAO and the Vietnam War’, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1/2, (December 2008), 151–65.

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5. Robert C. Lewis to James F. Collins, 4 June, 1965, 1, 900.16 SEASIA – SRAO DOD request for, 5/26/65 Regulations and Guidelines folder, RG 200, NACP. 6. ‘Resume of Red Cross Center/Clubmobile Operation III Marine Amphibious Forces’, September 1969, 900.616 SEASIA – SRAO 1965–1966; American National Red Cross Functions, Responsibilities, Administration, and Logistical Support, Directive Number 940–1, 24 March, 1968, 900.616 SEASIA – SRAO DOD Request for, 5/26/65 Regulations and Guidelines, both in RG 200, NACP. 7. ‘Jennifer Young’, in Olga Gruhzit-Hoyt, A Time Remembered: American Women in the Vietnam War (Novato: Presidio Press, 1999), 184, 208; Summary Report: Unit Directors’ Meeting, April 13, 1968, 900.031 SEASIA-SRAO SRAO Letters 1–111 May 1968–July 1970, RG 200, NACP. 8. ‘Red Cross Clubmobile Girls Coming Home from Vietnam’, 26 May, 1972 press release, 1, 020.101 SRAO, RG 200, NACP. 9. ‘ “SRAO’er BARBARA LYNN’ press release to Ebony magazine’, 020.281 Ebony folder, RG 200, NACP. 10. Red Cross Press Release, SEA #88 ‘Red Cross Girls Boost Morale of American GI’s in Vietnam’, February 1969, Hazel Brown Red Cross Archives, Lorton, VA (hereafter HBRCA). 11. Red Cross Press Release, SEA #155, ‘Minnesota Girl Likes ARC Work in Vietnam’, August 1970, HBRCA. 12. Westbrook, ‘I want a girl’, 596. 13. Jeanne Christie in Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1966–1975 (Boston: Little Brown, 1987), 178. 14. ‘Red Cross Clubmobile Girls Coming Home from Vietnam’, 26 May, 1972 press release, 2, 020.101 SRAO, RG 200, NACP. 15. ‘Mary Blanchard Bowe’, in Gruhzit-Hoyt, A Time Remembered, 209. 16. ‘Jennifer Young’, in Gruhzit-Hoyt, A Time Remembered, 185. 17. The Miss America Pageant winners travelled to South Vietnam with the USO. New York Radical Women, ‘No More Miss America!’ available at the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union online archive, http://www.cwluherstory.org/ no-more-miss-america.html?q=miss+america [accessed 21 February 2012]. 18. Leah O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, in Karen Manners Smith and Tom Koster (eds) Time it Was: American Stories from the Sixties, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008), 46–47. 19. War Personnel Board, ‘How to Enlist for YMCA War Work’, (YMCA, 6 June, 1918), 18; Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Meghan K. Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Ann Elizabeth Pfau, Miss Yourlovin’: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, Gutenberg-e, available at http:// www.gutenberg-e.org/pfau/ [accessed 21 February 2012]. 20. Mary Louise Dowling to Norman A. Durfee, 4 August, 1965, 900.3 SEASIA SRAO Personnel folder, RG 200, NACP. 21. Red Cross Press Release, SEA #88. 22. Charles Rooks, ‘Red Cross Girls Mark One Year of Service to Men in Vietnam’, 26 October, 1966, Press Release, 900.616 SEASIA – SRAO 1965–1966, RG 200, NACP. 23. McLendon, ‘It’s Not Paradise, But the Men are There’.

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24. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 45. 25. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 45. 26. Jeanne ‘Sam’ Bokina Christie, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 70. See also ‘Jeanne (Bokina) Christie, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 171. 27. Evans, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 338. 28. Summary Report: Unit Directors’ Meeting, 13 April, 1968, 900.031 SEASIA – SRAO SRAO Letters 1–111 May 1968–July 1970, RG 200, NACP. 29. Jennifer Young, interview by Richard Burks Verrone, 7 November, 2002, part 2, 6, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University. 30. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 46. 31. ‘Haute Couture’, The Red Cross Newsletter XIX:1 (January 1970), p. 1, 491 Newsletter, 1970–71, 19, 1–4, January 1970–April 1970, HBRCA. 32. Mary Louise Dowling to Meyer Mathis, et al., 24 January, 1966, 421.1 Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas folder, RG 200, NACP. 33. See Penni Evans, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 338. 34. Mary Louise Dowling to Frances P. Douglass and Sue C. Behrens, 5 February, 1971, 421.1 Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas, RG 200, NACP. 35. Norman A. Durfee to Miss Cabell, 7 March, 1968, 900.3 OA Negro Personnel folder, RG 200, NACP. 36. James A. Purdue to Norman A. Durfee, 26 July, 1966, 020.281 Ebony folder, RG 200, NACP. 37. Barbara Lynn, ‘Good Samaritan in Vietnam: Red Cross Girl Brings Cheer to Men at Front’, Ebony (October 1968), 179. 38. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 48. 39. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 52. 40. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 59. 41. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 52. 42. Evans, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 345. 43. Christie, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 78. 44. Enloe, Maneuvers, 52–67, 153–62; Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), 358–85; Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press, 1992); Mary Louise Roberts, ‘The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946’, American Historical Review 115/4 (October 2010), 1002–30; Paul A. Kramer, ‘The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the PhilippineAmerican War’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 366–404. 45. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 50. 46. Christie, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 75–76. 47. Christie, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 180–81. 48. See Bourke, Rape, 358–85. 49. Rankin, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 72. 50. Rankin, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 68–69. 51. Young, interview by Verrone, part 2, 4. See also Evans, in Walker, A Piece of My Heart, 345. 52. Young, interview by Verrone, part 2, 4–5. 53. Rankin, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 68–69. 54. O’Leary, ‘The G.I.s Called Us Donut Dollies’, 54.

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55. Christie, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 180–81. 56. The Army’s Inspector General files contain no reports of rape or sexual harassment by Donut Dollies. Rankin, in Marshall, In the Combat Zone, 70. 57. Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, ‘To Honor and Humor: USO’s Surprise Guest’, Washington Post, 8 October, 2008. 58. GQ (July 2005), cover. 59. Percentage of women serving on active duty in 30 September, 2010 acquired from the Women in Military Service to America Memorial, ‘Statistics on Women in the Military’, available at http://www.womensmemorial.org/Press/stats.html [accessed 21 February 2012]; on sexual harassment see Erin Mulhall, ‘Women Warriors: Supporting She Who Has Borne the Battle’ Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Issue Report (October 2009), 6. See also the ‘Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2009 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military’, available at http:// www.sapr.mil/media/pdf/reports/fy09_annual_report.pdf [accessed 21 February 2012]. The military estimates only a small percentage of assaults are even reported.

11 ‘I was one of the better interrogators’: Gender Performativity, Identity Transformation and the Female Military Intelligence Officer in the Iraq War Phoebe C. Godfrey

Gender, a Question of Analysis In 2003, Staff Sergeant Jane Jones [pseudonym] worked as an interrogator for US Military Intelligence (MI) in Baghdad, Iraq representing a radical change in the US military since the First World War, when women enrolled in paramilitary organizations and engaged in war occupations other than nursing.1 During the Vietnam War, though some 1,200 female soldiers worked in MI, not all were interrogators.2 In the twenty-first century American military, women such as Staff Sergeant Jones, make up 25% of MI, (and 14% of the entire military), performing various roles from gathering intelligence to interrogating male prisoners.3 This appears to represent a significant historical change and one that many military women welcomed. There is, however, another side to women’s increased role in intelligence operations, as the military makes explicit use of their gender and sexuality. According to retired Colonel Janis Karpinski, a senior figure in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: ‘The Iraqi War is the first time women were being deliberately placed in sexually suggestive scenarios to obtain actionable intelligence from interrogation operations’.4 To an unprecedented extent, women in MI were deliberately used as ‘weapons of interrogation’. This provides the important historical context in which to investigate how Staff Sergeant Jones’ gender identity was shaped and transformed first, within the masculine environment of the US military operations in Iraq, second, by her work as an interrogator and, third, through her return to civilian life.5 154

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To fully explore this multifaceted question, the concept of gender must shift from a ‘category of analysis’ (as Joan Scott alerted in the 1980s) to a ‘question of analysis’, as Jeanne Boydston recently argued.6 Our ideas about gender should not be based on fixed ‘categories’, but rather should be seen as fluid ‘questions’ that shift in relation to ‘time and place’.7 An ideal example of exploring gender as a ‘question of analysis’ is found in gender theorist Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’.8 Butler defines gender not as a fixed social construction, but as the ritualized identity performance that a subject repeats within the constraints of a given context, creating the illusion of a ‘natural’ gender identity. In this case the subject is Jane Jones and the context is the hierarchical, patriarchal and highly gendered context of the US military under specific conditions of the war in Iraq.9 Although Butler’s notion of performativity describes all manifestations of gender and sexuality, by applying it to this study, performativity’s theoretical positioning is given a practical and experience-based context. To fully analyse the complexity of gender performativity within the framework of war an interdisciplinary approach is required. This research incorporates a sociological method by situating Staff Sergeant Jones (henceforth referred to as Jones) as a gendered subject in the world of the US military, but also draws on the research practices of the discipline of psychology by considering how Jones made sense of herself as a gendered subject in relation to her experiences while working as an interrogator in Iraq. The feminist sociological perspective explores the ways Jones performed intentionally (based on training) and unintentionally (based on learned civilian and military gender norms) various articulations of Western patriarchal notions of masculinity and femininity in order to express herself as a subject, to adopt militarized gender norms and to act as an effective interrogator.10 The psychological perspective explores Jones’s subjective narrative that overshadowed her external experiences, despite the immediate context of her military service during the Iraq War. In combining two approaches that cover Jones’s external and internal stories, this chapter presents a more comprehensive picture of one woman’s military experience, highlighting what the sociologist Sasson-Levy has referred to, in regard to the Israeli woman soldier, as, ‘resistance to and complacence with the military gender order’, in negotiating her own gender subjectivity.11 First, this chapter introduces the research methodology used in interviewing Jones and then presents a brief feminist analysis of the military as a gendered institution in order set the stage for Jones’s story. Second, the sociological perspective examines Jones’s recruitment, training by MI as a Human Subject Researcher (interrogator), and her experiences interrogating Iraqi male prisoners in a makeshift US prison in Baghdad. Third, the psychological perspective focuses on Jones’s personal narrative, including her childhood, the break-up of her first relationship, and her most salient experiences in Iraq. Finally, the conclusion considers how Jones’s military experiences transformed her gender identity in complex and contradictory ways, affirming Boydston’s proposition that gender performance is a ‘questions of analysis’. The impact of much larger historical changes in women’s roles in the military can thus be seen at the intimate level of personal life history.

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Methods: Shaping the Terms of Engagement This chapter assesses four semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with one former female US military interrogator, over a two-year period and totalling about twenty hours. In three interviews, spanning 2008–2009, the sociologist asked questions focusing on gender from a socio-cultural perspective in relation to Jones’s interrogation training and practice. During a final interview completed in 2010, the licensed clinical practitioner (psychologist) focused on Jones’s personal history and the meanings she ascribes to her experiences. The interviews cover material from Jones’s life that spans ten years from her enlistment in 2000 to her civilian life in 2010, enabling an exploration of the ways in which Jones’s identity was militarized by, as Cynthia Enloe suggests, ‘privileging masculinity’, and upon her discharge from the services, how the process of de-militarization privileged normative notions of femininity.12 This return to civilian life can be seen as a ‘re-feminizing process’, similar to the way wounded male soldiers experienced ‘rehabilitation was a re-masculinizing process’, as Carden-Coyne discusses in this volume. Two distinct narratives were collected given the different disciplinary concerns of the interviewers, illustrating the potential contradictions and distinctions between physical experience and thoughts and feelings about those experiences. The two perspectives also illuminate the fluid and unpredictable role of memory in creating autobiographical narratives.13 Telling stories, according to historian Beth Roy, is ‘a political act’, in that ‘how we portray the past, ourselves, and our fellows can defend or contest social arrangements’.14 Perhaps this observation is never truer than when interviewing individuals about extreme circumstances, as in their roles in war and, more significantly, in the abuse of others. As the renowned trauma psychologist Robert Loftus writes, memory is not a stable entity and is often beyond our control to retrieve or accurately interpret.15 Memory may also be repressed when linked to traumatic experiences, even if the trauma is that of the perpetrator.16 Traumatized perpetrators may have comparable symptoms to victims however, as LaCapra warns, such trauma ‘is ethically and politically different in decisive ways’.17 A key comparable symptom relates to memory loss and distortion. Thus, some of Jones’s memories may be lost and distorted, making what she chose to share merely a glimpse into a larger, more complex story that will never be fully known, perhaps even by Jones.

The Social Context: The Military as a Gendered Institution Cynthia Enloe exhorts the need for research on the experiences of women inside militaries: ‘We will never fully understand patriarchy’s adaptive qualities and its limits if we avoid studying women who are trying to pursue their own goals inside such patriarchal institutions’.18 Indeed, studying women in the military sheds light on the ‘adaptive qualities’ of gender in the military context. For example, Karpinski, who served for 28 years, observed in response to a question about being a woman in the military, ‘it is changing, albeit slowly, largely because of these wars [Iraq and Afghanistan] and the previous Gulf War, but every time a war ends, men push back and women lose ground’.19 Karpinski’s

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observation – wars open up opportunities for women – relates to a longstanding historical debate. It is also ironic, given that militaries are designed to create soldiers with, as Whitworth argues, ‘some of the most aggressive and most insecure elements of masculinity: those that promote violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism’.20 The need for women’s war-time labour is coupled with the need to promote and maintain hegemonic masculinity, such as the illusion that male domination is natural.21 This links with Fitz and Nagel’s recognition that ‘warmaking depends on a military-sexual complex to recruit, motivate, and retain military personnel’.22 Discussing the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse episode of the Iraq War, Enloe highlights the exaggerated yet ‘insecure’ masculinity of the military and how the process of militarization permeates, to varying degrees, much of Western industrialized society. Enloe defines militarization as ‘a step-by-step’ process by which a person or thing gradually becomes controlled by the military, involving cultural as well as ‘institutional, ideological, and economic transformations’.23 In Jones’s case this included the transformation of her gender identity as well as her overall sense of self. By encouraging the embodiment of hyper-masculinity, militarization also amplifies femininity. As Howard and Prividera argue in relation to the staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraq hospital in 2003, if men embody militarized masculinity, as in the ‘protector and fighter’, women must embody the corresponding femininity as ‘in need of protection and become symbolic constructions of what men need to fight for’.24 When women join the military they are therefore confronted with complex and contradictory challenges to their existing civilian gendered, hence feminine, identity. Enloe further argues that, ‘men are the military, women are in the military’, and thus women have historically had to adapt in order to conform, without losing all symbolic aspects of femininity.25 Nira Yuval-Davis notes, women in the Israeli military ‘are threatening unless controlled and distinguished from male soldiers by emphasizing their femininity’.26 Even as female soldiers become more militarized, they must not compete with the role of male soldiers. As Yuval-Davis argues, ‘the sexual division of labour within the military’ is ‘even more formalized and rigid than that in the civil sector’.27 In MI, men and women are trained together. However, Sergeant Jones recalled a training session specifically for women on how to use their femininity as a ‘weapon of interrogation’, as noted by Colonel Karpinski. The men had no such ‘special training’ in masculinity, since, as Enloe argues, ‘men are the military’, and thus masculinity is not just a ‘weapon of interrogation’, but is interrogation.

The Sociological Perspective of Jones’s External Story: Joining and Training In light of the military’s institutionalized hyper-masculinity, Jones’s interviewer began by asking her if there was anything about the masculinity of the military that attracted her. Jones replied: I would say that speaks true to just about every female who joins . . . it is assumed that men join because they fit perfectly . . . they’re the infantry or the paratrooper or the sniper . . . but when women join everyone goes, ‘why did you join?’28

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For Jones, there was the lure of gaining discipline, independence from her parents and money for college. ‘They had me take a test and depending on how high you score on it they place you. I scored high enough to pick whatever I wanted.’29 With strong scores, Jones was sent on a Russian language course which opened the door to MI, and then interrogation training. Yet Jones felt that she would not be able to succeed: . . . there is no way I am ever going to be an interrogator in a war situation . . . I mean look at me I am 5’ 5’, 130 lbs—I am not going to intimidate anyone. Sure, you want to make me an interrogator? This will be fun, go ahead.30

Jones associated her size with an inability to effectively interrogate, believing that interrogation required the masculine capacity for ‘intimidation’. Nevertheless, Jones learned that being female was officially regarded as an asset if deliberately manipulated, as it had been in espionage during the Second World War when the British government deployed female agents in the Special Operations Executive. Juliette Pattinson has shown how the British military ‘strategically used their knowledge of conventional gender relations and their awareness of the potency of feminine performances’ to achieve desired results.31 Similarly, the American military’s deliberate use of femininity in ‘sexually suggestive scenarios’ was promoted in MI training manuals, and was also part of Jones’s training.32 As she recalled: They basically told us if you are a female interrogator you have to use what you have, to play your gender in any situation where it will be advantageous to you. Say, if you go to the Middle East, as Middle Eastern men don’t respect women or deem women as second class citizens, you’re going to be used to demean a prisoner . . . we were told that unlike male interrogators we have the ability to sort of flirt our way into getting information, be a little more provocative. We thought they were kidding and we laughed. But they were getting across a very serious message, that as females we had certain things we could use that males didn’t.33

Jones was trained in ‘gender coercion’ and on the use of hyper-femininity and sexuality, with men from cultures for whom such behaviour is deemed highly offensive and demeaning.34 Indeed, the results of an investigation by Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt of the Air Force into the conditions at Guantanamo Bay found many of the abuses fell ‘under the rubric of gender coercion’, as did those at Abu Ghraib.35 This included for the first time, as affirmed by Karpinski’s observation, ‘authorizing’ servicewomen to ‘perform acts designed to take advantage of their gender in relation to Muslim males’. For example, detainees had women’s underwear placed on their heads, and were forced to masturbate in front of each other and women guards’.36 As Jennifer Gaboury notes, a military investigator explained that such ‘sexually oriented tactics’ deemed ‘culturally repulsive’ were used to ‘shock’ prisoners into talking as long as they were not ‘prohibited by the Geneva Convention’.37 Significantly, the investigation did not apply the term ‘gender coercion’ to the use of hyper-masculinity, ‘a regularized and constrained repetition of norms’ that thereby renders it invisible, hence not seen as ‘gendered’, let alone as ‘coercive’.38 This silencing through the normalizing

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of the masculine is a defining aspect of what Carol Cohn refers to as ‘gender discourse’: ‘the symbolic system’ that shapes how a culture creates meaning and assigns value to everything, including war, from the perspective of gender.’39 For example, ‘masculine emotions – such as feelings of aggression . . . are not so easily noticed [as feminine ones] . . . and are instead invisibly folded into self-evident, so-called realist paradigms and analyses.’40 In other words, as Kelly Oliver argues, the concept of ‘gender coercion’ only applies when femininity and female sexuality are ‘used as tactics of war because of the potency of their association with the danger of nature, of mother-nature . . . women’s sex makes a powerful weapon because, within our cultural imaginary, it is by nature dangerous’.41 Despite the evidence that feminized gender coercion was used as a ‘weapon of interrogation’ as well as Jones’s discussion of her own training, when asked if she knew of any such incidents she replied: ‘I never heard it used nor did I ever bat my eyes or flirt in the booth in Iraq. Such an incident would have to be unique . . . the fact that I was interrogating them in and of itself was somewhat of a shock to them’.42 Inducing shock has been a standard interrogation strategy since the 1960s, as evidenced in the Kubark Manual for Counterintelligence Interrogation, which states its objectives as: . . . methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence . . . Control of the sources environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern and other fundamentals. Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disorientated, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.43

The degree to which the prisoner experiences an erasure of identity through shock and loss of environmental control depends on his or her social positioning, as Matthew Stibbe discusses in relation to civilian internees in this volume. It also depends on the degree to which the interrogator enacts different modalities of manipulation and oppression. These modalities involve power dynamics and include gender coercion in terms of the interrogator’s use of heightened masculinity and femininity to ‘create feelings of fear and helplessness’ in the prisoner. Similarly, the 1983 revised edition of Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual states that ‘throughout his detention, the subject must be convinced that his “questioner” controls his ultimate destiny, and that his absolute cooperation is essential to survival’.44 For example, subjecting the prisoner to ‘psychological shock, which may only last briefly, but during which he [or she] is far more likely to comply’.45 Such a ‘shock’ for an Iraqi male civilian could include suddenly finding themselves a prisoner and then being interrogated by an American military female, as opposed to an expected male. Trained in techniques of inducing shock and using femininity as a weapon, Jones developed her own twist to ‘gender coercion’, which she perceived as a performance: When I walked into the pen with my interpreter, prisoners would start yelling out and the interpreter would say, you don’t want to know what they are saying but

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at this point the show began. You just shout, (she shouted), ‘Where is #577573? You, let’s go!’ trying to be hard but you know it’s an act, it’s all an act . . . the acting starts the moment you walk in to get your prisoner . . . But then there was a time when I decided ‘I am not going in there anymore, the MP’s [Military Police] are going to bring my prisoner to me and that will further increase my power.’ So I would use the male MP’s to get my prisoners for me, as I wanted it to seem like I had a lot of power . . . When you are a female and you have men working for you getting your prisoners and manhandling them and throwing them through the door . . . then you seem powerful. Then I’d yell, ‘Sit down!’.46

Jones’s awareness of the ‘show’ and ‘act’ is significant. The process of interrogation involved degrees of performance, with the objective being a demonstration of power to compensate for her perceptions about her physical size, her sex and the prisoner’s alleged gendered beliefs. Jones’s performance was scripted by military norms, but also involved her own ingenuity and agency, such as making it appear that men worked under her authority. Jones believed she increased the prisoner’s ‘shock’ by heightening the gulf in gender norms between her masculine embodiment, her prisoners’ expectations, and their gender constraints as prisoners. Indeed, as Khoshaba argues in relation to female aggression and interrogation techniques, such actions contribute to ‘the detainee’s sense of his own horrific, helpless status’.47 Similarly, as Stibbe observes in this volume, with the inversion of gender roles in detention camps, men are ‘shamed’ when ‘their perceptions of masculine selfhood and self-worth’ are disturbed. In this manner a prisoner ‘experiences an erasure of identity’, but so too may the interrogator, according to Alfred McCoy, although to a lesser degree.48 However, the degree to which an interrogator is affected may also depend on their preexisting gender roles and what gender performances they enact as interrogators. Jones’s performance of masculinity as an interrogation strategy parallels Judith Butler’s notion of gendered performativity in that Jones’s masculinity became ritualized, emerging from her ‘temporal condition’ and emotional ‘constraints’ that both ‘impelled and sustained’ her behaviour.49 Jones’s repeated masculinity performance, scripted by society and heightened by the military’s rigid constraints, enabled her to be recognized as an interrogator by prisoners and colleagues alike, even as she constructed her own temporal militarized gendered subjectivity.50

Practising Interrogation In 2003, Staff Sergeant Jones was assigned to a makeshift detention centre near Abu Ghraib. Instructed to find out information on the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and any ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs), Jones began interrogating hundreds of Iraqi men who were both intentionally and randomly imprisoned. Jones told the story of an early interrogation that still haunts her. Prior to telling this story she had elaborated on how she was trained to feel superior to Iraqis: ‘We all had a superiority complex based on our role in Iraq, that we were above these Iraqis in terms of nationality, religion and race’.51

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The following story speaks to this sense of racialized superiority, which also characterized much American propaganda about the Iraq War:52 I remember interrogating an Iman, a religious leader—I didn’t know what that meant, I should have known. He said to me ‘you are here to take our land to take our oil. This is an invasion,’ and I laughed in his face. I picked up sand and let it slide through my fingers and said, ‘Do you think I want this sand? I want to go home, I don’t care about your land, or your oil . . . I am here to save lives!’53

Jones, like many Americans, initially adopted the military’s discourse and the wider US political rationale for the war. When asked directly about her political views, she stated, ‘I was taught a misleading history of America, that this is the best country on earth. You don’t really question’.54 However, she did begin to question and as a result became angry with the military. Only now, as a civilian, has Jones found a degree of personal responsibility and remorse: ‘Here we are, still there and controlling 80% of their oil. Yeah, I think we have invaded’.55 This insight indicates how Jones’s views have changed, yet the lines between patriotic duty, professional military role and personal accountability remained blurred.

Interrogation and Feelings When asked how she felt about interrogating prisoners, Jones stated: First of all, it was scary each time a person was brought in, not that they were going to hurt you, but because you might miss out on very key information. I was afraid I might be tricked by someone who was cleverer than me. This fueled me into saying, ‘I am going to get information, I don’t care if I am a woman, I don’t care if you don’t respect me, I am going to get this information’, and that’s probably what over time made me one of the best interrogators in the facility. I didn’t use my gender as a crutch, even though my gender was being used all the time I was there.56

Jones’s motivation, and part of her success as an interrogator, was fear of not meeting her military goals, but also prisoners’ assumed gendered beliefs. Though trained to use femininity as a ‘weapon of interrogation’, she felt this was a ‘crutch’. She did not, however, feel this way when exploiting masculine norms in her ritualized form of ‘gender coercion’. Thus, using what Sasson-Levy refers to as ritualized ‘discursive and bodily identity practices’, Jones created an intimidating masculine and at times hyper-masculine persona by ‘faking it’ and by being ‘very harsh’.57 Given her ‘temporal condition’ that was shaped by her situational power over her male Iraqi prisoners, Jones was able to successfully extract information.58 In the early months of being in Iraq, Jones’s commitment to the military cause and to her role within it was countered by other feelings that she ‘blocked out’. In the case of one prisoner, she mistakenly thought she had the power to have him released: You could tell he was completely innocent—he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He spilled his guts and I talked to him for a long time just to make sure I had

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everything . . . I wrote the report and then said to my supervisor, ‘I recommend this prisoner be released’ and then asked, ‘do you think he’ll be let go? He is completely innocent.’ He said, ‘I’ll work on it.’ Eight months later he was still in the pen and every time I saw him, I tried to convey, ‘I’m sorry.’ It was very frustrating . . . even though you cleared someone there was nothing I could do.59

Jones’s feelings of remorse, powerlessness and empathy in relation to this prisoner opposed the military masculine norms of non-emotional engagement. Lacking contextual validation for her feelings, as well as lacking any ability to positively affect the lives of her prisoners, led over time to increased frustration, propelling her to become harsher and more removed from her prisoners. Jones’s gender expressions were therefore, as Judith Butler suggests, ‘impelled and sustained’ by the militarized context and the spectrum of ‘acceptable’ gender norms.60

Transformation in Iraq In recounting her personal history as a military interrogator in Iraq, Jones constructed a narrative of her evolving gender identity. In the beginning, she felt she was ‘nice’, but as a result of the ‘repetition’ and increasing ‘constraints’ in the highly oppressive and stressful conditions of war, she changed:61 In the beginning I was a nice interrogator – I’d bring someone in and offer them a seat, make sure their hands weren’t tied too tightly. Sometimes I’d even offer them food or drink. I just talked with them as I am talking to you now but by the end . . . there was nothing like that. I was getting better, more efficient . . . I would go into the booth and start off much harsher [‘fear up’] than I ever did in the beginning. I had become exhausted, sick and tired of their faces, sick and tired of them . . . of being there, of being an interrogator.62

Sergeant Jones’s treatment of prisoners was directly related to her own feelings, affecting her willingness to respond to their humanity. The more exhausted and oppressed she felt, the harsher and more efficient she became at extracting information. Cutting herself off from empathetic feelings propelled her into hyper-masculine action. When asked about any possible use of excessive force, Jones told a story about ‘an image that will forever stay with me’.63 She conducted a joint interrogation with several male colleagues, one of whom rolled the prisoner’s head with his foot: I remember the prisoner was on the floor. [She gets up during the interview and demonstrates]. This is the prisoner’s head [she uses the dog’s ball] and I remember the prisoner being on the floor, acting as if he had a mental disorder and we said, ‘No, we know you have information!’ Then my comrade put his foot like this on his head and said. ‘You are going to talk to us because our friends are dying out there!’ Then he rolled his foot back and forth not hurting him [she rolls the ball with her foot].64

Although Jones claimed that the interrogator was ‘not hurting him’, this may not have been the prisoner’s perception. Despite possible physical pain, there is

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the issue of being humiliated, degraded and emasculated.65 For many male Iraqi prisoners (and prisoners in general) the total loss of power and control over their physical situation and their bodily integrity is a fundamentally humiliating and terrifying experience that signifies feminization. Journalist Mark Danner’s account of torture describes a young Iraqi man’s perception: ‘It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over our heads, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe on his neck. This is a great shame, you understand?’.66 In recounting the story, Jones did not see the prisoner’s perspective. Instead, she felt confident that he had not been caused any physical or emotional pain. This lack of empathy possibly indicates that aspects of her emotions, her gendered role as an interrogator, and other experiences she ‘blocked-out’, have yet to be ‘de-militarized’. Indeed, Jones rationalized that she relied on psychological intimidation rather than physical abuse. Psychological abuse is often regarded as more temporary than physical abuse, although victims ‘often need long term treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain’.67 Jones believed that physical abuse revealed a lack of interrogation skills, but this also meant that women could succeed as skilled interrogators: I think the worse interrogator you were the more you had to rely on force. And being a female, not being large . . . I would use other tactics—I once pretended I had a scorpion in my hand when I didn’t. I was psychologically fucking with them [laughs nervously] pretending I had power when I didn’t, saying stuff like ‘if you are a drug dealer I can see to it to have your hands cut off.’ You know, just saying stuff, brutal stuff to say. I really didn’t have that ability or power . . . it was all a show. A lot of it was psychological, what I did, because I couldn’t pick them up by the neck and say ‘you are going to talk to me.’68

Jones felt her use of psychological manipulation resulted from her lack of physical stature and power. Thus she became ‘creative’, such as with the scorpion threat. For Jones such theatrics were part of the ‘show’, part of ‘pretending she had power’. Jones, however, did have considerable power over her prisoners, despite feeling that she did not. According to Sergeant First Class John Smith (pseudonym), who was the non-commissioned officer in charge of an Afghanistan interrogation unit, ‘women were often better interrogators’, as they ‘were often intellectually and emotionally more intelligent than their male counterparts’ and made instant ‘modifications’ in their approach ‘more naturally’.69 In this light, and given Jones’s testimony, the leverage available to women interrogators may have resulted from a capacity for gender versatility. Jones could perform femininity using psychological and emotional intimidation, but she could also perform masculinity by engaging the masculinizing context of interrogation and by being part of the highly masculine environment of the US military, further heightened through the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. In addition, though the fluidity of Jones’s gender performativity may have appeared ‘natural’, her behaviour was framed by the specific objectives of interrogation. Jones consciously negotiated the highly scripted, hence constrained,

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expressions of masculinity and femininity to maximize her desired result, highlighting gender’s ‘relational construction’ and ‘instability.’70 Discussing gender and victimhood in workplaces, Emma Jeanes notes that such constructions are ‘bounded by a gender dualism that anchors and describes the discursive limits of possibility’.71 Gender is performed in relation to others and in specific contexts that are shaped by time and place, limiting what is possible. Thus, what Jones embodied is what Kaufman–Osborn identified in relation to Abu Ghraib; the ‘differential production of masculinity and femininity’ ultimately unsettles ‘foundational illusions about the dependence of gender on sex’, thereby affirming ‘performativity’.72 These ‘foundational illusions’ are further unsettled when intimate insight is gained into an individual’s subjective narrative.

The Psychological Perspective of Jones’s Internal Story: Family and Love The dynamics of Jones’s family and the manner in which she was raised, she felt, contributed to her joining the military and becoming an interrogator. In telling the story of her childhood, she noted playing ‘the tough persona’ role her whole life. However, she also believed that this was never who she really was, nor who she is anymore: I was always the tom boy . . . I was always told I was a tough girl, on the masculine side . . . That persona was always reinforced but it wasn’t who I was. In my room I would write poetry and think about death a lot. Most of us have two faces, inside/outside . . . but mine were extreme . . . that I was one of the better interrogators was the only piece I had to cling to, the tough persona but it wasn’t me—the real me would have crumbled dreaming about my ex-girlfriend Jill, my family, being insecure and thinking. ‘This is such a debacle, I don’t know what I am doing with these prisoners, and this is just horrible.’ When you ask what pieces of me I used in Iraq they were all the ones that weren’t really me, yet I’d been practising all my life.73

The idea that the ‘tough masculine persona’ was or is not really her is intriguing. The ‘real her’ could be ‘feminine’ – in her view – such as by writing poetry, being reflective, or thinking about her close relationships, especially that of her girlfriend Jill. Assigning her masculine attributes to her persona and her feminine ones to the ‘real’ her, fits with the fluid and highly complex roles she played as an interrogator. Taking on the masculine roles of intimidation and military authority, Jones wove in scripts of psychological intimidation she attributed to femininity, while still ‘blocking out’ deeper feelings of empathy and remorse. Jones recalled that her initial compassion (the ‘real her’), was constrained in the military, yet this was what Jones wanted when she signed up: ‘I wanted the military to mould me into this stand-up, stoic character’.74 Compounding, and perhaps originating from, Jones’s sense of having two faces was her burgeoning identity as a lesbian. When asked how she felt about joining the military knowing their position on homosexuality, she stated: I was just coming into my sexuality at the time that I joined and I was questioning if I should do this, but I thought ‘it’s fine . . . the military is more to me than my

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sexuality.’ I wanted to join to prove . . . that I can do something on my own . . . to get respect . . . to learn how to shoot . . . I was so pumped up that my sexuality took a back seat.

Jones’s sense of ‘shame’ for joining, knowing she was a lesbian, was offset by her desire for masculine empowerment – respect and violence – as promised by the military. This ‘double-bind’ of wanting to be a part of the military, yet knowing their exclusionary policy in relation to homosexuals, was typical for gay males and females in the military like Jones, as Allen Berube discusses in the context of the Second World War.75 For Jones, her sexuality may have been subordinated when joining the services, but once in the military her personal life became more important. After Jones was deployed to Iraq, her girlfriend Jill broke up with her. Later on she discovered that Jill had had an affair. This sequence of events caused her increasing distress, yet, given the climate of emotional restraint in the military, she represses her anguish: You never believe someone could cheat on you, but then you find out the truth and you are devastated . . . I’m sitting in the sand crying and I suddenly realized here is Staff Sergeant Jones crying and what if someone were to see me . . . I got up and didn’t cry again for about eight months.76

The ‘blocking-out’ of emotions took precedent, in keeping with military expectations and masculinist gender codes. Emotional restraint and masculine fearlessness was associated with security. Yet Jones’s militarized masculinity was just her external ‘face’; internally she was a ‘feminine’ mixture of fear, pain and vulnerability. For Jones, her role as a competent interrogator did not define her military experience, but rather her tempestuous inner landscape took precedence: ‘My deployment in Iraq was a backdrop to the love saga’.77 Yet, when she joined, questions about her ‘sexuality took a back seat’. This complex fluidity of experience suggests that different performativities can take place simultaneously and on multiple fronts, creating differently gendered ‘selves’.

Jones’s Civilian Gender Transformation Reflecting on her continual personal transformation, Jones spoke about when she first got out of the military: [A]I still had the tough persona. I used it to my advantage and got a certain kind of respect. But now I have gone from war vet to student to coffee shop worker and I don’t even tell people about Iraq anymore.78

Avoiding stressful situations, she now tells herself ‘you are not that confrontational persona anymore, you start to shake . . . you don’t like yelling . . . and so as a result I am trying to tailor my life to avoid as much stress as possible’.79 Avoidance may be Jones’s version of de-militarization, the ‘re-feminizing’ of her ‘real’ self, and/or it may be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Jones recognizes personal change from the period of her military service in Iraq to now, and feels some anxiety because she met her current partner in the initial stages of post-military life – a persona with which she no longer identifies: My partner fell in love with a self-sufficient military vet in uniform. I had my act together and I was very calm; nothing bothered me. When that period ended I had so many feelings I have been trying to uncover. Even though she fell in love with ‘this person,’ I have been changing rapidly and am not Staff Sergeant Jones anymore . . . I had money when I came back and now we are in a role reversal. Soon it will be she who is supporting us, and I know in order to be ok I have to make sure I am cooking, or I am going to have a baby, or have that sacrifice be mine . . . it shifts.80

Jones’s association of love, confidence and ‘masculine’ security is pitched against her current perception of her gendered state as stressed, less adaptive, emotional and unstable. She contrasts her prior financial stability with her current economic dependence, and feels a need to compensate, with domestic and family life positioned as a feminine ‘sacrifice’. For Jones, as for many ex-servicewomen, civilian life returns them to ‘traditional femininity’. Indeed, Lucy Noakes noted that for many female veterans, their performances in the military were later remembered as ‘times of personal autonomy’ as opposed to their feminine civilian roles.81 Looking back on her military experiences after four years, Jones was amazed: I look at that time and go ‘Wow’ . . . I was definitely pushed to the max . . . I think we don’t ever know who we are . . . you don’t know who you are going to turn into if you are put in an extreme situation . . . I actually feel I know a little bit of myself and that is neat in a way, as I have been pushed and it is not pretty. But I kinda know that about me and most people don’t . . . it’s not a good thing though.82

Yet, her newfound self-knowledge is not regarded as a ‘good thing’. When asked what she had learned as a result of her military experience she stated, ‘I have learned that if you take away all that you have been trained to be . . . who are you really? Not much . . . would you be caring, or did you learn that too? . . . Is crying, is feeling pain . . . is everything learned? It’s crazy’.83 Jones’s extreme gender performativity has led her to wonder if ‘everything is learned’, suggestive of how our gendered identities, as well as our larger personalities, are never fixed but always subject to social context regardless of what we may think.

Conclusion: Bringing the Parts Together Jones’s story is just one of many military women whose lives have been totally transformed by military service. When asked whether she was upset about the war, she retorted: There is so much that upsets me about it . . . I am upset that we are still there, I am upset about what we did, just the fact that we held people for months in prison when they were innocent . . . all that we’ve done and the excuses we have made for ourselves, the whole campaign built around lies.84

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Jones’s realizations that the military campaign was built around lies, conflated with the breakup of her first significant relationship, created a compounded narrative of betrayal and upset. Jones’s distress, mixed with her own ‘uncertain’ feelings around issues of ‘agency and responsibility’ is a common response, as Joanna Bourke states in relation to her interviews of men who were involved in war.85 Furthermore, although in re-telling her experiences Jones expressed little empathy, at the end of each interview she did express feelings of remorse directed mostly to those prisoners she feels that she wronged. She shared an example of her feelings: For my birthday in January my girlfriend gave me a gift certificate for a tattoo. I decided I wanted something written, a message, but I didn’t know what. And then I came up with possibly tattooing ‘truly sorry’. I don’t know. It is a multidimensional meaning, it has meaning for my partner and me, and the other big meaning would be Iraq.86

The symbolism of this tattoo – inscribing remorse literally on her body – evokes the bringing together of Jones’s internal and external selves, symbolized by the more masculine convention of a tattoo, juxtaposed by the feminine cultural trend of apology, regardless of personal accountability. By publicly displaying on her body her remorse at having contributed, both willingly and coercively, to the suffering of others, Jones attempts to find some form of resolution. Being a female interrogator in the US military during a time of war put Jones into an extreme situation, and provided an ideal case study to consider how militarized gender identities are continually shaped and transformed, becoming both ‘weapons of interrogation’ and expressions of subjectivity. Jones’s gender expressions were dialectically constructed and constrained based on the fluctuations of her specific social contexts – from being militarized to civilianized. Jones’s experiences in the military support Judith Butler’s notion that it is our ritualized and yet constrained gender performativity that informs subjectivity, even in its ‘temporal condition’.87 Observing her search for a narrative of selfhood to explain her past military experiences and her civilian present, Jones captures the essence of gender performativity, concluding, ‘I think we don’t ever know who we are’ ————– Sociologist: Is there anything else you’d like to say? Jones: I don’t know, you’d have to get it out of me—you have to interrogate me . . .

Notes 1. See G. Grundy, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military, (New York: New York University Press, 2003); R. Skaine, Women at War: Gender Issues of Americans in Combat, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 1999). 2. A. Bunn (1999, Nov. 11). Unarmed and Under Fire: An Oral History of Female Vietnam Vets. http://www.salon.com/life/feature/1999/11/11/women [accessed 21 February 2012].

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3. C. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 97. 4. J. Karpinski, (2009). Personal interview with author. 5. C. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (California: University of California Press, 2000). 6. J. Boydston, ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’, Gender and History, 20/3, (2008), 558–583, 578. 7. Boydston, 578. See also J. Butler ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’. The British Journal of Sociology, 59/1, (2008), 1–23. 8. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95. 9. Enloe, Maneuvers. 10. Butler Bodies that Matter, 95; N. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing, 1997), 93. 11. O.Sasson-Levy, ‘Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in ‘Masculine’ Roles’, Sociological Inquiry, 73/3, (August 2003), 410–441. 12. Enloe, Maneuvers, 3, 32. 13. R. Fivush and J. Buckner, ‘Creating Gender and Identity through Narratives’ in R. Fivush and C.A. Haden (eds) Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2003). 14. B. Roy, Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time (Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 9. 15. E.Loftus, ‘Tricked by Memory’ in J. Jeffery and G. Edwall (eds) Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience (Maryland: University Press of America, 1994), 89–106. 16. C. Caruth, Trauma Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 17. D. LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 41. 18. Enloe Globalization, 83. 19. Kapinski, (2009). Personal interview with author. 20. S. Whitworth, Men, Militarism and U.N Peacekeeping (Boulder and London: Lynn Rienner Publishing, 2004), 3. 21. R.W. Connell, Masculinities, (Oxford: Polity, 1995). 22. L. Fitz and J.Nagel ‘The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War’ in H. Carreiras and G. Kummel (eds), Women in the Military and in Armed Conflict, (VS Verlag Fur Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 201–226. 23. Enloe, Maneuvers, 3; C. Enloe ‘Wielding Masculinity inside Abu Ghraib: Making Feminist Sense of an American Military Scandal’, Asian Journal for Women’s Studies, 1/3, (2004) 89–102. 24. J. W. Howard III and C. Prividera, ‘Rescuing Patriarchy or ‘Saving Jessica Lynch’: The Rhetorical Structure of the American Women Soldier,’ Women and Language, 27/2, (2004), 89–98, 89. 25. Enloe, Maneuvers; Sasson-Levy, ‘Feminism’, 447; [italics in Sasson-Levy]. 26. Yuval-Davis, Gender, 101. 27. Yuval-Davis, Gender, 93. 28. Jones, (2008). 29. Jones, (2008). 30. Jones, (2008). 31. J. Pattinson, Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executives in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 140.

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32. See C. Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Boston: Seven Stories Press, 2008). 33. Jones, (2008). 34. T. Kaufman-Osborn, (2005), ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib’, Politics and Gender, 1/4, (2005), 597–619, 610. 35. T. Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Gender Trouble’, 610; T. McKelvey (ed.) One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Tortures (New York: Seal Press, 2007). L. Feitz and J. Nagel, ‘Deploying Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality in the Iraq War.’ Race, Gender and Class, 14/3–4, (2007) 28–47, 29. 36. Feitz and Nagel, ‘Deploying Race’, 28. 37. J.Gaboury, ‘Sexual Rights as Human Rights: Resituating Feminist Analysis of Sexual Violence in Wartime’, in J. Gelb and A. Leif Palley Women (eds) Women and Politics Around the World: A Comparative History and Survey (ABC Clio, 2009), 1, 101–114, 109. 38. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95. 39. C. Cohn, ‘Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War’ in M. Cooke and A. Woollacott (eds) Gendering War Talk. (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993), 227–246, 228. 40. Cohn, ‘Wars’, 242. 41. K.Oliver Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 31. Italics in original. 42. Jones, (2008). 43. Kubark Manual for Counterintelligence Interrogation (1963), 41, 86–87. 44. Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (1983), sec. F 20. http://www. gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/#kubark [accessed 21 February 2012] in Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Gender Trouble’, 608. 45. Human Resource, (1983), K-1, c-e in Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Gender Trouble’, 608. 46. Jones, (2008). 47. R. Khoshaba, ‘Women in the Interrogation Room’ in T. McKelvey (ed.) One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (New York: Seal Press, 2008), 185. 48. A. McCoy, (2004) ‘The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib’, Center for Research on Globalization, http://www.zcommunications.org/ the-hidden-history-of-cia-torture-by-alfred-w-mccoy [accessed 27 February 2012]. 49. Butler Bodies that Matter, 95. 50. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95. 51. Jones, (2008). 52. Feitz and Nagel ‘Deploying Race’, 28. 53. Jones (2008). 54. Feitz and Nagel ‘Deploying Race’, 28. 55. Feitz and Nagel ‘Deploying Race’, 28. 56. Jones, (2008). 57. Sasson-Levy, “Feminism’, 441. 58. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95. 59. Jones, (2008). 60. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95. 61. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95. 62. Jones, (2008). 63. Jones, (2009). 64. Jones, (2009). 65. Enloe, Globalization, 97. 66. M. Danner, (2004) ‘Torture and Truth’ New York Review of Books, http://www. markdanner.com/articles/show/35 [accessed 21 February 2012].

170 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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McCoy, ‘The Hidden’, 3. Jones, (2009). J. Smith, (2008). Personal interview with author. K. Anderson and D. Umberson, ‘Gendering Violence: Masculinity and Power in Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence,’ Gender & Society, 15/3, (2001), 358–380. E. Jeanes, ‘The Doing and Undoing of Gender: The Importance of Being a Credible Female Victim’, Gender, Work and Organizations, 14/6, (2007), 552–571, 555. Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Gender Trouble’, 606. Jones, (2010). Jones, (2008). A.Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. (New York: The Free Press, 1990). Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). L. Noakes, Women in British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), 15–16. Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). Jones, (2010). J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xxii. Jones, (2010). Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95.

Afterword Cynthia Enloe

There has been a stunning revival of popular interest among English speakers in the First World War. Pat Barker’s ambitious trilogy won the Booker Prize. The BBC’s Downton Abbey has drawn enthusiastic television audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Any reader of historical mystery novels probably has been struck by the outpouring of new detective fiction set in 1914–1920s wartime and post-wartime Britain. I can count five current authors whose books I have here on my own shelves. Most of these sophisticated stories and screenplays are set in England. Most of the chief protagonists are men, though women appear as military nurses, wives and girlfriends, occasionally even as sleuths. All but two of their creators are women. I have a hunch that there is something about the inhumanity of World War I that, as presently remembered, strikes a resonant chord with many people today in the early 2000s. It is not happenstance, I think, that in virtually all of these creative works the damage done to male soldiers’ mental health becomes a prominent theme – encouraging readers and viewers to weigh the war’s burdens on not only the wounded men but on their families, friends and medical professionals, burdens that do not become lighter once an Armistice has been signed. Jacqueline Winspear said recently during an author’s reading that she had been surprised to hear from psychiatrists treating male veterans of the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars that they had started giving copies of her Maisie Dobbs historical crime novels to their soldier-patients in an effort to reassure them that they were not alone in their post-war mental health tribulations. Ana Carden-Coyne and her astute contributors show us that plunging into the gendered minutiae of historically-situated wars helps us to do two things. First, by placing between these same bindings gender-smart studies of several wars, we are better able make comparisons over time and between places in such a way that it sharpens our explanations – for example, if so much about how military nursing was feminized in the First World War and again in the 1960s–70s Vietnam War is similar, but the two war-waging strategies adopted by masculinized elites were quite different, what does this tell us not just about wartime nursing, but about that intriguing variable of masculinized elite strategizing? Comparisons are rife in our own daily conversations. Comparisons are the very grit of political discourse. ‘Munich’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Dunkirk’, ‘Dien Bien Phu’ – each is wielded in political discourse to make implicit comparisons. In the case of these four, I think, comparisons are wielded to bolster claims to manliness, to stave off accusations of femininity (aimed by men at their 171

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male rivals). Rarely, though, do we have the chance, as we do here, to draw on the expertise of historians who are keenly self-reflective about the workings of masculinities and femininities. Most of the historians who accepted Ana Carden Coyne’s enticing invitation to join in this collective conversation have become convinced that the First World War can be used as an analytical touchstone. That is, their own investigations have persuaded them that taking seriously the (often confused and contradictory, usually anxiety-ridden) politics of masculinities and femininities shaping the First World War prepares each of us to ask better questions, to dig for evidence in more fruitful archives, to see more clearly connections between seemingly remote policy arenas than we otherwise would. Take seriously, for instance, studies of 1914 Austrian detention camps’ administrators’ assumptions about ‘women and children’, they tell us, and we’ll all be better equipped to investigate the disempowerment of displaced women in Somali refugee camps in 2011. Pay close attention to 1920s British civil servants’ excruciating calculations as they decided whether a male soldier suffering pelvic wounds that limited their sexual function should be deemed 100% disabled or ‘only’ 80% disabled, and we each will be better able explain why so many governments today act in ways that are alienating manliness-anxious Iraq War and Afghanistan War male veterans. Second, beyond comparison, is causality. Carden-Coyne and her ambitious scholarly colleagues are asserting here that they have uncovered evidence that decisions aimed at instrumentally utilizing masculinities and femininities in the First World War had consequences for many of the wars that followed in its wake. It is now widely accepted that technological and strategic choices made by elites in their waging of the 1914–1918 war had important impacts on the ways that many following wars were waged by successive elites: the uses of aerial bombing; the mobilization of civilian industry and agriculture; the targeting of the enemy’s civilian economic infrastructure; the use of the automatic machine gun, despite its gunner’s inability to select precise targets. But what about the gendered consequences of the First World War experience of war-waging? The historical sleuths here reveal that the political strategies designed to manipulate masculinities and femininities indeed did send ripple effects into succeeding armed conflicts. Popular mass media, the First World War showed, needed to be taken seriously by male elites if they were to effectively channel manliness into soldiering for the state. Likewise, femininity, if consciously manipulated, could bolster both men and women’s militarized patriotism. Feminized conventions, if handled with care, could be temporarily suspended for the sake of recruiting civilian women into war industries and even into military uniform. The First World War’s aftermath revealed, however, that the latter campaigns would require a firm hand on the patriarchal faucet, ready to turn off these innovations as soon as the ‘boys’ returned home expecting to resume their positions of masculinized domestic authority and decently paid jobs. The studies brought together here also show, though, that patriarchal wartime and post-war manipulations have their limits. Even the most determined and often deft patriarchal war-waging campaigns to mobilize the sorts of masculinities and the sorts of femininities deemed useful for war waging, these studies demonstrate, are not guaranteed success. Some men will upset

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the patriarchal chariot by seeking the pacifist status of Conscientious Objector. Many women will not forget, simply because the guns go silent, what it was like to have their own pay cheques or their independent public roles. Turning on and off the militarized patriarchal faucet turns out to be harder than expected. Those who naively take comfort in the alleged ‘naturalness’ of patriarchal gender relations, we learn here, are bound to suffer surprise at their fluidity, historical situatedness and contested practice. History has many uses. Of course, history badly used can be put to misguided, even malevolent uses, serving to justify the unjustifiable, to forge links between the unconnected, to feed dangerous paranoia and false pride. Historical attentiveness infused with integrity and candour, on the other hand, sometimes may provide solace, can become a reference point for solid explanatory comparisons, may shed a brighter light on causalities, and, if used with utmost care, can provide lessons. Thus, given these contradictory potential uses, serious historians and gender scholars, which Ana Carden Coyne and her energetic contributors certainly are, know to handle their profession as if it were an unstable chemical. Informed about and aware of the dynamics of masculinities and femininities, they handle their profession with their eyes wide open, their mental nerve endings alive. They are our intellectual land mine defusers. If we, their fortunate readers, read their findings slowly, if we pause to mull over their comparisons and causal revelations, we just might make it safely across the minefield of militarized gender politics to draw useful lessons on the other side.

Select Bibliography

Introduction Key Texts (Carden-Coyne) Bourke, Joanna. Rape: Sex, Violence, History. (Emeryville: CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). ——–An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, (London: Granta Books, 1999). ——–Dismembering the Male (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender (London: Routledge, 1993). Cockburn, Cynthia, The Space Between Ss: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998). Cohen, Deborah The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914– 1939, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Connell, R.W. Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). ——–‘Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities’ in M. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, (London: Sage, 2005). Cooper, Helen Margaret, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, (North Carolina: UNC Press, 1989). Damousi, Joy and Lake, Marilyn, Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Enloe, C., Maneuvers. The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ——–The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ——–Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007). Giles, Wenona Mary and Hyndman, Jennifer, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Goldstein, Joshua S., War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Grayzel, Susan, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, (North Carolina: UNC press, 1999). Hagemann Karen and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Home/front: The Military, War, and Gender in Twentieth-century Germany, (London: Berg Publishers, 2002). Higate, P. (ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport: Praeger, 2003). Lattuca, Lisa, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001). Moser, Caroline O. N. and Clark, Fiona, Victims, perpetrators or actors?: gender, armed conflict and political violence, (London: Zed, 2001). Noakes, Lucy, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity, 1939–91, (London: I.B. Taurus, 1997). 174

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Reznick, Jeffrey S., Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2005). Rose, Sonya, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Summerfield, Penny, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Wingfield, Meriwether Nancy and Maria Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. Politics and Culture. Reprint. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008.)

Chapter 1 Key Texts (Stibbe) Becker, A., Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre: populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1998). Bradford, H., ‘Regendering Afrikanerdom: The 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War’, in I. Blom, K. Hagemann and C. Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 207–25. Enloe, C., Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, updated edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Goldstein, J. S., War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambrisge University Press, 2001). Horne, J., ‘Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann and J. Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 22–40. Leoni, D. and Zadra, C., La Citta’ di Legno: Profughi trentini in Austria, 1915–1918 (Trento: Temi, 1995). Scott, J. W., ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, in Scott (ed.), Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 152–80. Sluga, G., ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gendered Re-Reading of the “Apogee of Nationalism” ’, Nations and Nationalism, 6/4 (2000), 495–521. Stibbe, M., ‘Elisabeth Rotten and the “Auskunfts-und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland”, 1914–1919’, in A. S. Fell and I. Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 194–210. Stibbe, M., ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–1920’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28/1–2, (2008), 49–81. Twomey, C., ‘Double Displacement: Western Women’s Return Home from Japanese Internment in the Second World War’, Gender and History, 21/3, (2009), 670–84.

Chapter 2 Key Texts (Grayzel and Noakes) Enloe, C., Maneuvers. The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Grant, M., After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain 1945–1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Grayzel, S., At Home and Under Fire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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Hunt K. and Rygiel, K., (eds), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006). O’Brien, T.H., Civil Defence, (London: HMSO, 1955). Rose, S.O., Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Chapter 3 Key Texts (Bibbings) Aubert, V., Sociology of Law (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Bibbings, L.S., ‘State Reaction to Conscientious Objection’ in Ian Loveland (ed.), The Frontiers of Criminality, (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1995). Bibbings, L.S., ‘Boys Will Be Boys: Masculinity and Offences Against the Person’ in L.S. Bibbings and D Nicolson (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Criminal Law (London: Cavendish Press, 2000). Bibbings, L.S., ‘Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War’ Social and Legal Studies, 12/3 (2003), 335–358. Bibbings, L.S., Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Connell, R.W., Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2nd edn, 2005). Enloe, C., The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Higate, P., (ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport: Praeger, 2003). McBarnet, D., Conviction: Law, the State and the Construction of Justice (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1983). Rae, J., Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Thomas, P.A., Socio-Legal Studies (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997). Wilson, G., ‘Selective Conscientious Objection in the Aftermath of Iraq: Reconsidering Objection to a Specific War’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 12/5, (2010) 665–88.

Chapter 4 Key Texts (Murphy) Anonymous, La Poilue par Une Première de la Rue de la Paix (Paris: Albin Michel, 1916). Bourke, Joanna, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999). Brechemier, Dominique, ‘Rencontres: Colette et Annie de Pène’, Cahiers Colette No. 30 (Paris: Société des amis de Colette, 2008) 93–103. Capdevila, L., ‘La mobilisation des femmes dans la France combattante (1940–1945)’, CLIO. Histoire, femmes et sociétés [on-line] (2000) 12: Le genre et la nation, 2–25. URL: http://clio.revues.org/index187.html [accessed 21 February 2012]. Darrow, M.H., French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (New York: Berg, 2000). Eades, Caroline, ‘La Première Guerre mondiale vue par le cinéma français d’aujourd’hui’, in A. Laserra, N. Leclercq and M. Quaghebeur (eds) Mémoires et Antimémoires littéraires au XXe siècle: La Première Guerre mondiale, Vol. 2, (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 229–249. Enloe, C., Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (Boston: South End Press, 1983). Enloe, C., Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).

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Goldstein, J.S., War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Higonnet, Margaret. R., ‘Not So Quiet in No-Woman’s-Land’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds) Gendering War Talk, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 205–226. Martin, M.L., ‘From Periphery to Center: Women in the French Military’, Armed Forces and Society, 8/2, (1982), 303–333. Smith, Leonard V., ‘The “Culture de guerre” and French Historiography of the Great War of 1914–1918,’ History Compass 5/6 (2007), 1967–1979. Tylee, C.M., ‘Verbal Screens and Mental Petticoats: Women’s Writings of the First World War’, Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 13–14 (1987), 125–152.

Chapter 5 Key Texts (Cohen) Bennett, Scott H., Radical Pacifism. The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Cooper, Sandi E., Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914, (New York: Oxford 1991). Early, Frances H., ‘Revolutionary Pacifism and War Resistance. Jessie Wallace Hughan’s ‘War Against War?’, Peace & Change, 20/3 (July 1995), 207–328. Liddington, Jill, The Long Road to Greenham. Feminism & Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820, (London: Virago, 1989). Schott, Linda, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Vellacott, Jo, ‘Transnationalism in the Early Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, in Harvey L. Dyck (ed.), The Pacifist Impulse: Historical Perspective, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 362–383.

Chapter 6 Key Texts (Carden-Coyne) Anderson, Julie, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: Soul of A Nation, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Carden-Coyne, Ana, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War, (Oxford University Press, 2009). Cohen, Deborah, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). Gagen, Wendy, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European History Review, 14 (2007), 525–42. Gerber, David, ‘In Search of Al Schmid: War Hero, Blinded Veteran, Everyman’, in Mitchell and Snyder (eds), The Body and Physical Difference, 111–133. Gullace, Nicoletta, ‘White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War’, Journal of British Studies, 36, (April, 1997), 178–206. Meyer, Jessica, ‘Not Septimus Now: Wives of Disabled Veterans and Cultural Memory of the First World War in Britain’, Women’s History Review, 13/1, (2004), 117–138 Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Synder (eds), The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1997). Ott, Katherine, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002).

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Poole, Carol, Disability in Twentieth Century German Culture, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Serlin, David, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Stiker, Henri Jacques, A History of Disability, (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1999).

Chapter 7 Key Texts (Meyer) Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). Bracco, Rosa Maria, Merchants of Hope (Oxford: Berg, 1993). Cohen, Deborah, The War Come Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Darke, Paul, ‘Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability’ in Tom Shakespeare, (ed.) The Disability Reader (London: Continuum, 1998). Gerber, David A., ‘Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives”, American Quarterly, 46/4, (December 1994). Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ Tale, (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). Karner, Tracy Xavia, ‘Engendering Violent Men: Oral Histories of Military Masculinity’ in Lee H. Bowker (ed.), Masculinities and Violence, (London: Sage, 1998). Meyer, Jessica, ‘”Not Septimus Now”: Wives of Disabled Veterans and Cultural Memory of the First World War in Britain’, Women’s History Review, 13/1, (2004). Michel, Sonya, ‘Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3/1 (1992). Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Chapter 8 Key Texts (Croft) Benedict, Helen, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, (Boston: Bacon Press, 2009). Bourke, Joanna, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, (London: Granta Books, 1999). Boydston, Jeanne, ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’, Gender and History, 20, (2008), 558–583. Kilshaw, Susie, ‘Gulf War Syndrome: A Reaction to Psychiatry’s Invasion of the Military?’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32, (2008), 219–237. Pols, Hans, ‘The Repression of War Trauma in American Psychiatry After WW11’, in Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (eds), Medicine and Modern Warfare, 2nd edition, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) (First published 1999). Rose, Sonya O., Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady, (London: Virago Press, 1987). Summerfield, Penny, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

Chapter 9 Key Texts (Koureas) Ali, S., ‘Troubling Times: A Comment on Judith Butler’s “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time” ’, The British Journal of Sociology, 59/1, (2008), 35–9.

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Blain, M., The Sociology of Terrorism: Studies in Power, Subjection and Victimage Ritual, (Florida: Universal Publishers, 2009). Brison, S.J., ‘Gender, Terrorism, and War’, Signs, 28/1, (2002), 435–7. Brod, H. and Kaufman, M. (eds), Theorising Masculinities. (London: Sage, 1994). Butler, J., ‘Sexual politics, torture, and secular time’, British Journal of Sociology, 59/1, (2008), 1–23. Carruthers, S., Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995). Cavarero, A., Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Chaliand, G. and Blin, A., The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda, (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007). Connell, R.W., Masculinities, (Oxford: Polity, 1995). Crawshaw, N., The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union with Greece, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978). Ferber, A.L. and Kimmel, M.S., ‘The Gendered Face of Terrorism’, Sociology Compass, 2/3, (2008), 870–87. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1963]). Holland, R., Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 1954–1959, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Laqueur W., ‘Postmodern Terrorism’, Foreign Affairs, 75/5, (1996), 24–36. Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, J. (eds), Manliness and Morality. Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Mitchell, W.J.T., ‘The Unspeakable And The Unimaginable’, ELH, 72, (2005), 291–308. Puar J., Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007) Roper, M. and Tosh, J. (eds) Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800, (London: Routledge, 1991). Schmitt, Carl, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (New York: Telos Press Pub, 2007). Sontag S., Regarding the Pain of Others, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003).

Chapter 10 Key Texts (Dixon Vuic) Bailey, Beth, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Bailey, Beth and Farber, David, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii, (New York: Free Press, 1992). Bourke, Joanna, Rape: Sex, Violence, History, (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). Bristow, Nancy K., Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War, (New York: New York University Press, 1996). Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993). Cameron, Craig M. American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Delano, Page Dougherty, ‘Making up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture.’ Feminist Studies 26/1, (Spring 2000), 33–68.

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Doan, Laura, ‘Topsy-turvydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism and the Great War.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12/4, (2006), 517–42. Enloe, Cynthia, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Goldstein, Joshua S., War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Gubar, Susan. “This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun:’ World War II and the Blitz on Women.’ In Margaret R. Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz, (eds) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, 227–59 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Hegarty, Marilyn E., Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II, (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Jeffords, Susan, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jensen, Kimberly, American Women in the First World War, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Kerber, Linda K., No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). Kramer, Paul A., ‘The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War.’ In Ann Laura Stoler, (ed.) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, 366–404. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Pfau, Ann Elizabeth., Miss Yourlovin’: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Gutenberg-e, available at http://www. gutenberg-e.org/pfau/[accessed 21 February 2012]. Roberts, Mary Louise, ‘The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946.’ American Historical Review 115/4, (October 2010), 1002–30. Stur, Heather M., ‘Perfume and Lipstick in the Boonies: Red Cross SRAO and the Vietnam War.’ The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1/2, (December 2008), 151–65. Vuic, Kara Dixon. Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. War/Society/Culture. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Westbrook, Robert. ‘”I want a girl, just like the girl that married Harry James”: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II.’ American Quarterly 42/4, (December 1990), 587–614. Wexler, Laura, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism, Cultural Studies of the United States. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Winchell, Meghan K., Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II, Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Wood, Molly. ‘ “Commanding Beauty” and “Gentle Charm”: American Women and Gender in the Early Twentieth Century Foreign Service.’ Diplomatic History 31/3, (June 2007), 505–30. Wood, Molly, ‘Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the “Social Game” in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905–1941.’ Journal of Women’s History 17/2, (Summer 2005), 142–165. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. Politics and Culture. Reprint. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008).

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Chapter 11 Key Texts (Godfrey) Boydston, Jeanne, ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’, Gender and History, 20, (2008), 558–583. Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). Enloe, C., Maneuvers. The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Enloe, C., ‘Wielding Masculinity inside Abu Ghraib: Making Feminist Sense of an American Military Scandal’, Asian Journal for Women’s Studies, 1/3, (2004), 89–102. Fivush, R. and Buckner, J., ‘Creating Gender and Identity through Narratives’ in R. Fivush and C.A. Haden (eds) Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2003). Howard III, W. and Prividera, C. ‘Rescuing Patriarchy or “Saving Jessica Lynch”: The Rhetorical Structure of the American Women Solider,’ Women and Language, 27/2, 89–98. Kaufman-Osborn, T., ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib’, Politics and Gender, 1/4, (2005), 597–619. Khoshaba, R., ‘Women in the Interrogation Room’ in T. McKelvey (ed.) One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Tortures (New York, Seal Press, 2008). Loftus, E., ‘Tricked by Memory’ in J. Jeffery and G. Edwall (eds) Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience (Maryland: University Press of America, 1994), 89–106. Sasson-Levy, O., ‘Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in “Masculine” Roles’, Sociological Inquiry, 73/3, (August 2003), 410–441.

Index

9/11 38, 134 Abu Ghraib Prison 19, 125, 154, 157–8, 160, 164 Addams, Jane 71, 74–6, 79 aerial warfare 33 Afghanistan War (2001–present) 2, 5, 9–10, 22, 38, 50, 79, 84, 88–90, 93, 98, 110, 117, 120, 133, 150, 156, 163, 171–2 Albright, Madeleine 24 air raids 32–33, 115 air raids precautions 33 Air Raids Precautions Act (1937) 33 anti aircraft sites 35 antiquity 127–8 armed forces 12, 42, 49–50, 89, 118, 139, 145, 150 Armitage, Simon 10, 98 At Ease 49–50 Aubert, Vilhelm 47 Austrian War Archive, Vienna 14 auxiliary forces 56 Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) 35 Baer, Gertrud 75 Barbusse, Henri 60 battle fatigue 110 Beardsworth, George 45 Benjamin, Medea 79 Best Years of Our Lives, The 99, 103–4, 106–7 Bibbings, Lois S. 64, 73 Big Parade, The 104 Bin Laden, Osama 133–4 black power movement 140, 146 body 3, 5, 7, 10, 34, 45, 74, 84–9, 91, 93–5, 101–5, 111, 124–7, 129, 133–4, 167 Bosnia, 15, 98, 100–1, 106 182

Bourke, Joanna 4, 24, 56, 113, 148, 167 Boydston, Jeanne 111, 155 Bozon, Serge 63–5 British Legion 93–4 British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association (BLESMA) 91, 93 Butler, Judith 5, 125, 155, 160, 162, 167 Cameron, David 38 camp followers 56, 63 Campbell, William 45 Cavarero, Adriana 134 charity/ies 4, 10, 17–18, 20–2, 83–4, 87–8, 91, 93–5 Church Terrell, Mary 69, 72, 77 citizenship 8, 15, 18–19, 21–2, 29–31, 34, 36, 38–9, 45–6, 76, 84–5, 87, 89, 117 civil defence 4–5, 8, 15, 29–37, 39, 117 civil defence corps 36 civil rights movement 145 civilians 2, 5, 7–8, 11, 14–17, 19–20, 30–4, 36, 39, 44, 51, 55, 57, 75, 110–12, 115–16, 118–19, 124–5 Clinton, Hilary 134 Code Pink 9, 70, 78–80 Cold War 2, 31, 36 combat stress (Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Society) 93 compensation 84–5, 89–90, 94, 117 Congo/Democratic Republic of Congo 24 Connell, Robert 5, 42, 125 conscientious objection 8, 41–51 Council of the Historical Memory of the Struggle of EOKA 132 critical criminology 43 cross-dressing 55–6, 59–60, 64 cyborg 91–2

INDEX

Darrow, Margaret 55, 57 de Pène, Annie 58–9, 61 Deeping, Warwick 99, 102–3, 107 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 91 dependence 18, 84, 87, 93, 100–3, 105–7, 159, 164, 166 Dighenis, General George Grivas 124, 128–9 disability 5, 10, 77, 83–9, 91, 93–5, 98–107, 112 displaced persons 8, 15–16 domesticity 8, 11, 34–6, 103, 105–6, 142 Donut Dollies 56, 138–49 Durrell, Lawrence 127 EOKA 124, 126, 128–9, 131–2 Enloe, Cynthia 4, 7, 15, 30, 43, 57, 61–2 144, 156–7 Faludi, Susan 38 family 2, 7, 14–15, 30, 34, 35, 37, 45, 49, 87–8, 101, 104, 113, 116, 119, 127, 130, 164, 166 Fanon, Franz 125 Faries, Dr John 88 fatherhood 85 femininity/ies 3–11, 15, 30, 35, 37, 60, 78, 84, 99, 103, 106, 110, 112, 115, 117, 134, 139, 141–5, 147–9, 155–9, 161, 163–4, 166, 171–3 feminism 58, 70, 76, 149 First Gulf War (1990–1991) 117 First World War 1–2, 5–10, 14–25, 29, 31–3, 42–6, 48–50, 55–66, 70, 73, 77, 80, 83–5, 88, 91–4, 98–102, 104, 107, 110–13, 115–16, 120, 128, 139, 154, 171–2 franchise for women 31, 46, 71 French resistance 9, 56, 62 Fried, Alfred Hermann 73 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 78 Gardner, Frank 34 gender performativity 155, 163, 165–7 gender politics 173 gender transformation 165 Geneva Conventions (1929 & 1949) 16, 23, 158

183

Glenton, Joe 49–50 Goffman, Irving (Spoiled identities) 88 Goldman, Emma 74 Goldstein, Joshua 6, 15 Grayzel, Susan 2, 4, 6, 8, 15, 43, 44, 117, 139 Greene Balch, Emily 78 Guantánamo Bay, US detention camp 202–16, 22, 158 gymnastic exercise 88 hanging 100, 130–3 Havelberg Camp, Germany, 17 hegemonic masculinity 80, 125, 157 hero, heroism, heroic (behaviour) 4–6, 8–10, 21, 32, 47, 59, 62, 83–4, 87, 90, 92–5, 99, 111–13, 115–16, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 134–5 Higonnet, Margaret R. 57 Hijab 31, 38–9 Hill, Brian 10, 98 Hobhouse, Emily 16 home front 1, 6, 11, 33, 44, 57, 58, 61, 112, 115–16, 139–40, 143 Home Office 33–4, 45 homosexuality 3, 164 Housewives Service (ARP) 35 Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual 159 human subject researcher 155 hyper-masculinity 11, 60, 91–2, 125–6, 157–8 hysteria 102, 112, 114–15 identity 2, 6, 11–12, 15, 31, 39, 45–6, 61, 70, 83, 85, 90, 100–1, 111, 124–7, 130, 132, 155–7, 159–62, 164 Imperial War Museum 126, 133–4 interdisciplinary 1, 4, 7, 11–12, 15, 23, 43, 70, 80, 104, 107, 110, 124, 140, 155 interrogation 11, 15, 154, 156–63, 167 interrogator 11, 60, 154–6, 158–65, 167 International Congress of Women (ICW) 69 internees/internment camps 2, 4–6, 8, 14–24, 159 interwar 31–2 injury 20, 35, 86, 90–1, 95, 104, 110 Iraq 32, 92

184

INDEX

Iraq War (2003–2010) 2, 5–6, 9, 11, 19, 38, 49, 60, 78, 84, 88–9, 92, 117–18, 125, 150, 154–65, 171 irresponsible masculinities 130 Jones, Staff Sergeant Jane 11, 154–5 Karaolis, Michalis 130–2 Karpinski. Colonel Janis 154, 156–8 Kubark Manual for Counterintelligence Interrogation 159 Kulka, Leopoldina 71, 74 L’Oeuvre 58–61 La Vie Parisienne 58 Langlands, Ben & Bell, Nikki 133 League of Nations 23, 77 Legett, Elsie 32 London 11, 32, 34, 38, 75, 115, 126, 133 Lyons, Michael 49, 51 Macmillan, Harold 127 Makarios, Archbishop Michail Christodolou 129 malingering 87, 93, 114, 116, 119 manliness 3, 41–51, 78, 111, 116, 171–2 marriage 21, 86, 103, 106 masculinity/ies 3–5, 7–11, 15, 18–21, 23, 30, 33, 42, 45, 47, 49–51, 60, 64, 77–8, 80, 83–92, 94, 99, 101–2, 105, 107, 110–13, 115, 119, 124–6, 128–31, 133–5, 139, 142, 148, 155–60, 163–5 , 172 media 9, 22, 30, 33, 56–7, 62, 65, 76, 79, 84, 89–95, 133, 172 mental health 20, 102, 115, 171 Middlebrook, J.B. 85 middlebrow novels 99, 102 militarism 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9, 11–12, 43, 47, 71, 76, 79–80, 128 militarized 4, 9, 11, 21, 30, 37, 56, 58, 84, 90, 95, 141, 143, 145, 149, 155, 157, 160, 162, 165, 167, 172 military masculinity 5, 8, 10, 42, 50, 60, 84, 90, 92, 94, 113, 129 military psychiatry 10, 111, 114, 118–20 military wives 49, 107, 171 Ministry of Defence (MoD) 48–9, 89, 91

Ministry of Pensions (MoP) 83–7, 91 Miss America Pageant 143 morale 11, 20, 29, 32, 56, 116, 139, 141, 143, 150 multiculturalism 38 Muslims 38 mutilated male body 126–7 National Museum of Struggle 126, 132 nationalism 4, 6, 9, 23, 70–1, 75, 77, 79, 95, 125 new woman 60, 70 Noakes, Lucy 6, 8, 15, 44, 117, 139, 166 Not Dead, The 104, 106 nuclear deterrence 37 nuclear war 36–7 nursing 154, 171 Obama, Barack 133–4 overcoming (disability) 83, 89–92, 94–5 Owen, Wilfred 99–100 pacifism 9, 44, 50, 76, 80 pacifist 4, 8–9, 41, 44, 47, 63–4, 71–7, 80, 133, 173 pain 14, 83–5, 93, 163, 165–6 Paralympics 90 Paris Peace Treaties (1919–20) 21 patriarchy 30, 156 patriotism 44, 79, 172 pensions 83–8, 90–1, 93, 112, 120 perpetrator 5, 10, 12, 126, 156 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 71, 74 Pile, Sir Frederick 35 poilu (French infantry soldier) 9, 56–61, 63–5 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 5, 10, 98, 100, 106, 110–14, 117–19, 165 posters 34, 37, 59 predisposition to neurosis 112–13, 116, 118–20 propaganda 9–10, 16–17, 20, 55, 83, 126, 129–30, 133, 161 prosthetics 84, 87, 91–3 psychiatric diagnosis 110–12 Rachamimov, Alon 18 rape 4, 15–16, 19, 21, 23–4, 71, 119, 148–9 recreation 11, 56, 138–44, 146, 149–50

INDEX

recreation centres 138, 141 Red Cross 6, 11, 17, 20, 56, 71, 87–8, 138–49 Red Cross Institute for the Blind and Disabled 88 refugees/refugee camps 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 22, 24, 71, 172 rehabilitation (vocational; medical) 5, 10, 83–5, 87–8, 90–4, 99, 102–4, 107, 156 Rose, Sonya 4, 6, 116 Rossides, Michalakis 131 Rotten, Elisabeth 20–1 Royal Warrant (1917, 1918) 87 Ruhleben Camp, Germany, 1914–18 18 Rushdie Affair 38 Sasson-Levy, Orna 155, 161 Schmitt, Carl 134 Schwimmer, Rosika 73–8 Scott, Joan Wallach 15, 23, 155 second-wave feminism 149 Second World War 2, 6, 8, 10–11, 35, 36–7, 48, 63–5, 77, 88–9, 91–2, 99, 103–4, 110–12, 115, 117–18, 125, 158, 165 Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham 89 Serlin, David 91 servicewomen 5, 110–11, 114–18, 158, 166 sexual assault 18, 24, 119, 150 sexuality 9, 11, 23, 92, 103, 138, 140, 147–50, 154–5, 158–9, 164–5 shellshock 10, 110–11 Shilton, Ronald 131 Showalter, Elaine 111 Siebers, Tobin 88 Simpson. Jessica 150 skull-stuffing (bourrage de crâne) 60 Sluga, Glenda 21 social problem films 99, 104, 106 socio-legal 8, 43, 46–7, 50–1 Sontag, Susan 133 sport 3, 88, 91, 150 Sri Lanka 15 Stanton, Henry E. 41–2, 44, 47, 51 Stöcker, Helene 76 stoicism 83, 89, 116 Straw, Jack 38 surgery 86, 93

185

technology/ies 1, 61, 91–2, 103 Terrorism Bill (2005) 38 Thalerhof Camp, Graz, Austria, 1914–18 19 Tondues 62 torture 16, 19, 125–6, 163 trauma 2, 5, 19, 65, 107, 110, 114–15, 117–20, 142, 156, 163 US Military Intelligence 2, 11, 77, 154 USO 150 veteran/s 2, 4, 83–5, 87, 90–1, 93–4, 98–101, 103–6, 117–20, 166, 171–2 victim 5–6, 10, 12, 16–17, 19, 31–2, 35, 65, 94, 98, 111, 119, 126, 156, 163, 164 Vietnam 2, 5, 9, 118 Vietnam Veterans 117 Vietnam War 2, 5–6, 9, 11, 56, 125, 138–50, 154, 171 violence 2, 4, 6, 9, 11–12, 15, 16, 18, 124–5, 133, 157, 165 volunteerism 5, 33, 37, 44, 73, 91, 150 Walker, Alice 79 war and children 16–17, 21–2, 29–33, 38, 71, 86, 129, 131, 172 war disability 98–107 War on Terror 79, 124–5, 133 war neurosis 8, 10, 110 Warden Service (ARP) 33–4, 36–7 warrior 9–10, 73, 84–6, 91–2, 94, 126, 128, 134 women as war supporters 2, 7, 10, 35, 56, 62, 65, 102–3, 140, 142–3, 147, 149 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 70–2, 75–80 Women’s Voluntary Service 34 work 18, 22, 33–7, 41–4, 46, 55–6, 58–9, 72–5, 77, 83, 86–8, 112, 114, 128, 130, 139, 141, 144, 146, 148, 162, 165 wounds, wounded 10, 83–7, 90–2, 94, 128, 172 Wyler, William 99, 104 Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, UK, 2001 16 Ziemann, Benjamin 15