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Special Topic:Gender Roles in Wartime and Peacetime
1840:485/585:802
Spring Semester 2008
Paula Maggio
Assistant Lecturer
Women’s Studies Program
The University of Akron
Akron, Ohio
Gender Roles in Wartime and Peacetime: An Introduction
Sources:
1. Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, ed. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
2. Phillips, Kathy J., ed. Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and
American History.
3. Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
About the course:
This course will discuss gender roles in wartime and peacetime and will focus on how war
affects both men and women, particularly due to prescribed gender roles enforced by the cultural,
societal, economic and political systems under which we live.
Despite the fact that war is a mostly male affair – which means that there is much more
scholarship regarding men and war than women and war -- in this course we will try to evenly
divide our discussion of war, peace, and gender between both men and women. That will be
easier to do than it was 20 years ago, because research on this topic has increased since the
1980s.
There are a few things that are important to note:
1. In most cases, gender norms and gender realities are not identical throughout the world
and/or throughout history.
2. And in most cases, gender norms and gender realities are subject to historical change,
depending upon many factors.
3. Also, war is an extremely diverse endeavor, operating in different contexts for different
purposes and with different rules and meanings.
4. But as Joshua Goldstein points out in War and Gender, despite the fact that war is a very
diverse endeavor, diversity disappears when it comes to the connection of war with
gender. When we study war’s connection to gender, we see that the way gender roles
play out in war is very similar across cultures and through time.
Why is this the case?
Goldstein says this is the case because killing does not come naturally to either gender, yet war is
a universal occurrence in human societies. So to help overcome soldiers’ reluctance to fight,
cultures develop gender roles that equate “manliness” with being tough and being able to stay
tough under fire. Across cultures and through time, he says, this gender division that selects men
to fight and women to serve in support roles has influenced gender in a profound way.
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These gender roles have helped shape the war system. In turn, the pervasiveness of war has
influenced gender in profound ways, particularly in the way we enforce gender norms in child
rearing.
Gender roles in times of war and peace depend on:
 The Binary Myth: men are naturally warlike; women have an affinity for peace
 The polarization of gender: masculinity and femininity have virtually nothing in common
and women are seen as lesser than men
Gender roles in times of war and peace create:
 The Binary Division: between battlefront vs. homefront
What do these myths and divisions do? These myths and divisions:
 Influence customs, society, culture and national thinking about war and gender.
 Exert collective pressure to coerce men into war so they won’t be seen as “sissies,” while
making it seem that men are exercising freedom and choice (KP)
 Enable governments to conduct war because they pressure both men and women to
support it – on the battlefront and the homefront
 Help guarantee social stability when the unleashed violence of war, which is intended to
defend civilization and contain violence, is then restored to balance by invoking images
of femininity, nurturance, and family (MH 1).
Our emphasis in this course will be how gender roles changes when a nation mobilizes for
war, is in the middle of a war, and then returns to a peacetime economy.
Women are seen as
 Mothers – sending off their sons to war
 Sexualized creatures that reinforces the soldier’s masculinity
 Helpless victims who need protection
 History traditionally excludes women’s non-mythological roles in war on the homefront - filling traditional men’s roles for example -- as anomalies
Men are seen as
 Protectors of women and children
 Defenders of all civilization holds dear – including the fatherland or nation
 Manly men – stoic and tough under any circumstances
Two recent waves of scholarship question mythology of war’s gender:
1. Explores cultural construction of being a soldier and its psychological implications for
men. Investigates the experience of individual men, rather than men as a group. Finds
that men have ambivalent attitudes toward aggression, along with deep fears,
disorientation, and passivity.
2. Feminist historians challenge the idea that both world wars were entirely male
enterprises. Women’s roles are described: in the military, the resistance, medical corps,
heavy industry, and at home. While war impelled women out of the domestic sphere, they
remained subordinate to men, who continued to dominate the labor market and
monopolize political power.
Both waves of scholarship raise questions about gender.
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Kathy Phillips describes three feminist tracks related to the discussion of gender and war:
1. Strategy of equality in war: men and women should have equal opportunities to serve on
the battlefront
2. Strategy of differences: women are the peacemakers; men are the warriors
3. Idea that the social world needs to change for both sexes