This volume explores the role of gender on both the home and fighting fronts in eastern Europe during World Wars I and II. By using gender as a category of analysis, the authors seek to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the subjective nature of wartime experience and its representations. While historians have long equated the fighting front with the masculine and the home front with the feminine, the contributors challenge these dichotomies, demonstrating that they are based on culturally embedded assumptions
about heroism and sacrifice. Major themes include the ways in which wartime experiences challenge traditional gender roles; postwar restoration of gender order; collaboration and resistance; the body; and memory and commemoration.

Integrates gender into the broader narrative of the world wars in eastern Europe

About the Author

Nancy M. Wingfield is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. She is co-author of Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II and co-editor (with Maria Bucur) of Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present.

Maria Bucur is John W. Hill Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and author of Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania.

Reviews

This collection of high-quality essays is designed to explore little-known aspects of the two world wars in Eastern Europe. The contributions have been grouped thematically in three sections devoted to gender roles, gender and occupation, and the gendered commemoration of war. The result is a coherent volume that will be of particular interest to social and cultural historians of modern Europe.

* The Journal of Military History 71.4, 2007 *

[This book] is a . . . welcome addition to the literature on gender in Europe during a particularly violent century. Oct. 2008

* Slavonic & East European Review *

. . . an exceptionally rich collection of diverse texts. . . . [A] significant contribution in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies. . .

* Signs *

This volume is an impressive collection of articles that will appeal to those interested in the history of eastern Europe, war and the war experience, both world wars, and gender and women's studies.

-- Laurie Stoff * russian-front.com *

. . . thoughtful, fascinating . . . . this fine volume is notable for its unified presentation of complex and engaging issues. It provides an introduction to the most significant recent historiography in gender studies and military history, as well as an overview of some of the most stimulating new research being done in an important field. March 2009

-- Andrea Orzoff * H-Ideas, H-Net *

. . . this fine volume is notable for its unified presentation of complex and engaging issues. It provides an introduction to the most significant recent historiography in gender studies and military history, as well as an overview of some of the most stimulating new research being done in an important field. . . . Rarely are compilations like this one so consistently well written and intriguing.March, 2009

-- Andrea Orzoff * H-Ideas, H-Net *

This excellent collection of 11 articles advances the thriving English-language historiography on gender, wars and the military into the too often neglected territories of twentieth-century Eastern Europe.Vol. 39.4 2009

-- Anders Ahlback * European History Quarterly *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253218445
Author Nancy M. Wingfield
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press