Gender And War in Twentieth-century Eastern Europe

by Wingfield, Nancy M.

• ISBN13: 9780253218445
• ISBN10: 0253218446
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-30
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

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 assumptionsabout 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
1. Introduction: Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe	1	(22)
Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur
PART ONE: CHALLENGING GENDER ROLES/RESTORING ORDER
2. "Female Generals" and "Siberian Angels": Aristocratic Nurses and the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief	23	(24)
Alon Rachamimov
3. Civilizing the Soldier in Postwar Austria	47	(23)
Maureen Healy
4. Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919	70	(25)
Eliza Ablovatski
PART TWO: GENDERED COLLABORATING AND RESISTING
5. Dumplings and Domesticity: Women, Collaboration, and Resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia	95	(16)
Melissa Feinberg
6. Denouncers and Fraternizers: Gender, Collaboration, and Retribution in Bohemia and Moravia during World War II and After	111	(22)
Benjamin Frommer
7. Family, Gender, and Ideology in World War II Latvia	133	(24)
Mara Lazda
PART THREE: REMEMBERING WAR: GENDERED BODIES, GENDERED STORIES
8. Kosovo Maiden(s): Serbian Women Commemorate the Wars of National Liberation, 1912-1918	157	(14)
Melissa Bokovoy
9. Women's Stories as Sites of Memory: Gender and Remembering Romania's World Wars	171	(22)
Maria Bucur
10. The Nation's Pain and Women's Shame: Polish Women and Wartime Violence	193	(27)
Katherine R. Jolluck
11. "The Alienated Body": Gender Identity and the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad	220	(15)
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Select Bibliography	235	(4)
Contributors	239	(2)
Index	241