Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe [Paperback]

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

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.

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.

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

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