Preliminary Programme

Almost 1 million Soviet women were involved in the “Great Patriotic War” (as Red Army soldiers or as members of partisan units) – that it is on an unprecedented scale in comparison to women’s role in the First World War or the Civil War, but also compared with the involvement of women in the military forces of other countries participating in WWII. It is true, the majority of military women officially held civic functions or fulfilled supporting roles (nurses, doctors, cooks, washing women, radio operators, signallers, clerks etc.), but during the course of the war, the boundaries between noncombatant and combatant duties of female soldiers and partisans more and more blurred. Moreover, there were tens of thousands of women who were especially trained as combatants and served in the Red Army as – for example –, snipers, machine gunners, tank drivers, rifle-women or bomber pilots. Women contributed to partisan warfare also in functions that required exerting violence.
The paper will discuss the ideological, political and military context in which the recruitment and deployment of women (all female and mixed units) took place, when and how it was introduced and how it was dealt with in the Soviet press and propaganda during and after the war. Since women wanted to join the Red Army and partisan units as volunteers already before official mobilisation policy was introduced, their motivations will be analysed as well as the attitude of the political leadership and the military with regard to military involvement of women on a mass scale. Finally the paper will focus on the postwar status of Soviet women veterans. It will address their own view in contrast to official and popular attitudes to female combat participation, perceived as actively transgressing traditional gender lines.
The paper is based on memories and interviews with female soldiers/partisans and on articles from the Soviet press. (Show less)

While the U.S. Army was at war on two fronts, questions of what it meant to be a soldier were fought over within the military as well as in Congress. The necessity to include women in the war effort and the presence of the first regular women’s contingent, the Women's Army Corps, (WAC) which was founded in 1943 made it necessary to symbolically re-draw gender boundaries within the military institution as well as in civilian society. In my contribution I argue that despite the formal inclusion of women in the military organization, they were dis-cursively excluded from what was perceived as the virile core of the military profession, combat. In reserving the status of combatant and protector for Euro-American men while excluding African American men and all women from combat positions, the role of white women as the girl back home in need of protection could be perpetuated. The core of the or-ganization remained white and masculine and the “line of demarcation” between soldiers (his-torically men, citizens and warriors) and civilians (historically “womenandchildren” (Enloe) and men unfit to serve) was redrawn inside the organization during World War II.
My paper will focus on three critical areas: First, I will briefly look at the symbolic role of weapons in the press coverage of the Women’s Army Corps and its Public Relations policy. Second, I will compare the use of women in anti-aircraft artillery, which is widely considered a combat support position in Great Britain and the United States. Whereas women of the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) played a vital role in the air defense, only a small number of American Wacs served in gender-integrated AA batteries that were part of a brief and highly secret experiment that was despite its success soon discontinued as General Mar-shall and others thought the American public would not be ready to accept women in these positions. Finally, by analyzing a series of records of courts martial at Fort Oglethorpe, GA, I will look at the sexual politics of the Army and the WAC and show how the regulation of sexuality was used to reproduce gender differences in the military and civilian society. (Show less)

This paper investigates the impact on gender, both immediately during the war and in the long term, of British women’s involvement in anti-aircraft batteries, stationed along the country’s coastline to ward off German bomber planes. After briefly assessing the government’s reasons for recruiting women into combatant units, the paper focuses on the women concerned. Particular attention is paid to the precise nature of any division of labour within the units and of the functions fulfilled by the women in relation to combat. Beginning with the exploration of their motives for volunteering for this particular unit, the women’s self-conception as well as the impact of their war-time experience on their subsequent lives is elucidated. It is argued that it was precisely the near-complete breakdown of gender boundaries in these units that made for official efforts to conceal this from the public and to shore up gender once victory in Europe was assured. (Show less)