Preliminary Programme

The participation of millions of women was fundamental to Russia’s waging of the First World War. The “total” nature of the war meant that military activities were highly dependent on mobilization of broad swaths of the civilian population and their active involvement in various aspects of the war effort. Female workers performed nearly half of all wartime labor in agricultural, commercial, and industrial sectors. More than thirty thousand women worked in wartime medical capacities, treating the wounded and ill among both the soldiering and civilian populations. Perhaps most saliently, thousands of Russian women actually participated directly in Russia’s military efforts on the battlefields. The women involved in the war effort attracted much attention from contemporaries, who, not infrequently, compared them to various legendary female figures. The most common of these analogies were to the ancient Amazons and the medieval French figure of Joan of Arc. The former (Amazons) could be invoked in positive, neutral, or negative ways in reporting on the phenomenon, indicating the ambiguity surrounding the idea of women serving as soldiers. The latter (Joan of Arc), however, was almost always employed affirmatively, depicting the women soldiers not only as those willing to lay down their lives for the defense of the nation, but as sources of inspiration to the men to continue fighting, and framed as those who could save the nation from destruction. In recent years, despite long neglect in Soviet and Russian public and scholarly discourse following the end of the war, the women of Russia’s Great War have garnered new attention. This paper explores both the historical and contemporary uses and meanings of such analogies. (Show less)

The times of crises like war tend to polarize gender relations when most men are given a task to fight in the front and most women stay at home. This division also concerns the expressions of emotions. Soldiering increasingly demands men to “shut down” their feelings for their duty of killing, while the task of mourning for the war losses is assigned to women. However, people might not always follow these predefined standards. Scholars like Jason Crouthamel have argued that the cruel experiences of world wars reshaped gender relations as people and particularly men searched for comfort for their experiences from more feminine forms of emotionality.

In this paper we analyze the interconnections of gender, war, and emotions in World War II Finland with a corpus of 7,000 digitized wartime letters. Combining statistical analysis with careful close reading, we examine the intensity and content of women’s and men’s emotional vocabulary in their personal letters. Our premise is that people’s emotional behavior is strongly related to different social situations, and we have taken four forms of interaction under inspection: we compare woman-woman, woman-men, men-men and men-woman letters.

Our analysis reveals stark differences in women’s and men’s emotional behavior in different communicational situations. We find largest differences in intragender writing when women wrote to women and men to men, with men’s mutual dialogue being particularly unemotional and harsh in tone. The differences in men’s and women’s emotionality are significantly smaller when they wrote letters to each other. Letters from women to men and from men to women are overall the most emotional types of messages in our corpus. Although they share a lot of emotional vocabulary, they also reflect the traditional gender division of war: women’s emotionality focuses on intimate relationships and longing, while men use patriotic emotion words to talk about their elevated duty of protecting the nation at war. Overall, our analysis confirms some stereotypical assumptions about gender differences of emotionality, but it also indicates that these norms varied greatly in different social situations and were perhaps blurred due to the war. (Show less)