Perspective

Her War Story: Twentieth Century Women Write About War

By Sayre P. Sheldon

I have been deeply affected by war, even though as an American, I had the good fortune to live in a country almost untouched by war on its own soil. I grew up with stories and pictures from World War I. I was frustrated at being too young to take any part in World War II. I protested against America's war in Vietnam. I helped start a women's organization for nuclear disarmament in the early 1980s. Today, in my 70s, at the beginning of a new century, I continue to strive with my organization for a peaceful world. I have also spent many years teaching literature. Much of the world's great literature concerns war. Human conduct in war arouses great interest--in some ways war is a test and demonstration of human behavior like no other. Students read this literature with the intense interest of people who ask what they would do in similar situations. I believed that these students should examine the writing of women as well as men about war. 

The 20th century opened up many new opportunities for women in wartime. They gained the right to be heard as journalists, novelists, poets, propagandists, and more. Yet where was the war writing by women? I began to collect it. The next step was to assemble it in a book, a book which would not only tell the story of women in the wars of the 20th century, but would show how differently women wrote about war than men. The anthology had to include fiction and nonfiction, poetry, diaries, interviews, articles, letters, and many of the other ways women used to tell their experiences of war, both actual and imagined. This was an ambitious task, one which I could only do imperfectly. 

Yet the result does tell a continuing story of many of the changes war brought to women during the long years of war-making and a testament to the ways women were able to describe these changes. Say "women and war," and the image that comes to mind is of a woman as a victim, embracing her children, desperately trying to protect them from the violence unleashed by men. The most frequently quoted fact about modern war is that civilian casualties have gone from around five percent at the century's beginning to 95 percent at its end--a devastating statistic for the world's women and their families. 

If what women have done in war through the century is looked at more closely, many different images emerge. In World War I, women in Russia's Batallion of Death threw themselves into the most violent fighting. British women steered ambulances loaded with desperately wounded soldiers through heavy shelling. Rebecca West wrote about young munitions factory workers who, she noted, would not go back to their old lives without at least demanding and getting the right to vote.

After World War I, many women predicted the next world war and opposed the rise of fascism which they saw as making another war inevitable. Virginia Woolf wrote as early as 1928 that fascism began at home when the patriarchal family condemned women to sacrifice their educations and careers to keep men in power. She also wrote that because women were not brought up in the war system, they should refuse to have anything to do with war and form a society of "Outsiders." When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, many women went to Spain as writers and broadcasters to ask the rest of the world to support a fledgling democracy against the fascist-backed general, Franco. A young American, Martha Gellhorn, became a war correspondent by going there.

In World War II, women in far greater numbers fought, nursed, flew planes, entertained troops, smuggled themselves into combat to report on it for their newspapers, and learned to make ships and tanks. Women endured World War II's new atrocities: death camps, fire bombings, the ultimate weapon--the nuclear bomb. As survivors, they vowed to tell their stories. French resistance fighter Charlotte Delbo, after surviving Auschwitz, wrote book after book to "explain the inexplicable." Kikue Tada, a young nurse in the aftermath of Hiroshima, said, "I intend to go on telling my story as long as there is life left in me."

During the long Cold War years, smaller wars raged around the globe, many supported by the superpowers in the struggle between communism and capitalism. Again, civilians were devastated by these conflicts. Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch wrote painfully of the massacres of Palestinians in refugee camps in her poem, "One Cannot Kill a Baby Twice." Karla Ramirez left her baby behind to go to the mountains of El Salvador and fight with the revolutionaries. "There's no choice but to kill," she said. "You have to demonstrate to your compañeros that you can."

Women as leaders can successfully act as commanders in chief. Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, wrote proudly of Britain's victory in the Falklands War. By the time of the Gulf War, American women left their babies to report for duty, and served in combat zones that could no longer be kept separate from "behind the lines."

Women's actions in wartime are only a small part of the whole in comparison to what they do to put society back together when the wars end. In a sense, wars don't end for women. They tend to write not about the victories but about the continuing grief--"an inward sword" as one World War I poet wrote, from which the bleeding is slower. The burden of remaking society falls heavily on women. It is they who nurse the injured, comfort the children, improvise some kind of shelter, find ways to feed and clothe their families and the families of others, and even attempt to make peace with the very neighbors who turned on them and murdered their relatives, as in recent examples from Bosnia.

The selections in this book show that one reason women are so good at rebuilding society is their tendency to connect with women everywhere--women don't just see their own children as victims, but all children. Again in Virginia Woolf's words, "In fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." Another major role for women is trying to prevent renewed fighting and killing. The mothers in Argentina forced their government to acknowledge their "disappeared" children. Greenham Common women forced British citizens to recognize that their country had become a target when the United States based nuclear missiles there. 

Today we see Japanese women working to prevent Japan from rearming, Russian women retrieving their sons from the fighting in Chechnya, Sudanese women setting up schools in deserted buildings, U.S. women demonstrating against Pentagon spending that robs their children's education and health care--women in the millions have worked and sacrificed to bring their societies to their senses.

What conclusions can be drawn from hearing so many different experiences and voices? First, the 20th century made women an essential part of every aspect of modern war. Secondly, women can be leaders in war just as they can be leaders in efforts to prevent war. Thirdly, our world is so deeply militarized that the tentacles of war, preparations for it and recovery from it, reach everywhere. Lastly, women have reasons to protest war with its capacity of undermining, if not actually destroying, the families and communities they try to build. Perhaps most importantly, women's voices and words reach our hearts and imaginations in ways we need to respond to--if we are to make this new century a better one than the last. The bloody 20th century will not be missed. So far, the new millennium shows few signs that lessons learned in the 20th century might be applied in the 21st. Yet the humanity these women have given witness to in their writings does suggest that a new spirit of individual rights has taken root and is growing. Perhaps human society will at last begin to throw off the scourge of war. If so, it will need the words and the work of women in order to succeed.

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