Introduction

Throughout history, women have been systematically excluded from the battlefield, but that certainly does not mean they are absent from wars. The legions of combatants were invariably followed by women taking on all sorts of tasks: throughout history they have been healers and nurses, laundresses, cooks, prostitutes, in charge of correspondence or even of searching the battlefield at the end of the confrontation, collecting valuables from fallen bodies (Trustrum, 1984). In the Second World War, the unprecedented scale of the conflict, both in terms of geographical scope and in terms of the mobilization of human and material resources, led to the incorporation of women into the military ranks of several countries, especially in auxiliary cadres, which made it possible that a greater number of men be allocated to the fronts of combat (Campbell, 1993; Wheelwright, 2020). Women started to work as nurses, as in the Brazilian case, operating lines of communication and logistics and, mainly, working in factories of products destined for war. Also, in the United States and the Soviet Union, some women served as combat aircraft pilots. From the 1970s onwards, women began to be admitted to the armed forces – mostly in Western liberal democracies – in times of peace, with full military status (Carreiras and Alexandre, 2013).

However, this timeline is a partial portrait of the relationship between women and conflict. On the one hand, they were an important part of the most varied armed organizations, especially from the 20th century onwards. In several European countries, many women joined national resistance militias during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. During the US Civil War and Mexican Revolution, they were present on both sides of the conflicts, occasionally reaching command positions within the differing forces. Even in Mexico, the solderaras tradition continued until the 1930s, when they were banned by the military on the grounds that they would be a source of immorality. These women followed the armies performing various services and even fighting in combat (Salas, 1990; Browder, 2006).

More than that, the gaze on the relationship between war and women cannot be focused solely on the battlefield. Armed conflict has important consequences for women around it, even if they are not directly engaged in combat.