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Between Amazons and Sabines: a historical approach to women and war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2010

Irène Herrmann  and
Daniel Palmieri
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Abstract

Today, war is still perceived as being the prerogative of men only. Women are generally excluded from the debate on belligerence, except as passive victims of the brutality inflicted on them by their masculine contemporaries. Yet history shows that through the ages, women have also played a role in armed hostilities, and have sometimes even been the main protagonists. In the present article, the long history and the multiple facets of women's involvement in war are recounted from two angles: women at war (participating in war) and women in war (affected by war). The merit of a gender-based division of roles in war is then examined with reference to the ancestral practice of armed violence.

Type
Women
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 92 , Issue 877: Women , March 2010 , pp. 19 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2010

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References

1 Guilaine, Jean and Zammit, Jean, Le sentier de la guerre: Visages de la violence préhistorique, Le Seuil, Paris, 2000Google Scholar; Lawrence Keeley, War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996; Pierre Clastres, Archéologie de la violence: La guerre dans les sociétés primitives, Éditions de l'Aube, La Tour d'Aigues, 2005.

2 A custom that struck fear into the first European visitors – see Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre de Brésil, Le livre de poche, Paris, 1994; see also Harris, Marvin, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture, Vintage, New York, 1977, pp. 47–64.Google Scholar

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13 This was when the famous educationist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was appointed director of the orphanage in Stans (the chief city of the canton), where the many children who were orphaned in the revolt and the ensuing suppression were looked after.

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15 Reynaud, above note 3, p. 20.

16 In France, on the other hand, the resistance networks largely excluded women from any active combat.

17 Goldstein, above note 14, p. 82.

18 Ibid., p. 83.

19 This fact indicates a need for women combatants to be taken into account in demobilization processes and measures for reintegration into civilian society – at present, these are generally geared only towards men.

20 Reynaud, above note 3, p. 21.

21 Claude Quétel, Femmes dans la guerre, 1939–1945, Larousse, Paris, 2004, pp. 77ff.

22 Ibid., p.136.

23 Renée Lelandais, ‘Les Filles de la Charité sur les champs de bataille, 1847–1863’, Préludes et pionniers: Les précurseurs de la Croix-Rouge, 1840–1860, Henry Dunant Society, Geneva, 1991, pp. 299–319.

24 Gruber, Walter, ‘La grande-duchesse Héléna Pavlowna et ses auxiliaires en Crimée’, Préludes et pionniers, above note 23, pp. 119–129.Google Scholar

25 In the Fiji Islands, for example, women were frequently deployed as scouts or lookouts who subsequently passed on information to the combatants – see Under the Protection of the Palm: Wars of Dignity in the Pacific, ICRC, 2009, p. 16.

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27 Quétel, above note 21, pp. 110–111.

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30 ICRC Archives, B G 25/40, Femmes polonaises de l'Armée du Général Bor-Komorowsky, P.G. en Allemagne.

31 ICRC Archives, B G 25/40, Appel aux gouvernements, letter from President Burckhardt to Anthony Eden, 9 January 1945.

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33 Even when woman are combatants, this does not necessarily protect them in practice from sexual assault.

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35 For practices in France, see Fabrice Virgili, La France ‘virile’: Des femmes tondues à la Libération, Payot, Paris, 2003.

36 In Sodome et Gomorrhe, Grasset, Paris, 1943, p. 130. Own translation.

37 Goldstein, above note 14, p. 7.

38 Ibid., p. 10.

39 Margaret Mead, ‘A national service system as a solution to a variety of national problems’, in M. Anderson (ed), The Military Draft: Selected Readings on Conscription, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, California, 1982, p. 441 (original edn 1967, paper reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Draft: A Handbook of Facts and Alternatives, edited by Sol Tax, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967).

40 Ibid.

41 This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that joining in hostilities has very often been the only chance for women – most of whom had no political rights at all until the end of World War II – to help shape the national destiny.

42 On the participation of German nurses in the euthanasia programme launched by the Third Reich, see Rebekhah Bronwyn McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999.

43 Dara Kay Cohen, ‘The role of female combatants in armed groups: Women and wartime rape in Sierra Leone (1991–2002)’, communication presented at the international colloquium on ‘Rape in Wartime: A History to be Written’, Paris, 11–13 May 2009.