Book Review

Comparative/World

This stimulating collection of nineteen articles on women and their martial roles edited by Gerard J. DeGroot and Corinna Peniston-Bird is divided into two chronological sections: pre and post-World War II. Most contributions focus on Europe, but there are a sprinkling of essays on the United States, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Some authors focus on women in combat, but most analyze their vital work as camp followers or in other military support capacities during war and in peacetime. A central theme of the essays is how military service is so strongly identified with masculinity and the rights of full citizenship that it obscures the fact that women have historically performed invaluable military service, including combat, in different ages and cultures across the world. As Peniston-Bird puts it, "the identification of the male as the warrior and protector has proved resilient to re-interpretation" (p. 177). While most contributors note that women in many cultures have achieved new opportunities and rights by performing military service, they generally conclude that these openings fall far short of approximating equality with men. Furthermore, to succeed in military institutions, many women find they are pressured to renounce their femininity.	1
Prominent beliefs that women were not reliable combat troops have led leaders to bar women from the frontlines of battle, making it impossible for them to dispel this view. This is even true of armed forces touted as innovators of sexual integration, like those of Israel (the only national army that conscripts women), China, and Vietnam. Even when the First Russian Women's Battalion of Death proved itself a capable all-woman infantry force in World War I, Soviet authorities urged them not to speak of their battlefield services at war's end, and their combat feats were not celebrated in patriotic Soviet military histories.	2
It is impossible to touch on all of the fine scholarship and topics covered in this diverse volume, but I will note briefly that I found the essays by Kathryn Coughlin and Nicole Ladewig on Muslim women in military service particularly intriguing. Perhaps given the recent developments in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the West Bank (to mention just a few), these articles seem particularly timely because women are such important actors and symbols in these military and civil struggles. From the emergence of Palestinian women as suicide bombers, whose image has electrified the Western media, to the women of Afghanistan, whom Western leaders mobilized as a powerful justification for deposing the Taliban, gender roles continually color the imagined lines of "Orient" and "West." As Coughlin asks, "How is it that in societies that do not grant meaningful political and economic rights to women, they are accepted in the bastion of male exclusivity—the military?" (p. 227). Coughlin and other contributors adroitly show how gender bias can be creatively used by women to make them more effective wartime operatives, particular in clandestine warfare. For instance, many Algerian women worked as domestics for French families, and they were able to move much more freely than men in French neighborhoods (veiled or unveiled) without generating suspicions. She also utilizes the paradoxical symbol of the veil (long a symbol of female oppression in the eyes of the West) to illuminate how women who supported the Algerian liberation struggle against France reappropriated it as a badge of resistance. In 1958, the wives of French officers publicly unveiled a number of Algerian women in attempt to point out their oppression in Muslim Algerian society and to win them over to the French cause. The strategy ultimately backfired, but the episode is especially intriguing because before the nationalist struggle of liberation many Algerian women never used the veil. Despite their wartime services, few female Algerian veterans received benefits or, beyond the work of Frantz Fanon, recognition. Translating this service into greater legal and political rights for women and an independent Algeria has also proved frustrating.	. . .