Women and Wars

Edited by Carol Cohn, Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures begins with a corrective question: where are women in the conventional histories of planning, fighting, surviving, and ending wars? The answer is not a single place. Women appear as soldiers, guerrillas, civilians, caregivers, factory and agricultural workers, sex workers, people subjected to sexual slavery, refugees, antiwar organizers, and community peace-builders. By following war from preparation through combat and into displacement, reconstruction, and memory, the collection shows that the boundary between battlefield and home front is itself a gendered political construction.

The anthology’s feminist contribution is to combine recovery with analysis. Simply adding women to military history would leave intact the institutions and categories that made their labor invisible. The contributors instead ask how masculinity is attached to combat and citizenship, why care and subsistence work are treated as background, how sexual violence intersects with other wartime economies, and why postwar settlements often restore unequal gender orders. Women are neither collapsed into victims nor celebrated uncritically as peacemakers. Their differing positions are shaped by race, class, nation, sexuality, age, and whether participation is coerced, strategic, or chosen under constrained conditions.

Its breadth is both strength and limitation. An edited textbook can map many roles and conflicts, but individual chapters cannot provide the historical depth of specialized regional studies, and a volume published in the early 2010s does not cover every subsequent development in drone warfare, digital surveillance, climate displacement, or contemporary anti-gender politics. Readers should use it as an analytical framework rather than a final inventory. For FemRes, the book supplies a disciplined way to ask whose work makes war possible, whose injuries become legible, and whether peace means merely ending combat or transforming the gendered institutions that survive it.