Abstract
If Americans view World War II as liberty triumphant, the contrasting term “invasion” conveys a knotty yet persistent ambivalence in Europe. The World War I narrative is even more complex. As the editors of this book of essays write in their Introduction: “The standard narrative…very much obscures the diversity of wartime experiences of those caught up in the First World War” (p. 4). Both professors of history at, respectively, the University of Mississippi and Utah State University, Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy R. Proctor, have now brought together an international group of scholars to reflect on that diversity. The result is a collection of 13 essays that explore, individually and collectively, unexpectedly intimate aspects of wartime reality and human endurance in the decades following the 1914–1918 conflicts. The book makes good use of the historiographic frameworks of transnationalism and gender. Recognizing that “‘gender’ is a term that often becomes code for ‘women’” (p. 5), the editors systematically assess how the World War I transformed role assignments, and much more, for both women and men. The second framework, transnationalism, is a helpful tool for analyzing the impact of migrations on expelling and receiving nations; in these essays, the term is used to compare nations and cultures.
With “gender” anchoring their research, the authors cover a broad set of themes: gender and race (played out in brutal struggles between French colonies and the Métropole), gender and sexuality (readings and misreadings of the human figure in wartime pictorials), gender and citizenship (the franchise, government, and the economy), and above all, the violence. From the potato fights between women caught in an agonizing pursuit of food to the psychological upheavals of parents lamenting the vast swath of death that spread from families to nations—each theme becomes a backdrop for escalating violence. Tammy Proctor’s study of how chronological age places—or doesn’t—in accounts of World War I, is an innovative challenge to the prevailing fable of the youthful (White) American “doughboy.” What of “the invisible…older women in occupied and front-line zones” (p. 122) or older men? Why are we reluctant to retrieve the painful realities of war experience among the elderly? Equally original, the Australian historian Joy Damousi pairs gender with the theme of mourning, and her close reading of Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture distills individual sorrow from collective grief. Other essays are, however, less convincing. In their work on gender and sexuality, for example, Ana Carden-Coyne and Laura Doan omit reference to Wilhelm Reich and especially to Sigmund Freud who broke with history in order to give sexuality its due in human development. No one less than Emma Goldman (1977/1931), on hearing Freud lecture in Vienna, remembered: His simplicity and earnestness and the brilliance of his mind combined to give one the feeling of being led out of a dark cellar into broad daylight. For the first time I grasped the full significance of sex repression and its effect on human thought and action. (p. 173)
Grayzel and Proctor have produced a thought-provoking book. The data are largely primary—as it should be—collected from newspapers, artworks, memoirs, letters, official documents, and the historical literature. The real intellectual traction, however, comes from the authors’ use of intersectionality. The theory functions as a true historiographic methodology and in leading by example, this book should be widely read.