Gender Issues

Militaries and warfare have always been profoundly gendered sites of human activity. Excluding, marginalizing, or obscuring women’s participation in combat and other military roles has proved remarkably salient throughout history and across cultures. This has assured the association of men with, as well as their predominance in, commanding, fighting, technologically advancing, and even analyzing, warfare, with one effect of this being to normalize that relationship in practice and scholarship. Another has been to limit the range of issues that military history has traditionally explored, with gendered consequences. Until the 1960s, military history was rather preoccupied with narrow concerns such as military campaigns, their leaders, strategy and tactics and developments in weaponry, and logistics. As heavily masculinized sites, it follows that military history has, therefore, focused primarily on the actions and experiences of men until relatively recently. As a result, not only have the practices and experiences of women in warfare and military settings received scant attention, the focus on men, warfare, and military power has meant that the power relations embedded within this relationship have been overlooked by many scholars, and for some considerable time. More specifically, the narrow focus on “men” and the absence of women in earlier accounts left important questions unanswered as to how shifting social constructions of masculinities and femininities have shaped militaries and warfare over time. From the 1960s onward, gender issues—including, but not only pertaining to, questions of why men predominate military history and why women have been marginalized in it—became more widely studied and debated marking the rise of so-called “new military history.” In critiquing earlier approaches to militaries and war for limiting their concerns—to the detriment of closer examination of military culture and organization—“new” military historians, and scholars from cognate disciplines, have paid more attention to the military and warfare both as gendered institutions shaped by accepted ideas of femininity and masculinity, and as gendering institutions, through which the creation of gendered identities takes place. This bibliography aims to alert readers to scholarship that more fully explores gendered experiences of war and the military across the globe.