Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

Landscapes of women and men: rethinking the regional historical geography of the United States and Canada

This paper proceeds from the premise that historical geographers are not prejudiced against women, but many are unsure how to incorporate information on women into their research. The result unfortunately is a historical landscape in which only half of the residents normally are visible, despite many models of regional studies published in women's history. Historical geographers of rural Canada and the United States are to some extent limited by their frequent use of one narrative form, the national epic, that cannot readily portray women as important actors unless its essential plot line is reinterpreted in ways less familiar to geographers. Taking the examples of three western frontier women, I discuss how their narratives indicate ways to give a more balanced impression of both women and men in studies of regional economies and landscape modification. Incorporating female experience is likely to change some fundamental assumptions about the historical geography of the United States and Canada.     

Surviving under the Enemy: Oral Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Japanese-Occupied China (1931-45)

In a fragmented wartime China (1931-45), the levels of violence, suffering, and resistance varied in different regions. The Anti-Japanese War left people with different experiences and memories. To date, both Chinese- and English-language scholarship have paid insufficient attention to the more than two hundred million common Chinese who stayed in Japanese-occupied areas. To help fill this gap, this study provides a thematic analysis of interviews conducted by the author with six Chinese women of the urban middle-class about their experiences in the Japanese-occupied areas. It adds voices and perspectives of ordinary, middle-class women to the rich tapestry of everyday life of wartime China. The oral narratives of these women are everyday accounts of uncertainty, fear, and survival. More important, they are testimonies to the evolution of their gender consciousness and their determination to pursue an education as a means of resisting gender inequality. In addition, these oral narratives show how these women developed strategies in their marriages, work, and political views to reconcile with the reality of living with the enemy. Their everyday forms of resistance helped them maintain dignity in the face of foreign imperialism.     

American Red Cross posters and the cultural politics of motherhood in World War I

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.     

Speaking the land: exploring women's historical geographies in Northern Québec

This review article explores the significance of studying the historical geographies of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec and presents potential research avenues. The article's premise is that we cannot understand the historic and contemporary geographies of subsistence economies without more research about the roles that women played in them. Related to this issue is a broader reflection on how geographies of the past are reconstructed by historical geographers, both from an epistemological and methodological point of view. As a discipline, historical geography has been chiefly dedicated to the study of the encounter of migrant Europeans with new world lands and societies, with the result that Aboriginal and women's geographies have commanded less attention. This gap in knowledge should be addressed by emerging researchers. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and moving from the general to the particular, my inquiry evolves in three parts. First, I identify some key debates that are pertinent to a study of gender and Aboriginal women in a colonial context. Second, I review the existing ethnographic literature on Cree women in Eastern Canada and assess insights about their role in subsistence economies. Third, I outline specific avenues that help frame a research programme to study the historical geographies—by which I understand the places, placing, and place-making—of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Parents and children in Second World War Germany: an inter-generational perspective on wartime separation

This article discusses how the relationship between parents and their children were affected by the second world war in Germany. With fathers away from home for often as long as a decade, many children grew up without a father being physically present. The current historiography suggests that wartime separation caused a crisis in the family. But did the prolonged periods of time apart and the separate experiences of husbands at the Front and wives and children at home really destabilize family relationships? This article questions such a picture of families in ruin. It argues that family relationships were far more resilient in the face of wartime separation than has previously been credited. Indeed, it reveals the importance of children in keeping mothers and fathers focused on getting through the war. It further contends that, even from afar, fathers continued to play an important role in their children’s lives. And this in turn revises our understanding of the situation facing reuniting families.     

Challenges and Controversies in the Protection of Archaeological Resources

Abstract

I think the following paper by S. Alan Skinner is important in two ways. First, it shows how, in the United States, if an archeological contractor wishes to take issue with an agency's procurement policies, he or she can use standard federal government protestation procedures to do so. Most of us are unfamiliar with these procedures, and Skinner's paper provides a valuable primer for those who may have to use them in the future. Second, I. think Skinner's paper is important for its demonstration of a distinction between procurement problems that can be effectively addressed through case-by-case protestation and those that cannot. Note that in Skinner's case, the Comptroller General did not comment on the archeologists' concern about curation capabilities and, perhaps even more significantly, did not deal with the agency's policy of awarding contracts based largely on cost, without solicitation or evaluation of research proposals. I doubt if the Comptroller's failure to fully consider these matters resulted from any deficiency in the case presented by Skinner and his colleagues. These issues are never likely to be considered by the Comptroller, I believe, because they are professional in nature, and it is not the Comptroller's business to settle professional disputes.

All this is not to suggest that archeologists should not challenge agencies that fail to ensure proper curation or that select archeological contractors primarily on the basis of bid. Such policies should be challenged at all possible levels, and the fact that our challenges are not always (or even often) effective will not detract from the documentary record of professional objection that will thus be constructed. Such a documentary record will be vital if really effective action—probably through the Congress—is ever to take place.

What I do suggest is that, by documenting the failure of the Comptroller General to reach the issues of broadest importance to archeologists in his case, Skinner has outlined a challenge to the authorities responsible for managing the federal historic preservation system. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the Secretary of the Interior are explicitly charged with consultation with other federal agencies to ensure that their policies effectively contribute to the preservation of historic places and archeological data. Contracting policies that result in low-quality research or impermanent preservation of data and collections are legitimate targets for the historic preservation authorities, and should be vigorously attacked. Actions like the one taken by Skinner and his colleagues will help the federal authorities to launch and sustain such an attack.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

The influence of the 'spaces of everyday life' on pregnancy health

Given the recent focus of medical geography on the social influences of health and illness, this paper draws upon a socio‐theoretical framework to show the link between pregnancy health and the spaces of everyday life. The health of pregnant women is becoming increasingly important given that 85 percent of women work during their pregnancy. Employment during pregnancy is consistently linked with good health for infants; however, large discrepancies exist on the effects for employed mothers. This study estimates the health effect of women's employment during pregnancy with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Findings show that women's involvement in paid employment has a beneficial impact for infants compared to women not involved in paid labour. Women who work one job or more per week experience more health problems than women who work less than one job per week. Finally, women who work in male‐dominated and gender‐neutral workspaces experience significantly more prenatal problems than women in female‐dominated workspaces. In conclusion, there is evidence to support that differences in employment status, number of workplaces involved in and gendered workspaces influence the experience of health and illness that are negotiated in the spaces of everyday life.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.     

Reconceptualizing gender and reconstructing social life: Ugandan women and the path to national development

This article focuses on how women's responses to crisis and social change in Uganda signal attempts to achieve a more gender-equal social life while facilitating national development. After an introduction, the article reviews research on women's response to change and points out the limitations of this research. In the next section, the article provides a historical overview of Uganda's gender system and the political and economic changes that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s. The third main section argues that while the social structural changes created widespread hardship, they also provided openings for women to advance their interests. Thus, the National Resistance Movement of the mid-1980s responded to the mobilization of women by creating new avenues for women to participate in political life and have control over financial resources. Traditional ideologies, divisions of labor, and the social construction of gender have also been altered by such factors as the involvement of women in the guerrilla movement and the key developmental role played by nongovernmental organizations and women's groups. The article continues by considering the effect of these changes on contemporary gender relations. Data from a sampling of women and men from two regions of the country and of small business owners provide the basis for a discussion of the different strategies (such as small scale entrepreneurship and networking) employed by women to meet their daily and longterm needs. It is concluded that women's attempts to change their lives have influenced macrolevel social structure. However, it remains to be seen whether these postinsurgency gains can be sustained.     

In Our Own Voices: a Guide to Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women

The valuable oral history guidebook, In Our Own Voices: A Guideto Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women,opens with this quote by Nen Lederkremen, "Without roots wecannot grow." The Jewish Women's Archive, an organization thatwas founded in 1995, has done an excellent job in enabling AmericanJewish women to record their roots. The Jewish Women's Archivefelt that women's contributions had been missing from the accountof the American Jewish experience. To rectify this, they pioneeredthe use of community-based oral history projects with Jewishwomen in Boston,     

"WHEN THE GREAT PLANES CAME AND MADE ASHES OF OUR CITY …"1: TOWARDS AN ORAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE DISASTERS OF WAR.

This paper reconstructs a view of armed violence from the personal testimony of civilians who survived massive bombing of their neighborhoods. A majority of raid victims are “ordinary” civilians, primarily women, children, and the elderly. In World War II the most destructive city-wrecking campaigns were directed against the “morale” of these civilians. Their concerns and experience receive little consideration in the literature of air war, yet huge wartime and postwar surveys recorded first hand testimonies of those in heavily bombed cities in Germany, Japan and England. Women's words are given priority: they represent the majority of able-bodied persons under the bombs, and bear witness to the human ecology of violent experience: the disruptions of everyday life; the worlds of blackout and underground; the losses of home places and urban culture. They testify as well to the uneven social and spatial distribution of harm within cities, where death, damage and homelessness overwhelmingly affected working class and inner city areas. The paper also suggests that personal testimony should be recovered and incorporated into studies of neglected and disadvantaged people in “oral geography.” Some of the radical departures and methodological rethinking involved are considered in a final section.     

Field of Fire: Evidence for Wartime Conflict in a 17th-Century Cottier Settlement in County Meath,Ireland

Abstract

Much of conflict archaeology is focused on battlefields and the material culture of military troops, but what about civilians caught up in warzones? Can archaeology contribute to our understanding of how such people fared during troublous times, and the manner in which political and social turmoil affected them?

By considering the recently excavated, late 16th–17th century A.D. settlement of 'Cleglin', this article will examine the evidence for wartime conflict: whether poor inhabitants were subject to violence such as armed raids and the razing of buildings; whether they were forced to abandon their homes for any extended period; and whether there is evidence for the occupation or billeting of soldiers, or for the enrolment of male inhabitants in militias. A more comprehensive—and historically accurate—conflict archaeology should not just scrutinize the evidence for overt violence, or it risks excluding non-combatants from such historical endeavour (except, perhaps, as hapless victims). Instead the material culture of certain related events associated with warfare—market price fluctuations, famine, plague—needs also to be considered. At Killegland, scrutiny of household economies yielded some of the most profound and intriguing data: relating to wartime economy and risk-averse behaviour in agricultural practice.     

The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.     

基于女性主义视角的我国居住空间历史变迁研究

女性主义的研究扩展到建筑学与规划学领域。其实自古以来的居住空间规划与设计都是权力外化的体现,女性虽然有使用权,但却没有支配权。女性与居住空间的关系不仅是衡量女性自身发展状况的重要维度,也是折射居住空间随社会进步的一面镜子。文章从女性主义出发,认为居住空间是女性气质化的空间,以历史的角度说明居住空间中女性角色地位的变化,研究历史对当今居住空间的影响,初步探索女性与居住空间关系的基本构架。     

Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter‐Insurgency in Africa after 1945

This paper looks at the politics of surfaces, and the practices of veiling (and unveiling) and of white men wearing blackface in counter‐insurgency efforts in post‐war Africa. The sten gun beneath the veil, the unveiled woman with a bomb in her handbag and the counter‐gangs masquerading as African guerillas all embody specific kinds of violence; they also embody a political imaginary in which racial and cultural lines are more fluid than previous studies of these periods suggest; indeed, they raise questions about what makes a race, a gender or a regiment: are racial and national categories learned, mimicked, or are they literally skin deep? My question, however, is not why do people dress up as guerillas or as Western women to wreak havoc on their enemies, but how historians of post‐war Africa might understand such actions. To this end I want to read accounts of counter‐insurgency, Fanon's famous essay, the memoirs of British soldiers in Kenya and Rhodesian soldiers in Rhodesia and some of the volumes of Rhodesian wartime fiction through the lens of transgender literature, looking at how various crossings, and the multiple markers thereof, shed light on broader issues of hierarchy, race and gender at the time of decolonisation.     

‘Raw Individualists’: American Soldiers on the Bataan Death March Reconsidered

Abstract

The Bataan Death March has entered historical consciousness as one of the four great Japanese atrocities during WWII. Along with the Rape of Nanjing, the Burma-Siam Death Railway, and the Rape of Manila, it stands as one of the ultimate measures of twentieth-century wartime barbarity. Both primary and secondary sources share a central preoccupation with Japanese behaviour and therefore assume American prisoners were little more than a passive presence during this episode. In this essay I examine the Bataan Death March from a new vantage point, asking salient questions that lead to modi?ed understanding: who were these Americans, and what kind of soldiers, at war’s dawn for the US, did they make? What features of their cultural make-up help explain their behaviour? What were the fault lines in the allied, Filipino-American force that faced the Japanese Army? This article explores the numerous problems the American forces in the Philippines faced: the hybrid nature of the army, the tension between career soldiers and recent draftees and poor training and leadership. These problems, American soldiers’ cultural predisposition, and military inexperience all combined to render them signi?cantly more vulnerable to Japanese cruelty on the Death March than they otherwise would have been.     

Gendered Archetypes of Wartime Occupation: ‘New Women’ in Occupied North China, 1937–40

This article examines the creation and use of gendered archetypes by the Provisional Government of the Republic of China (PGROC), the first collaborationist government established in China following the Japanese invasion of 1937. Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, it traces how this regime's messages about where women ‘belonged’ in an occupied China resulted in the creation of unique and complex archetypes which were deployed to convince Chinese women of the advantages of PGROC rule. Chief among these archetypes was the figure of the ‘PGROC new woman’. I show how this figure developed in PGROC poster art and propaganda, and eventually in film, as well as how it evolved out of early wartime and pre‐war precedents. In addition to detailing the uses and meanings of this (and other) archetypes, the article suggests that comparative analyses of gendered archetypes of collaboration developed in cognate regimes during the same period can help shed light on the extent to which the peculiar circumstances of wartime collaboration often resulted in specific ideas by male collaborationist leaders about the roles women were expected to play under occupation.