Saturday, January 3, 2009: 2:50 PM
Metropolitan Ballroom West (Sheraton New York)
Wars and their aftermaths provide historians with a lens through which to view people’s connection to the nation. International armed conflicts elicited a complex web of responses, including heightened state powers, elevated expressions of patriotism, and international attempts at reconciling belligerent states. The task for the transnational historian is to scrutinize the relationship between the citizen and the state, and between people across national boundaries. For historians of gender, this undertaking is made more complex by their obligation to analyze the impact of gender on these relationships.
Questions arising from this inquiry include: what strategies did states employ to earn women’s participation in “total” war in light of their unwillingness to enfranchise them? When wars of great sacrifice ended, how did nation-states reinvigorate sagging nationalism by rewarding men—while at the same time valuing women’s wartime work and fertility—thereby perpetuating the patriarchal state? How did female antiwar activists bypass national boundaries in order to implement reconciliation and humanitarian programs, just as nationalism and internationalism helped secure the peace? A transnational, gendered analysis of war, especially one that examines displaced populations, international marriages, and universal human rights, demonstrates the extent to which binary oppositions, such as victor-vanquished and home-front—typically employed in postwar diplomacy, in the resulting peace, and in traditional histories—are too simplistic to tell the history of wars between people and nations.
Questions arising from this inquiry include: what strategies did states employ to earn women’s participation in “total” war in light of their unwillingness to enfranchise them? When wars of great sacrifice ended, how did nation-states reinvigorate sagging nationalism by rewarding men—while at the same time valuing women’s wartime work and fertility—thereby perpetuating the patriarchal state? How did female antiwar activists bypass national boundaries in order to implement reconciliation and humanitarian programs, just as nationalism and internationalism helped secure the peace? A transnational, gendered analysis of war, especially one that examines displaced populations, international marriages, and universal human rights, demonstrates the extent to which binary oppositions, such as victor-vanquished and home-front—typically employed in postwar diplomacy, in the resulting peace, and in traditional histories—are too simplistic to tell the history of wars between people and nations.