This presentation uses biographical examples of women from the recent four-volume reference work,
Women Who Changed the World (ABC-CLIO, 2021), a survey of 200 women’s lives across forty centuries of world history, to consider the impact of war on women’s lives. Specifically, the paper explores the individual lives of five women, whose common global context led to vastly different outcomes in the first half of the twentieth century. Women soldiers, suffragists and social reformers, scientists, and peace activists were inspired by the same events and transnational dynamics of the new twentieth century. Among the women discussed, Maria Bochkareva, Emily Balch, Rachel Carson, Naomi Mitchison, and Ichikawa Fusae, are examples of women’s lives that were influenced by war and faced powerful limitations yet sought to confront the world’s dilemmas with direct action. While shaped by global conflict, their responses also forged new opportunities for other women in their struggle for environmental, social, and economic justice.
The emphasis on women’s gendered experiences in the classroom can open students’ eyes to the major roles that even the most marginalized played as individuals, in groups linked to others, across generations, and across the world. In the classroom, biography as a comparative exercise resonates with familiar concepts of “network” and “influencers” in an age of conflict. Among the most significant of modern social movements were the struggles to achieve national sovereignty, justice, equality, and peace. Their collective message that it is impossible to understand history or chart the future without the inclusivity of the broadest human experience and the great diversity of multiple perspectives has never been more important. In this respect, the history of these and other women viewed in aggregate can be a classroom tool for changing the world.
