Abstract
Women's Experiences of the Second World War is an edited collection that explores under-told aspects of women's wartime activities. The editors and contributors aim to showcase the expansive range of women's experiences during the Second World War by relying on individual microhistories and tapping underused sources such as interviews and scrapbooks.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one explores the lives of women who faced some form of ‘exile’ during the war years. The notion of exile is developed in broad terms. American Protestant missionary women were ‘exiled’ back to the United States after years of work in Japan. A young Alsatian woman was ‘exiled’ temporarily to Paris after being evacuated from Strasbourg once the war began. A poor, young British woman chose to remake her life in the United States as a circus performer as hostilities grew in Europe. Young Jewish women experienced a form of exile as anti-Semitism isolated them from their national communities. Contributors suggest that the experience of exile took many forms. Some women were literally forced out of their home countries, while others were displaced to unfamiliar regions of their nations. Others remained in their homelands but were ‘exiled’ from their national communities because of anti-Semitism.
Part two roughly explores women's varied experiences under wartime occupation. This section focuses heavily on the dynamics of interracial wartime relationships, both romantic and platonic. Contributors detail interracial romantic relationships between American servicemen and Māori women in New Zealand as well as with Japanese women in Japan. They also highlight both the legal and cultural barriers that interracial couples faced as they sought to legitimize their relationships. Romantic relationships were not the only form of interracial bonds. This section also reveals how the friendships that developed between American missionary women and Chinese women helped protect students at a school for the blind after the Japanese occupation of China.
Part three is a combination of stories focusing on women's home front and warfront experiences. This section includes the story of conservative American women who used traditional gender stereotypes to campaign for the rapid demobilization of their husbands at the end of the Second World War. Likewise, Soviet women, who served on or near the front lines, tried to preserve aspects of their feminine identity in an environment that demanded masculine attributes, their experiences shaped by fears of sexual violence. Canadian women used scrapbooks to commemorate and validate their military service. Finally, interviews reveal the determination of American nurses who entered Nazi concentration camps to help victims of those camps.
This is a wide-ranging collection of essays that highlights women's enormously varied wartime experiences. The essays are written by scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. The collection is fairly short, which impacts the length of each chapter. The contributors use a variety of source materials including diaries, scrapbooks, letters and interviews. Several helpfully delve into the difficulties of using and interpreting their source materials. Diaries are sometimes written for personal fulfilment, but they can be written purposefully to bear witness for future generations. Oral interviews conducted years or decades after an event are filtered through a lifetime of experiences. Scrapbooks are a fascinating and underused source, but interpreting their meaning poses enormous challenges. Discussing challenges in source material reminds readers about the interpretive nature of historical analysis but also about the changing interpretations that individuals give to their own lives.
The primary weakness of this collection is the lack of argumentation and historical contextualization in many of the essays. Each essay has a ‘further reading’ section at the end, but the essays are generally not well-situated in a historical discussion. It is unclear where the individual histories in this collection fit within the wider narrative of this period. The lack of historical context makes it difficult for the contributors to indicate how their research is unique or significant to the historical community. The material is interesting, but the reader is left wondering where it fits and how the contributors see it contributing to their disciplines. The collection might have benefitted from fewer essays that were slightly longer so that contributors could have better developed the historiography of their topics.