As tensions grow across the world, and as the terrible war in Ukraine continues into its second year, we face a dangerous and uncertain future. Women are often at the front line of suffering in modern war. Here we reprint an extract from Lindsey German's book How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women (Pluto) where she takes up some of these issues. Published in 2012, it remains highly relevant today.

Women and war

Introduction

by Lindsey German

The Stop the War movement which began over a decade ago in response to the war on terror has been the biggest mass movement in British political history. Women of all ages, races and backgrounds have been at its centre. Why did this movement become such a vehicle for women’s political action and what does it tell us about the position of women today? To answer those questions it is necessary to look not just at the past few years but at the changes which have taken place over the past century.

It is almost 100 years since the world descended into the first of two world wars, the most terrifying in history. It began in sunshine and patriotic fervour, slogged its way through four years of mud, misery, injury and carnage on an unprecedented scale, and ended in revolution and upheaval. The First World War was a watershed: it destroyed kings and emperors, ushered in universal suffrage and workers’ revolution, and changed people’s view of war for ever. Governments of the richest countries have never again been able to preside over such carnage of their young men, their deaths put at 10 million around Europe and further afield.

If the war changed the lives of young men and their families, it also had a profound effect on women. Coming out of the war they found themselves experienced at working in jobs previously reserved for men, with access to wages higher than they were ever able to earn in their most common previous employment of domestic service. While they were denied access to some of these jobs when the war ended, they began to go out to work in greater numbers and in some of the new areas of work that were opening up. They had the vote (or at least some of them did _ universal female suffrage would have to wait another decade). Their clothing changed quite dramatically to much more comfortable and unrestricted styles. While marriage and motherhood were still considered women’s main roles, the number of children that women had began to decline dramatically.

The experience of the Second World War, just a generation later, was even more dramatic. Women worked in essential industries, joined the armed forces, and threw off ideas about chastity and taboos on sex before marriage with great enthusiasm. Again, while they were encouraged to go back to home, marriage and family after 1945, women very quickly embarked on paths of work and education which challenged the traditional stereotypes.

The story of women in these two wars was my initial aim in writing this book.  Questions of women’s liberation and war have seemed intertwined in modern history, with the terrible events of war having a dramatic impact on women’s role. This was true of the two world wars, whose histories were full of stories of women who broke down stereotypes, did unusual jobs, acted with great courage, became feminists, rejected relationships with men, and took up weapons.  Successive wars have shown not just women involved in wars _ although in this era of total war it is impossible to ignore the direct involvement of civilians and the effect of war on them _but women playing an increasing role in opposing them.

Modern industrialised warfare has transformed its impact on ordinary people. Wars have become total wars of attrition. Industrial mass production creates and sustains mass armies and unprecedented firepower, and therefore causes unprecedented killing and destruction. It is qualitatively different from previous eras.

Britain had 156 guns at Waterloo in 1815. By the battle of the Somme in 1916 they had 1,400 guns, and fired nearly 2 million shells in a few days. The Prussian army at Waterloo had 60,000 men; by 1914 the German army had 1.5 million men on the Western Front alone.

One effect of modern firepower was often to create wars of stalemate and attrition, where industrial output was decisive, mobilising not just soldiers but workers in war industries. Women were decisive to this home front.

This book is an attempt to try to understand the relationship between women and war in Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries. Britain was in a unique position during the Second World War: escaping Nazi occupation, unlike most of Europe. It was nonetheless subject to heavy bombing and high levels of government intervention and conscription to create a war economy.

What happened in the Second World War shaped the lives of my generation, born in the era of hope after the war, when people expected improvements in health and education and housing as a reward for the terrible years of bombing, death and dislocation which our parents and grandparents had suffered.  The second half of the 20th century offered more opportunities for women than at any other time in history, and the basis for many of those opportunities was created in the first half of a century which witnessed two world wars and the worst economic crisis ever seen.

War has a terrible impact on human beings, and increasingly on women as victims through death, injury, rape and displacement. But it has in Britain and a number of other countries also driven forward women’s emancipation by breaking down oppressive social structures. Many of the great social changes from which my generation benefited had their genesis in war; others were already in gestation but were advanced by the two world wars which changed women’s lives forever.

This was true of the vote for women, equal pay _first raised by the trade unionists in the munitions industry and in public transport during the first world war but not granted even in its weakened form until the 1970s_, widely available divorce, women’s education at higher levels, women working in ‘men’s jobs’, and the reduction of the birth-rate, meaning fewer pregnancies and smaller families, which became very marked after the First World War.

Although I was born six years after the war ended, the fact of the war was a major feature my life. ‘The war’ was a constant reference point. My father, and the fathers of most of my friends, had been in the armed forces. For I think all of them, the only times they had been abroad were as a result of the war: to Sicily, Burma, North Africa, Greece. One uncle lost a leg in Holland at the battle of Nijmegen in 1944. Another, a merchant seaman, was in the river police during the Blitz, then transported troops on the D day landings. Throughout London there were signs of bomb damage. My primary school still had its air raid shelters, now stuffed with old desks and equipment.

However it struck me from a young age that there was another side to the war and one that I understood especially from my mother.  And this was in very great contrast to the image of war projected from most sources. It was about working and having enough money to go out in the evenings, to the Streatham Locarno, the London Palladium and especially the Hammersmith Palais with Canadian and then American soldiers and airmen, with money in their pockets and a short time to enjoy. 

This lifestyle was not typical for all women. My mother was a teenager when war broke out without family responsibilities or children. But her experience was typical of many young women, and showed how the war gave them social opportunities they would have thought impossible only a few years before. Most importantly, they paved the way for future generations to seize opportunities which they were only beginning to define and to articulate.

Of course this was in unoccupied Britain. Just a short journey across the Channel, the experience of women was much more dangerous and repressive. Women in the occupied countries and the Axis faced the danger of death, rape, torture and imprisonment on a daily basis. Many of them fought bravely in the resistance movements of Europe despite these dangerous conditions. Even in Britain, the threat of death and danger was always there, and many, including my mother, lost loved ones.

The contradictions expressed in these lives are what this book is about. War is one of the most terrifying aspects of modern capitalism, an all pervasive war economy which threatens to catapult us all back to barbarism. It is also a major force for change: it forces apart the old ways of working and living in such a way that individual women and men are drawn along in its wake, forced to take on new roles, confront challenges and dangers, change their ideas, and if fortunate, come out of the other end in one piece.

However, progress for some has only come at the cost of the mass annihilation of others. There is no greater mark of a barbarous and dehumanised social system that it takes destruction of lives, creation of wastelands and devastation on such a scale that most people conclude a different world has to be created. Out of the two world wars, it took millions dead, the Holocaust, nuclear horror and the rise and fall of fascism, to try to build a new society based on more equal and just principles.

War has also created an odd dialectic for women: their lives have been changed by processes wrought by wars. This has helped them in turn to develop a much deeper consciousness about war, and a strong commitment, now seen in many women across several generations, to campaign against it. So the consequences of total war has been to build opposition to it, and to make women more politically aware and active.

In Britain the men and women of my and subsequent generations have far less direct experience of wars, but war has become a permanent fact of life for us. The ‘balance of terror’ which recently existed between the US and the USSR was sometimes justified as ensuring that a third world war could never happen. But many who had lived through the First and Second World Wars knew that wasn’t necessarily true, that deadly weapons could in fact lead to war even if the consequences seemed too horrific to contemplate. This era of Cold War contained within it the ever present threat of a new major ‘hot war’.

So relatively soon after the Second World War a new opposition to the threat of war and nuclear weapons grew up internationally, as the implications of such an armed ‘peace’ became clear. No conscious and aware person could have ignored the sometimes very real threat of nuclear annihilation, and this helped lead to a movement against nuclear weapons. The Cuba missile crisis in 1962 was, it was feared, likely to lead to another war - less than 20 years after the bombs and rockets had rained down on London.

Conscious opposition to war has grown since then. This has been specially marked among women.  The movement against the Vietnam War took place at a time when there was greater social change than previously: women were finding new jobs, going into higher education, discovering a freer sexuality, and engaging in political action. For that reason it propelled women’s concerns to centre stage, exposing a US left which was simply incapable of relating to these problems. 

If women’s political issues took centre stage from the 60s onwards, they did so at least partly in relation to issues around war, and those of us who judged the Vietnam war as a great politicising issue had opposition to war embedded in our DNA. Those who created the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s did so consciously linking their struggle against oppression with the national liberation movements which were so effective in the 1950s, 60s and 70s in some of the former colonies of western empires.

The permanent changes in women’s lives from the 1960s onwards led to women asserting their right to equality and organisation. One of the main concerns of many of those women has been peace. The peace movement revived in the early 1980s, this time in opposition to the siting of Cruise missiles in Europe. In Britain one major expression of this movement was the Greenham Common peace camp organised by women as a feminist response to militarism, if one that I for one felt was too narrow and too focused on feminism to really fulfil its potential.  It did however mobilise and galvanise very large numbers of people.

 It was only a few years until the old ‘balance of terror’ was upset by the collapse of one side, leaving a new situation internationally which created a much more unstable situation where new wars became increasingly frequent and dangerous.

After 1989, a rapid succession of wars have broken out.  The First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, the series of Balkans wars which marked the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and then the War on Terror all signposted how the US planned to deal with its declining economic power in the 21st century.

All were increasingly described not as wars of aggression - which would have been both illegal and politically unacceptable - but as wars of humanitarian intervention.  One justification for these wars, especially the War on Terror, became the need to rescue women from subjugation and oppression. Despite the urgency with which this case was pressed by first ladies and secretaries of state, the response to it from many women was to argue that this liberation was not being carried out in their name.

I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War and to all the wars after that. But it was from September 11 2001 that I played a key organising role in building the movement, helping to form the Stop the War Coalition and elected as its convenor. The high level of involvement and activism in the movement was obvious, with women of all ages, all nationalities and religions, and very widely differing class backgrounds. The legacy of opposition still continues and will no doubt give rise to new movements in the future.

It has been remarkable throughout the movement to see how many women have been involved at every level, often with a sense of purpose not found in many other spheres of politics, and I have been increasingly intrigued about how this should happen and what political significance it might have. At least part of the reason seems to me to do with the cumulative effect of war on women’s lives and consciousness. The 20th century meant total war, with civilians increasingly the majority of victims of those wars, and women expected to play an active part in waging war.

War has come into the home, into work and into social life in a way that simply would have been impossible for most people for most of history. Women have played a role as combatants, as war workers, defence workers and nurses. They have been direct victims of war. They have also suffered huge bereavement. The social changes resulting from these developments in war in turn fed involvement in, and often opposition to, war.  

I want in this book to explain the hows and whys of women’s role in wars, and why so many women in the 21st century now want to oppose them.  Wars have been motors of change for women, altering the family and women’s role within it, transforming the sorts of work that women did, and so their ideas about themselves.  The collective and individual decisions and actions of millions of women and men are how history is made, for better or worse. This book is about some of their decisions, their implications and consequences and – most importantly _ how they can be used to shape the future.

The Stop the War Coalition, the movement which began in 2001 is looked at through the eyes of some of its participants. They cover a range of ages and backgrounds, and they are all people who have experienced wars or have some experience of opposing them. In the course of this book I look at the questions which have arisen from the war on terror: the role of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in modern wars, and the way in which arguments of women’s equality are used to justify wars. The attitudes to _ and of_Muslim women are also considered here. Finally I use various women’s experiences to try to understand how war has changed women and their ideas and what the prospects are for peace and women’s liberation in the future.

The book is not a history of women’s peace organisation, nor of peace and anti war campaigning generally. What it tries to do is to raise two major issues facing us today _ women’s liberation and war _and make connections which I think are relevant and I hope will be useful to those fighting to change the world.

As the postwar welfare state sees its greatest threat yet, from exactly the same people who also support wars and the obscenely high levels of military spending which accompany them, a new generation of women activists are coming onto the field of battle. They have already made clear that they are unwilling to countenance war and militarism, and in the course of opposing those dangers, they are also asserting their liberation.