Klein Yvonne M. (red.) - Beyond the Home Front

Klein Yvonne M. (red.) - Beyond the Home Front - Yvonne M Klein

Beyond the Home Front. Women's Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars Few would argue that war has been a defining experience for people born in Europe and North America in the twentieth century. The degree to which war has been instrumental in improving women's social situation remains a vexed question, however. Conventional wisdom repeats the cliche that the Great War liberated women by allowing them to demonstrate their fitness for equality by recruiting them to work in men's jobs previously considered beyond their capabilities. In fact, their patriotic enthusiasm was used against them after the war, when they were seen to have profited from the deaths of the men they replaced. As Europe prepared for the Second World War, this resentment of women's perceived war-profiteering helped to smooth their transition from sacred, protected icon to target. In Beyond The Home Front, Yvonne M. Klein provides selections from autobiographical writing by women in the two World Wars that illustrate the richness and complexity of women's war-time lives. Although women generally did not take up arms, this collection reminds us that their war stories are neither peripheral nor secondary to the battle stories of men. This volume helps to reclaim women's experience of war as part of the universal experience of the twentieth century, different from that of men, but not as different as might be thought.