Understanding twentieth-century wars through women and gender: forty years of historiography

Abstract

This article offers a historiographical synthesis of forty years of research on the subject of “women, gender and wars”, focusing more specifically on the two world wars. It traces the development of a women’s history that appeared at the same time as a social history of nations at war, and then the emergence of a gendered history of war alongside that of the cultural history of World War I. Paying careful attention to the sources used within these studies, the article considers the questions and main conclusions in these different approaches, concluding that there is a current convergence around a certain number of themes: the processes that accompany the exit from war, private life in wartime, and gendered and sexual violence.