Gender and War in Twentieth century eastern europe

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Gender and War in the Twentieth Century

Nancy Wingfield and Mary Bucur

Through the Essays

Contents

Introduction

The Nurse in Camp

After the War

Through the Essays

Conclusion

Introduction

The period between 1913 and 1946 marked a new era in human civilization . Never before had human beings deliberately and with murderous intent come together for the destruction and the obliteration of the world as it was known then . Almost every continent and nation was involved . Women , children and men temporarily forgot how to live

normal lives

Everything belonged to and was owned by the war . Factories were but in which to make ammunition , women left home to go overseas and be nurses in friendly camps . Thoughts of children were left . The whole world awoke to find a different kind of civilization , one that wrote terror and vended death , mistrust , poverty and animosity . Europe suffered the most from these , with bombings in all major cities , destruction of war and merchant ships , strain and near collapse of the countries ' economies stripping of colonies from countries , loss of countless lives punishments and fines for some countries and the outright display of the brutality of the human race

The Great War , as the First World War was called was termed the war to end all other wars ' It was gruesome and nasty and those who lived through it seldom want to tell the tale

The effects of the wars were not only in the trenches and in the fields , nor in the fighter jets that constantly patrolled the sky . War was everywhere , from the radios that blasted nationalistic , often agitated slogans , to the newss that carried men in their uniforms marching down streets , to the lame or wounded men who returned home before the end of duty , to the absence of men from homes , to the gun factories where the women worked , and the makeshift hospitals with nurses who saw more than their fair quota , to the silence that was observed every so often and the rise of great men to power and fame such as Sir Winston Churchill and the little bastard and orphaned children who littered the street , and the gaping craters that had once held structures where people had worked and lived . War was , therefore , every where

The common story is of the men who went into the battle zones and either came back in one piece , amputees , or never came back at all while their women stayed at home to work diligently in the factories and maintain a hope for their lovers ' return

The book Gender and War in Twentieth Century Europe seeks to tell a new story , not new in the sense that it happened recently , but new in that it is seldom told for the

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tellers as few and far spaced . It tells the story of the women who lived in , through and with the war , emphasizing on the story of the Austro-Hungarian nurses ' who

were employed by their government to be their ambassadors in enemy...