Introduction: Women’s and Gender History of the First World War — Topics, Concepts, Perspectives

Abstract

The starting point of this volume was the observation that the upcoming centenary of 2014 has already evoked a wide range of memorial activities, book projects, conferences, and so on, so that a historiographical revisiting, re-discussing, and rewriting of the First World War can be expected in the near future. With this in mind, we are convinced that it is essential to incorporate gender issues from the very outset. Neither the societies of the belligerent nations between 1914 and 1918 nor the consequences of the First World War can be sufficiently documented and understood without considering the analytical category of gender. Historians of women and gender have impressively revealed this fact over the last decades,1 albeit quite disparately for different European countries and national historiographies. Nevertheless, mainstream history of the First World War all too often still ignores a gender perspective, which seems to be especially true for the context of Eastern and south-eastern Europe. Motivated by international imbalances of current gender approaches to the history of the First World War and the consequential difficulty of taking up a transnational perspective, we organized a conference on ‘The First World War in a Gender Context — Topics and Perspectives’, held in Vienna from 29 September to 1 October 2011. This volume presents some of the revised and extended papers of that conference.KeywordsHegemonic MasculinityGender ConceptWoman SuffrageWestern FrontGender TroubleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.