The World Wars through the Female Gaze (review)

Abstract

On the second page of The World Wars through the Female Gaze Jean Gallagher explains the mysterious and unnerving picture of two strangely [End Page 1049] masked female figures on her cover: "a 1940 photograph taken by Lee Miller for Vogue magazine shows two women perched on the edge of a Hampstead bomb shelter, looking toward the photographer and viewer. Each wears an elaborate mask or visor, protective eyewear suggested for use during incendiary bombing raids." The picture serves as a "parable" for this intriguing study of gender, vision, and war: the construction of women as "actively seeing subjects who are at the same time exposed to the dangers of wartime vision." In six critically sophisticated chapters, Gallagher looks at a series of diverse texts by female American fiction writers, poets, photographers, and journalists who lived in Europe during the First and Second World Wars. Her choice of subjects does not make her task easy, as she contends with World War I propaganda works by Edith Wharton and Mildred Aldrich, the antifascist projects of journalist Martha Gellhorn and photographer Lee Miller, H.D.'s oblique meditations on the bombardment of London, and Gertrude Stein's problematic and controversial writings about Vichy France.