‘Certain things go inevitably with war and are war. The main thing is fighting, winning, killing and being killed, being masculine and aggressive and abnormally vigorous, violent and physical.’

The experience of total war dominated the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did the First World War inaugurate a new era in warfare, but its memory, commemoration and image was also incorporated in a profound sense into the culture of the interwar period. Combatants' memories and cinematic images contributed to keeping the war ever-present, as much in the pacifist desires of those who abhorred it as in the militarist ambitions of those intoxicated by it. The spirit of the trenches was to be reborn in the new fascist man of the 1920s and 1930s. As the opening quotation suggests, soldiering was the quintessential masculine experience. Military service – repackaged as national service during peacetime – was a school for forging men from callow boys, a cultural supposition which spanned the political divides of left and right, democracies and dictatorships. The experience of war restated and exaggerated conventional expectations of men and women. Indeed, for some theorists, war in the twentieth century was men's equivalent to women's experience of child-bearing. The front was an heroic, male arena, explicitly contrasted to the home front where women, children and those ‘unmanned’ by age or injury provided support and succour for the soldiers.

In the crisis of the First World War, the vast expansion of military control over civil society included women's work. Women contributed not only directly to war production but also to maintaining the entire socioeconomic structure in jobs such as trolley conductor or farm worker. Hundreds and thousands of women volunteered for war work in social and relief organisations. If their work under wartime conditions did not differ radically from the centuries-old tradition of nursing and other forms of care-giving, the considerable human force they now brought to military support work raised to a new level the debate over the proper role of women in modern democratic society. And whether members of the armed forces, employees or civilian volunteers, they all wore uniforms.

This paper first looks briefly at the connections – personal, political, practical and philosophical – between pre-First World War British and European women's suffrage and feminist pacifism as it emerged after 1914. Two feminist approaches to postwar peacemaking are compared, and the underlying assumptions of the Paris Peace Conference of the Allied and Associated Powers are compared with those of the women gathered at Zurich in May 1919. The aspirations and achievement of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom between 1919 and 1930 are analysed less in terms of what the organisation did for women than in terms of the women's own intent, and what they hoped to do for the world. The article considers how they confronted the political disabilities they faced as women, and on occasion turned them to their advantage, and shall show how they saw their pacifism as integral to their feminism, although it frequently took them out of gender stereotypes, particularly in their insistence on moving into that most male preserve, international relations.

The psychiatric study of women prisoners in the city of Málaga during the Spanish Civil War provides a starting point for a two-part analysis of the gendered tension between biology and morality. First, the relationship of organic psychiatry and bio-typologies to, in turn, liberalism and neo-Thomist Catholicism is discussed. The supposedly ‘biological’ roots of conditions such as hysteria and their link to women's revolutionary behaviour are examined. Second, prison records are used to examine the material conditions of women in the city and the gendered construction of their moral culpability during the revolution. Both medical science and Catholic doctrine could be exploited in declaring the indissolubility of gendered morality.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the individuals who enrolled in Vichy fighting units at the end of the German occupation. Those groups were mostly created in late 1943 and early 1944, and acted as effective subsidiaries to German troops, treating civilians and partisans with extreme violence. The enrolment of those men was a consequence of their political beliefs, notably strong anti-communism. But the fact that their behaviour seems born of desperation (some were recruited after D-Day) is a hint that it was shaped according to other cultural patterns, especially an image of masculinity rooted in the memory of the First World War and developed, among others, according to fascist and Nazi ideologies: a manhood based on strength, the violence of warfare and the image of the soldier. This article provides an analysis based on judiciary documents from the time of the purge, with a careful reconstruction of personal trajectories and self discourse in order to understand the masculine identity these sometimes very young men tried to realise through political engagement in the guise of warriors.

During the Second World War, the Nazi regime sent thousands of German women to occupied Poland to work with the ethnic German population, comprising native ethnic Germans and resettlers from the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Romania. They were to be trained to act as model colonisers for the newly conquered territories. Meanwhile the non-German population was subjugated and terrorised. This article examines what German women witnessed in Poland and how far they can be seen as complicit in acts of violence and injustice committed against Poles and Jews. To what extent did a gendered division of labour prevent women actively being involved in or witnessing acts committed against the Polish and Jewish populations? Did a construct of ‘womanly work’ help women to ‘look away’ from the evidence of oppression and persecution?

Hundreds of thousands of Poles were forcibly transported to the interior of the USSR after the Red Army invaded eastern Poland in 1939. These individuals, male and female, ended up in Soviet prisons, labour camps or special deportation settlements. This article examines how women interpreted and coped with this traumatic experience of exile, arguing that this entailed the articulation of a traditional, homogenous identity for Polish females. One component of this self-definition was differentiation from ‘others’, isolated on the basis of nationality. On the whole, the exiled Polish women did not feel solidarity with women of other nationalities, regardless of the fact that they too were victims of the Stalinist regime. Polish women continually linked the configuration of gender roles which they regarded as proper, civilised and even natural, to their own national group. In this way, they affirmed that they did not belong in this new world and maintained a connection to home, to what they understood to be Polish, European and civilised.

The participation of women in armed combat was arguably the most striking feature of the Greek Civil War (1946–9). The advent of civil conflict marked a shift in the gendered division of military labour, as the female ‘novelty’ soldier of the earlier Resistance period (1941–4) gave way to the fully integrated female combatant. This article seeks to examine the circumstances which lead to such high levels of female representation within the ranks of the partisan army (the Greek Democratic Army), but also to explore the symbolic functions of this volatile imagery in the context of intense struggles to define Greek national culture and identity.

Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women's Movement, 1918–1928 (London: I. B. Taurus, 1997), 260 pp., £39.50, ISBN 1-86064-201-2.

Christine Bard, ed., Un Siècle d'antiféminisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 481 pp., FF 150.00, ISBN 2-213-60285-9.

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler and Susan Strasser, eds., Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 381 pp., $19.95, ISBN. 0-8014-8469-3.

Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 325 pp., cloth $55.00, pb $19.95, ISBN 0-691-01675-5.

Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott, eds., Feminisms and Internationalism, Gender and History Special Issue, 264 pp. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). $24.95, ISBN 0-631-20919-0.

When we think of the women's movements of the early twentieth century, organisations like Britain's WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) come to mind and we envision suffragettes marching and getting themselves arrested in cities like London. None of the books discussed here deals with this ‘mainstream’ view of feminism. Instead, they investigate women's movements and reactions to them from other perspectives. Approaching their subject matter from different angles, these recent works offer new interpretations of the history of feminism in the twentieth century. Together they make us consider a geographical re-focusing on the subject of women's movements. They raise questions about the chronology of feminism; they highlight the complicated relationships between ‘globalisation’ and nationalism and centre and periphery; and they draw attention to changing definitions of feminism depending on time and place and the issues at stake.

Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 269 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0-674-35091-X.

Dan P. Silverman, Hitler's Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384 pp., $45.00, ISBN 0-674-74071-8.

Roderick Stackelberg, Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 432 pp., hb, £50.00, ISBN 0-415-2011414-4.

Conan Fischer, ed., The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 256 pp., hb, $55.00, £37.00, ISBN 1-571-81915-0.

Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Era of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 448 pp., hb, $30.00 ISBN 0-060-19042-6.

These works address, among other issues, the following: how widespread was support for Nazism before and after 1933 and how can this support be explained? What was the core of Nazi antisemitism, how important was it to the history of the regime, and how was it translated into policy? Several also demonstrate that, amidst the vast forest of specialist studies, it is also possible to write valuable synthetic works.

Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 236 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-333-71239-0.

Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 371 pp., hb, £40, ISBN 0-691-02877-X.

Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 351 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0-691-04454-6.

Kristie Macrakis and Dieter Hoffmann, eds., Science under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 380 pp., hb, £41.50, ISBN 0-674-79477-X.

Loren Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 177 pp., hb, $42.00, ISBN 0-804-73276-0.

Is the position of a citizen in the country to be determined only by his political weight? There was a time when alongside the emperor stood the patriarch: the church was then the bearer of culture. The church is becoming obsolete, the patriarchs have had their day, but the country cannot manage without leaders in the sphere of ideas …

Only science and scientists can move our technology, economy and state order forward …Sooner or later we will have to raise scientists to the rank of patriarch. That will be necessary because without that you will not make scientists always serve the country with enthusiasm … Without that patriarchal position for the scientists the country cannot grow culturally on its own, just as Bacon noted in his ‘New Atlantis’. It is time, therefore, for comrades of Comrade [Lavrenty] Beria's type to begin to learn respect for scientists.

Letter from Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa to Joseph Stalin, 3 October 1945