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War and Women across Continents
Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences
Edited by Shirley Ardener, Fiona Armitage-Woodward, and Lidia Dina Sciama
212 pages, 2 tables, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78533-013-1 $135.00/£99.00 Hb Published (February 2016)
ISBN 978-1-78533-825-0 $27.95/£22.95 Pb Published (April 2018)
eISBN 978-1-78533-014-8 eBook
Reviews
"Interesting and timely. Using different research methods to arrive at the story of women involved in war and conflicts adds value to existing feminist research methods. The academic, and especially feminist, readership will benefit from this volume." · Nahla Abdo, Carleton University
"I enjoyed reading this book and admired its range across time and space. The variety of cases included is its main strength." · Linda McDowell, University of Oxford
Description
Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War's aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.
Shirley Ardener, has carried out many years anthropological fieldwork in Nigeria and in Cameroon where she is still involved with the National Anglophone Archives in Buea which she and her husband Edwin set up. She was the Founding Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women (1983-1997) renamed the International Gender Studies at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford University of which she is currently a Research Associate, and a Research Associate of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford. She works on gender, microcredit, nudity, and humour. Books include Swedish Ventures in Cameroon (2002) and Changing Sex and Bending Gender (ed. 2005).
Fiona Armitage-Woodward has held various teaching and research posts, including at Oxfam. She was a founding member of the Swaziland Society (1991). Her publications include contributions to Focus on Swaziland, which she has edited, and "Imitating Ethnicity: Land, Territoriality and Identity in a Swazi Christian Church" in Land and Territoriality, ed., Michael Saltman (2002).
Lidia D. Sciama is a Research Associate of the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and a former Director of Oxford's International Gender Studies Centre, where she is currently a Senior Research Associate. She has conducted long-term research in Italy and England with a focus on women's crafts, city life, narrative, memory and relations between anthropology and literature. Among her publications are A Venetian Island. Environment, History and Change in Burano (Berghahn Books 2003) and Humour, Comedy and Laughter (Berghahn Books, 2016).
Subject: Gender Studies General History
Contents
Introduction: Women’s Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences of War across Continents: An Introduction
Shirley Ardener
Chapter 1. The Resistance of Francesca Tonetti in German-Occupied Venice 1943-1945
Lidia Dina Sciama
Chapter 2. Ank Faber-Chabot, A Dutchwoman who Sheltered Jews in World War II
Marieke Faber Clarke
Chapter 3. Hildegard Jaschok’s Testimony: Expulsion and Hope in World War II
Maria Jaschok
Chapter 4. Mau Mau Women: Sixty Years Later
Tabitha Kanogo
Chapter 5. Women and Conflict in Burma’s Borderlands
Mandy Sadan
Chapter 6. Rebuilding Family, Body and Soul: New Life on the Cambodian Border
Janette Davies
Chapter 7. Rwandan Women at War: Fighting for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (1990-1994)
Hannah Spens-Black
Chapter 8. Women War Correspondents in 2013
Glenda Cooper
Chapter 9. Talking Gender, War & Security at NATO
Matthew Hurley
Chapter 10. Military Masculinities and Counterinsurgency Theory in Afghanistan: An Uneasy Relationship?
Rachel Grimes