Nicole Ann Dombrowski.

Nicole Ann Dombrowski, ed Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted With or Without approval Women's History and Culture. recent York: Garland, 1999. x + 377 pp Photographs, notes, index. $5900 (cloth) ISBN 0-8153-2287-9

In Women and War in the Twentieth hundred editor Nicole Ann Dombrowski has gathered an interesting material substance of articles on this excessively broad topic. The collection, which grew abroad of New York University's talk on "Women and War," shows many thought-provoking pieces on women's wartime parts from the First and other World Wars, through the Chinese Revolution, to the more modern conflicts in Central and southward America as well as Rwanda and Bosnia. The bulk has much to offer upon individual topics but suffers, as do in the same manner many conference collections, from its lack of a tighter thematic focus.

Consisting of fifteen essays and organized into three sections (1914-1939; 1940-1945; and 1946 to the present) the collection begins with Dombrowski's "Soldiers, Saints, or Sacrificial Lambs: Women's Relationship to Combat and the Fortification of the abode Front in the Twentieth Century" As the title prompts the essay examines popular cultural depictions of women during wartime as well as attempts to explore commonalities among the pieces in this work. Dombrowski explains her goal: "The complexity of women's relationship to war raises the questions this bulk endeavors to confront (p.3). Here lies individual of the collection's problems. Indeed Women and War in the Twentieth hundred does raise questions regarding the tangled relationship of women to war, it just doesn't provide many answers. Dombrowski also laments the lack of historicity in many in every one's mouth studies about women and the military, arguing that "historical trajectory and global perspective secure lost in presentist debates about women's place in the military" (p4) Instead this work is meant to anchor "women in time and geography, examining their universal as well as particular interests in relationship to war and peace" (p4) The work's chronological organization does provide a certain limited historical trajectory, but purely as a matter of arrangement.

There is no intervening discussion to demonstrate to what extent the "complex relationship of women to war" changes across time and place. The essays instead stand alone. Although the chronological arrangement is traditional, these articles might have been better arrangeed thematically. Barbara Alpern Engel's work forward women in the WWII Soviet Army speaks more to Helen Praeger Young's article forward women fighting with the Chinese Communists than it does to other WWII essays onward the flight of French civilians during the German invasion or the internment of Japanese-American women Similarly, Atina Grossman's highly deserving piece on the rape of German women by the agency of Soviet soldiers in WWII could benefit on pairing it with Rhonda Copelon's view of the rape debate in international law today. Rather than the existing overarching attempt to tie these disparate essays together in the first piece in the body perhaps a dialogue between the essayists or deeper analysis of the relationship between the make submissives would have given this bulk a more cohesive feel. The sum of two units back-to-back articles on the Great War experiences of French women (Annette Becker's "Tortured and Exalted on War: French Catholic Women, 1914-1918" and Mindy Jane Roseman's "The Great War and fresh Motherhood: La Maternite' and the Bombing of Paris") proffer the reader focused critiques of specific aspects of French improvement which would be made more valuable by way of a discussion between the sum of two units writers. Many of the other essays are disturbed with women's silence, voice, and testimony which posture larger questions that should be more meaningfully addressed together. Although the initial essay contains a section titled, "Piecing Together the Shrapnel of Women's Experience" the work too often fails to accomplish that goal. Because the topic of women and war in the twentieth hundred encompasses so broad a full play readers may struggle to make connections between women's experiences in for a like reason many different cultures and times.

This lack of all still the broadest connections between one of the contributions does not detract however, from the quality of many of the essays themselves. The visible form [i]or[/i] frame of scholarship on Western women during the sum of two units world wars continues to attract more interest, particularly as it affairs sexuality. Susan Grayzel's work upon British women's sexuality during WWI and Leisa Meyer's article forward perceptions of lesbianism in the WACs the couple add insight to this topic. Exploring les well-known facets of women's war experiences, Elizabeth Thompson examines the writhe of Syrian and Lebanese women during WWII, while Antonella Fabri anticipates at the life of a Mayan woman and the Mayan folks during the civil war in Guatemala. Carol Andreas's article upon the role of the PCP or "Shining Path" in Peru is explicitly supportive of their position. The best essays, particularly the commons by Engel, Young, Grossman, and Ivy Arai's article onward Japanese-American women's internment experiences combine their subjects' personal narratives with serious analysis from the authors. Others are les auspicious including the introductory piece from Dombrowski which poses questions that remain unanswered, giving the essay and the tome the oral feel of a talk opening rather than the more finished quality that these garnered essays deserve.