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Military institutions have everywhere and always shaped the course of history, but women's near universal participation in them has largely gone unnoticed. This volume addresses the changing relationships between women and armed forces from antiquity to the present. The eight chapters in Part I present broad, scholarly reviews of the existing literature to provide a clear understanding of where we stand. An extended picture essay documents visually women's military work since the sixteenth century. The book's second part comprises eight exemplary articles, more narrowly focused than the survey articles but illustrating some of their major themes. Military history will benefit from acknowledging women's participation, as will women's history from recognizing military institutions as major factors in molding women's lives.
Contributors include Jorit Wintjes, Mary Elizabeth Ailes, John A. Lynn, Barton C. Hacker, Kimberly Jensen, Margaret Vining, D'Ann M. Campbell, Carol B. Stevens, Jan Noel, Elizabeth Prelinger, Donna Alvah, Karen Hagemann, Yehudit Kol-Inbar, Dorotea Gucciardo and Megan Howatt, and Judith Hicks Stiehm.
About the author
Barton C. Hacker, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1968), is senior curator of armed forces history in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. In addition to women's military history, he has published widely on the history of military technology and of nonwestern military institutions.
Margaret Vining, MA. (The George Washington University, 1983), is curator of armed forces history in the Smithsonian Institution. She has published numerous articles on women's military history and on the material culture of the armed forces of the United States.
