How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women looks at the remarkable impact of war on women in Britain. It shows how conflict has changed women's lives and how those changes have put women at the center of peace campaigning. Lindsey German, one of the UK's leading anti-war activists and commentators, shows how women have played a central role in antiwar and peace movements, including the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The women themselves talk about how they became active, overcoming prejudice and difficulty to do so. The book integrates this experience into a historical overview, analyzing the two world wars as catalysts of social change for women. It looks at how the changing nature of war, especially the involvement of civilians, increasingly involves significant numbers of women. As well as providing an inspiring account of women's opposition to war the book also tackles key contemporary developments, challenging negative assumptions about Muslim women and showing how antiwar movements are feeding into a broader desire to change society.

This volume contains writings of or about war from the following authors : Nina Macdonald, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain, Edith Wharton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, Colette, Helen Zenna Smith, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Amy Lowell, Willa Cather, Mary Lee, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, Charlotte Mew, Katherine Mansfield, Louise Bogan, Toni Morrison, Jane Addams, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Martha Gellhorn, Frances Davis, Dorothy Parker, Gertrud Kolmar, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Thompson, Ding Ling, Anna Akhmatova, Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Bowen, Bryher, H.D., Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Vaughan, Iris Origo, Christabel Bielenberg, Etty Hillesum, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Charlotte Delbo, Elsa Morante, Mitsuye Yamada, Hirabayashi Taiko, Kikue Tada, Doris Lessing, Kathryn Hulme, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gelhorn, Mary McCarthy, Grace Paley, Huong Tram, Lady Borton, Margaret Atwood, Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Griffin, Karla Ramirez, Margaret Thatcher, Molly Moore, Fadwa Tuqan, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Meena Alexander, Marta Traba, Lina Magaia, and Margaret Drabble.

A groundbreaking history of the American Revolution that “vividly recounts Colonial women’s struggles for independence—for their nation and, sometimes, for themselves.... [Her] lively book reclaims a vital part of our political legacy" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers and fathers died. Yet Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.

In consideration of UN Resolution 1325 (which called for women's equal participation in promoting peace and security and for greater efforts to protect women exposed to violence during and after conflict), this volume takes stock of the current state of knowledge on women, peace and security issues, including efforts to increase women's participation in post-conflict reconstruction strategies and their protection from wartime sexual violence.

Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars throughout history, and their participation is only increasing at the turn of the 21st century. Women experience war in multiple ways: as soldiers, as fighters, as civilians, as caregivers, as sex workers, as sexual slaves, refugees and internally displaced persons, as anti-war activists, as community peace-builders, and more. This book at once provides a glimpse into where women are in war, and gives readers the tools to understood women’s (told and untold) war experiences in the greater context of the gendered nature of global social and political life.

The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.