Heroines

Aside from the Enlightenment and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions (and their obvious consequences, e.g. mass prosperity and WMD's), the change of greatest human magnitude in recorded history has arguably been the emergence of women in the 20th century from their prior state of almost complete dependency upon men. Among the causes of this transformation, the precipitous drop in infant mortality in the last 100 years must rank quite high, along with various technological changes. In any case, the story of women's efforts to more fully participate in public life broadly defined, esp. within the most influential countries, is as gripping as any struggle ever recorded. This story, and particularly certain aspects thereof, are not nearly as well known as they ought to be, so this essay will attempt to begin to correct that deficiency in public awareness.

The idea of women's rights began to emerge with the flowering of the Enlightenment, as people like Abigail Adams and Tom Paine made it a public issue in their writings. Women got off to a good start, so to speak, for the 20th century when Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize in 1903; the rest of the century saw various individual women achieve various feats which are detailed in any number of media. Our purpose here is to cover a few underrated aspects of the story. The drama began to intensify in 1905, when members of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) started the strategy of provoking arrest by the (British) authorities, so as to bring free publicity to the cause of women's suffrage; the upshot was an immense increase inmembers for the WSPU. Here was the first fairly successful implementation of what would later be known as "guerilla theater" tactics (Anarchists performed assassinations, hoping that the resulting publicity would bring support for their cause, but this hope failed to be fulfilled). Within a few years, these women were protesting the conditions of their incarceration by hunger striking; the Government's response, forcible feeding, turned an already interesting situation into a sensational one which the popular press could not resist covering to an unprecedented degree, thus insuring that the issue would, to put it mildly, become the talk of the English speaking world.

The ultimate poignant incident seemed to flow inevitably from the preceding events: suffragette activist Emily Wilding Davison gave her life by throwing herself in front of the King's horse at the annual Derby in 1913, thus posthumously becoming a world figure, with her funeral procession shown in newsreels all over the planet. Except for the Davison tactic, the British example would be imported into the U.S. by Alice Paul, an American woman studying in Britain while the W.S.P.U. was developing its approach. Eventually the W.S.P.U. resorted to a campaign of vandalism which ceased with the outbreak of the Great War. In this conflict, British women, particularly suffragettes, seized the resulting opportunity to prove their mettle, capacity, and patriotism as nurses, etc. in the most horrifying environmemt yet produced by human effort, trench warfare; they also contributed as munitions producers, etc. Press coverage of British women's "Deeds That Thrilled the Empire" in this war broke the back of the anti-suffrage movement, first in Britain (1917) then the U.S. (1920). Additionally, German women got the vote in 1919. Of the hundreds of hunger strikers, one might cite Churchill's later quip about the Royal Airforce pilots who held off Hitler's pilots in the Battle of Britain: "Never have so many owed so much to so few."

Meanwhile, events in other parts of Europe, esp. Russia, began a process which would lead to another gripping story in women's history.

See
Atkinson, Diane, The Purple White and Green (Museum of London, 1992)

Rosen, Andrew, Rise Up Women! (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)

Tickner, Lisa, The Spectacle of Women (Chatto & Windus, 1987)

WWI medals awarded to Nellie Hozier ROMILLY , sister in law of Winston Churchill . She volunteered to serve as a nurse on the Western Front in 1914, but was captured by the Germans, and while in captivity earned a reputation for pluck by such deeds as scribbling on a wall the following jingle:

Our good King George
is greater and wiser
than all other monarchs
including Der Kaiser

The Germans decided that this hot potato was too much for them, so they shipped her back to her brother in law, probably fearing his powerful role in the Brit. government and its possible effect on subsequent negotiations for a compromise peace. Members of the family suspected that she became pregnant by Churchill ; in any case, her sons Esmond and Giles became interesting persons in their own right. Among books incl. is Rebel: A Short Life of Esmond Romilly

The Russian Revolution brought to power the Reds, who, among other things, promised gender equality (a promise which, like so many others from them, was honored as much in breach as in observance, esp. once Stalin came to power). These breaches, however, bothered Adolf Hitler less than did the observances; many today are ignorant of the fact that Nazism was as explicitly anti-feminist as an ideology of the 20th Century, and that this anti-feminism was a key element in Hitler's defeat. Of all the groups whom Hitler underestimated, none more consistently provided his troops with unpleasant surprises more than did the women of the countries he attacked. Hitler's rise to power set the stage for the most titanic contest, and perhaps the finest hour of women, in history: the sacrifices and hardships that Allied, and esp. Soviet, women had to provide and endure to defeat the German Wehrmacht were of almost unimaginable magnitude. WWII was Total War, as would first be shown in the Battle of Britain, then in the struggle in France between Nazi occupiers and the Resistance, but most massively in the Soviet's Great Patriotic War to repel Hitler's invasion of Russia. The element of surprise women could bring to bear against Nazi troops made them invaluable assets in Resistance operations behind German lines, although the price such women paid, for being caught by the Nazis in the act of Resistance, was almost always the most horrible imaginable, including every sort of sexual defilement; in Russia, good medical equipment was often non-existent, so partisans wounds often had to be repaired with forks, knives, etc. In other places not occupied by the Axis, of course, women did much as they had done in WWI, as nurses, producers of war material, etc., though often under enemy aerial bombardment.

In the Soviet Union, however, women's war participation had an unprecedented intensity and magnitude, befitting the intensity and magnitude of this ideological and "racial" contest itself. The best way to describe this war may very well be to paraphrase Churchill: "Never have so many striven so intensely for such high stakes"; conservative estimates put Soviet deaths in this war at over twenty million, other estimates are of double that figure. The Soviets performed the unprecedented feat of moving whole factories from the path of the Nazi advance to the safety of Siberia, but such was the dire need for war material, that these factories were put into operation immediately after reassembly, ie. before walls could be constructed to protect the females on the assembly lines from the blasts of Siberian wind. Had Hitler defeated Russia, he could scarcely have lost WWII, with unimaginablely dire consequences for humanity. His intent was to wipe whole Soviet cities, eg. Moscow and Leningrad, off of the face of the earth, and to reduce those Soviets who he did not exterminate to chattel slavery; people in those areas which he did conquer learned of this intent first hand. He assumed that he could achieve this conquest without making Aryan women leave their traditional role of "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche."

Soviet women did leave their traditional role, and their performance, including in combat roles, showed the folly of Hitler's anti-feminism. The best known women in such roles were the aviators, some of whom earned from German troops the curse "night witches", since these women made Nazi troops miserable by disturbing their sleep with night bombing attacks on barracks, etc., starting with late 1942 in the decisive Battle of Stalingrad. Some of the Soviet women were so skilled at maneuvering their aircraft in battle that captured Nazi pilots insisted that they were not dogfighting against women until incontestable evidence to this effect was presented. Another important group of Soviet women were the over 100,000 trained as snipers, who between them eliminated almost 20,000 key Nazi personnel. Thousands of women also served as machine gun and mortar operators, and even in tanks. Finally, hundreds of thousands more served as doctors, Resistance troops, etc.; all told over 800,00 wore the Soviet uniform in WWII, accounting for as much as 8% of Soviet personnel. Some 200,000 women were decorated for military prowess, ninety being granted a place in the pantheon of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Hitler's refusal to allow German women similar roles did much to contribute to his forces' plight of being decisively outnumbered at critical times in the critical sectors of the front. Particularly when historians consider that Western experts expected Hitler's Wehrmacht to defeat the Soviets in six to twelve weeks, the Soviets' ability to avoid defeat altogether, much less their eventual destruction of the Third Reich, is ranked as one of the great achievements of history; U.S. Arm Chief of Staff Gen. Marshall, (later a Nobel laureate) when asked for the military lessons of WWII, summarized: "Don't invade Russia, don't invade China." Soviet women's role in this achievement was such that this episode ranks as one of the most impressive in the history of women.

see Clark, Alan, Barbarossa

Cottam, Kazimiera, Women in War and Resistance

Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won

Pennington, Reina, Wings, Women, and War

Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945