Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World Since 1600

"The handbook is a reference work of thirty-two essays jointly written by specialists in the history of military and war and experts in gender and women's history. The collection, covering four centuries from the Thirty Years' War to the present Wars of Globalization, investigates how gender contributed to the shaping of warfare and the military and was at the same time transformed by them. The essays explore this question by focusing on themes such as the cultural representations of military and war; war mobilization of and war support by society; war experiences on the home fronts and battlefronts; gendered war violence; military service and citizenship; war demobilization, postwar societies, and memories; and attempts to regulate and tame warfare and prevent new wars. The volume covers chronologically the major periods in the development of warfare since the seventeenth century. Its content reflects the state of research on the history of gender and war. Therefore, the main geographical focus of the handbook in several chapters is on the best explored regions of eastern and western Europe, the Americas and Australia. But it also systematically covers the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building originating in early modern Europe and their aftermath in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, which are more recent fields of research. Thus, the handbook allows for both temporal comparisons that explore continuities and changes in a long-term perspective and regional comparisons, as well as an assessment of transnational influences on the entangled relationships between and among gender, warfare, and military culture. All essays are thematic, comparative or transnational"--