April 2016 - Women and War

War has been around since the beginning of time, and women have had to struggle, adapt and survive in war conditions. So, does she keep the home fires burning or does she put on a uniform or serve as a nurse? While today many proudly serve in their country’s forces, in the past some women cut their hair, put on men’s clothing and marched off to fight while others seduced secrets out of the enemy.

My April Reading Through Time Theme is Women And War, with my challenge to you being to read a book, fiction or non-fiction that involves women and war.

Some examples of books that would fit this theme are:

Non-Fiction

Greatcoats & Glamour Boots by Carolyn Gossage
We Band of Angels by Elizabeth M. Norman
Rosie the Riveter by Sean Stewart Price
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: 4 Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott

Fiction

I Shall Be Near You by Erin Lindsay McCabe
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

I am hoping to read the following books in April:

Where the Heart Is by Annie Groves
Band of Angels by Julia Gregson
Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang

This will be a good excuse to read Persepolis, which will fill my GN square in the BingoDog. I've got several audiobooks that would work, too, so I'll listen to at least one of these in April:

The Old Brown Suitcase: A Teenager's Story of War & Peace by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Sylvia's Lovers, an Elizabeth Gaskell novel I've yet to read. I may read Jenny Uglow's biography Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories for February's "authors read" if I can find it around the house. I'm trying not to buy anything for RTT this year and combine RTT with ROOTs.

I will have absolutely no trouble finding a book for this one. So many choices.

I found a nice slim volume for this challenge The Women's Land Army from 1944, bequeathed to me by my Mum.

I'm thinking of starting with His Majesty's Hope for this one, the third book in the Maggie Hope mystery series.

I have completed my first book for this month's theme but unfortunately I wasn't all that pleased. Band of Angels by Julia Gregson, originally published as The Water Horse was a story about a young woman who was with Florence Nightingale in Crimea. The book seemed to be more focused on a rather dull romance than on the actual history.

Another book about the Crimean war, I'm planning to read Helen Rappaport's No Place for Ladies about women's involvement in the war (Florence Nightingae, Mary Seacole etc). >8 DeltaQueen50: Hopefully I like it more than your book!

Other possibilities are Monica Dickens' Mariana, set during WWII, and Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front 1939-45 by Raynes Minns.

I have both Code Name Verity and Daughters of Mars on the virtual shelf, but I'd love to add a nonfiction entry as well if I can find a good one.

And for those who are still deliberating, I thought I'd throw out another fiction possibility that I've read and enjoyed: Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks.

I finished reading His Majesty's Hope, Maggie is a spy sent into Berlin during WWII. A quick enjoyable read.

I have completed Where The Heart Is by Annie Groves. This is the 4th book in a series about a family during World War II. One daughter becomes a nurse, while another joins the WAAF and is learning to repair airplanes but hoping for a chance to learn to fly. This book brought me up to the end of 1942.

I've finished Helen Rappaport's No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War. This was a wide-ranging look at women in the Crimean War from Florence Nightingale and her nurses, to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who set up a 'British hotel' close to the front lines. Also covered were the rich officers' wives and lady tourists (people actually went on tours to the battlefields whilst the war was still on) and the wives of the ordinary soldiers, some of whom were allowed to travel to the Crimea as camp followers. The conditions were terrible and, shockingly, although a small number of women were offically allowed to accompany their husbands to the front, no provision was made for them in terms of food or places to stay. Similarly, no financial provision was made for any of the wives and families who stayed in the UK whilst their husbands/fathers were fighting in the Crimea. Interestingly, there seems to be some debate over whether women being allowed to travel to the Crimea as nurses was a step forward for feminism or not as it arguably just reinforced the gender stereotyping (women are caring etc) prevalent at the time. But I think it probably made it easier for women to play more of a role in WWI. I felt a bit lost in all the detail sometimes but this was an interesting read.

I've also finished Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein which is a YA novel about a female American pilot taken prisoner by the Germans in WWII who ends up at Ravensbruck concentration camp. There she meets the Ravensbruck 'rabbits' - a group of Polish woman subjected to medical experiments by the doctors at the camp. This was very good and very emotional reading and I spent a lot of time on wikipedia afterwards reading about Ravensbruck, the prisoners there and the trials after the war.

>13 souloftherose:, both of those books sound really interesting.

I'll count The Crippled God toward this challenge, as two of the armies involved are led by women, as well as having lots of women among the fighters.

I just finished Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang, a pretty good historical fiction story about a granddaughter of Kubilai Khan and her desire to shun the traditional woman's path and instead train to be a soldier and travel her grandfather's empire with the army.

I have also read The Bungalow by Sarah Jio. It is a story about a nurse based st Bora Bora in WWII, a romance with a bit of a mystery. Quite a good read.

For my women at war read, I read The Women's Land Army, a slim volume handed down by my mother who was a member of the Land Army. I don't know if she bought this book as a souvenir of her time in this service or if this was a volume which was given to all of the volunteers. It was interesting as I understood some of the work that she did better after reading about it. It was also easy to read as it was written by a writer rather than a government hack and there are lots of photos.

Completed Sylvia's Lovers (Elizabeth Gaskell), which will be my only RTT for this month. (I really read an awful lot of "Women and War" back in 2014 when we did the WW1 read on the Virago group.) This leaves me with just two of Gaskell's novels to get to (Ruth and Wives and Daughters), following which I want to get on to the Gaskell biography by Jenny Uglow (who wrote the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Sylvia's Lovers).

4½**** to Sylvia's Lovers, my only quarrel being an ending that is a bit more sentimental than I like — not really horridly sentimental like the death of Little Nell, but still too sentimental for my taste.

I listened to the audio of Rose Under Fire. I didn't like it quite as well as Code Name Verity, but it's still a very good book. In addition to highlighting female pilots in the Air Transport Auxilliary, it also focuses on the Ravensbruck "Rabbits", female Polish political prisoners whose bodies were mutilated in medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors. It's a worthwhile read.

I finished The Girl from Ithaca by Cherry Gregory. Imagining a sister of Odysseus along with other women (wives, slaves) at Troy.

I'm a little slow, finishing two books for this April theme just last week. I thoroughly enjoyed both Code Name Verity and The Daughters of Mars and highly recommend them to anyone who hasn't yet read them.

I loved Daughters of Mars!

>23 countrylife: It was fantastic! Best read of the month for me.

I remembered this category and had to mention a book I read for a real life book club that fits it perfectly. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan discusses the women who worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the government's "secret" cities. Excellent nonfiction read.