THEME READ FOR JUNE: Women & War

Who says women can't write about 'big' themes?

I know it's grim, but war is on many of our minds these days, so I thought a war theme might be interesting. Women and war. I've left it deliberately open in hopes that each of us will find some really interesting and challenging reads on the subject WRITTEN BY A WOMAN, of course! Just to bring the theme in a little tighter, we should be looking for something set during an active war, not, say, post-war. I also think a war story written by a woman is appropriate whether or not it focuses on a single female protagonist (i.e. A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell). Discussion could also include what these women authors bring to a war story that might be different.

Do women have a different perspective of war? Do they think about war differently? Does their perspective challenge the traditional male war tales of violence and glory? Has the woman's role in war changed ? What about the woman fighter/soldier?

So to review:
1. theme: women and war
2. should be a war-in-progress (set during a war, not after)
3. any genre: fiction, memoir...etc.
4. book should be written by a woman.

I don't think it will be difficult to find appropriate reads for this theme. A few that come to mind to get you thinking:

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
The Siege by Helen Dunmore
The Virago Book of Women and the Great War
The Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser (nonfiction)
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War, by Assia Djebar
Love My Rifle More than You by Kayla Williams (memoir)
The Chestnut Tree by Charlotte Bingham
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Flanders by Patricia Anthony
numerous war diaries ... etc etc.

Keep coming with the recommendations, because other than The Diary of Anne Frank, I'm blank on this one.

If you go into the LT search feature and do a tag search like: "women, war" or perhaps "war, fiction", it's a good place to start. One can also google using the same keywords or women war novels (one has to play around a bit). I'm going to go look at your library and then recommend one for you, Nickelini:-)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum

You're right . . . of course I can do a search. I think the reason I didn't think of that (:-p) is because I was looking for a recommendation. (From your list, A Thread of Grace and Half of a Yellow Sun have come highly recommended. I like lots of choice though!)

I second the recommendation of An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum.

Also:
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
And No Man's Wit by Rose Macaulay (and many others by Rose Macaulay)

Something a little different--a mystery:
The Devil's Feather by Minette Walters

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff

if you are interested in non-fiction I highly recommend And If I Perish by Evelyn Monahan. Its a book about the Nurses on the front lines during WWII. It was an eye opening account and deals with events/personal stories that aren't widely talked about in school.

Nickelini, almost any of the above list might be something you would like. I'll add some more though. . .

For some nonfiction titles. This board lists some interesting titles:
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/war_women1.html

Ghost Road, Pat Barker (part of her Regeneration trilogy?)
Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf (other of her novels have come up also)
Necessary Targets, Eve Ensler (a play)
July's People, Nadine Gordimer
Zookeepers Wife, Diane Ackerman
For Rouenna, Sigrid Nunez
Enemy Women, Paulette Jiles
Outlander, Diane Gabaldon (really, it comes up under 'war')
Obasan, Joy Kogawa
Story of Zahra, Hana al-Shaykh
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille, Rosemary Sullivan
There are several American Civil War diaries written by women (Mary Chestnut, Elisha Hunt Rhodes, Sarah Morgan, Ellen Renshaw House...)

I'll read Day by A.L. Kennedy--I've been meaning to read something of hers and this will give me an excuse to buy one. :) Is it okay if the narrative centers around a man?

Edited to get the touchstones right

In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel by Sarah Dunant covers the 1527 Sacking of Rome in the War of the League of Cognac.

Also, How to Cook a Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher would be interesting for this category.

Great topic! Here a few some suggestions:

The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields--WWI
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott--not entirely set in Civil War, but enough of it is.
Achilles by Elizabeth Cook
Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq by Kirsten Holmstedt
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy. I wasn't familliar with the author's first name and thought it might be a man, but it is a woman.
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag--on visual representations of war and violence
Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip
Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
Life Class by Pat Barker
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemerovsky
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy

The last three are on my TBR shelf and Life Class is on order, but I'm intrigued by the Sontag.

Cariola, I think if the book's written by a woman it qualifies. The discussion will be women and war (in the case you mention, the 'women/woman" would be the author).

I qualified the theme to be set during a war rather than in the aftermath or post-war to try to focus the discussion a little. I looked at Silko's Ceremony and thought it was after the war, but I could be wrong.

High Hearts by Rita Mae Brown, about a woman who dresses as a man so she can accompany her husband to the army during the Civil War.

Well, I did post a reply to 16, but it seems to have disappeared. I believe all the authors I posted above are female, and I went back and elminated a few books that were perhaps more post-war. (That's a hard one, because a lot of them span 10 years or more, and the characters are in an active war for part of the time but may later reminisce.)

>16 avaland:, 18 Maybe because I'm egocentric ;) but I think the first part of avaland's message was aimed at my question in #11.

While The Crimson Portrait wasn't one of my top books of 2008, it fits this topic particularly well. It is set in England in World War I and begins when an young aristocratic widow volunteers to let the military use her husband's family mansion as a hospital for returning soldiers who have been facially disfigured in the war. She is still adjusting to the loss of her husband and tries to assist with the patients. Another fascinating character in the book is a woman artist who is brought in to help design prostheses.

oops, sorry! you are correct, christiguc. I think we will just have to all use our judgment. As Cariola mentions some books are post-war but spend much of the narrative time back in the war.

I think I'm going to read Children of the New World a novel of the Algerian war by Assia Djebar. I have wanted to read more Djebar and picked this book up in January. It is described as "a novel of the Algerian War, seen through women's eyes."

A woman in Berlin by Anonymous is about the direct aftermath of the war, but it is so powerful, I want to recommend it anyway.
also: The journey by Ida Fink about conscripted labor in Nazi Germany by a jew passing as a gentile, and The hiding place by Corrie Ten Boom,
Girls of Slender means by Muriel Spark about working girls in London during wwii.
A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn.
The notebooks of Simone Weil,
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir.
A fine of 500 francs by Elsa Triolet
Edited to add the Gellhorn title and fix spelling.

The dollmaker by Harriette Arnow is wonderful about a Appalachian woman displaced to the Detroit factories during WWII

>23 owenre: Sounds like it would fit the 'dislocated woman' theme also!

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Olivia Manning, who wrote extensively about WWII: Anthony Burgess always claimed that her Fortunes of War sequence was the finest fictional record by any British writer of WWII. (For those with a long tv memory it was adapted into a big mini-series starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson). What is interesting is that it isn't set in the UK or France but in places like Bucharest, Athens, Palestine, Cairo, etc.

I could swear I saw this book mentioned here, but it seems to have disappeared (maybe Cariola's disappearing post?): Mosquito, by Roma Tearne. It was one of my top five reads last year. It was written by a woman, and set against the civil war in Sri Lanka, so fits this category perfectly.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi are two of my fav war stories by women.

Well, this seems as good a time to read my Feminist Press edition of Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres as any other.

How about Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress Series?

Librarianwannabe

>29 beatles1964: If that's what you want to read, I'd say go for it.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This is a really great story. Anyone want to talk about it? *It does include explicit sexual scenes, so I understand if that offends some.*

I'm going to throw out suggestions for two great books about women and war, both written by women and both dealing with the Lebanese civil war (I swear I'm not one note - I swear!). Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan is set during the earlier part of the war (1976). The Stone of Laughter by Hoda Barakat is set during the later part of the war (unspecified late 1980s). The second features a gay male protagonist, rather than a female protagonist, so I don't know if that means its out of the running or not.

It's a non-fiction academic history book, but for anybody interested in women in the Confederacy during the Civil War, I recommend Mothers of Invention, by Drew Gilpin Faust (now the first woman president of Harvard U).

I also second Reading Lolita in Tehran heartily.

Don't forget Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. (My apologies if it's already been mentioned--I didn't see it anywhere.) I just read this recently, and it's wonderful. It's short, and every word of it is perfect.

Some further book ideas for Women and War

A Life In Secrets The Story of Vera Atkins by Sarah Helm.
This biography of Vera is set in WW2 when the Special Operations Executive's French section sent more than 400 agents behind enemy lines. Aomong those who failed to return were 12 young women whom Vera had helped prepare for their missions. The book is the story of how she searches through the chaos of Allied occupied Germany to establish the fate of the women.

When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
Written from the point of view of unnamed characters this short elegantly written novel taught me about events that were previously unknown to me. How can writing be so direct yet so deep and unashamedly honest, almost point blank? There were moments when it felt as if this was not a work of fiction and with a sudden jerk you are catapulted into the reality that this did actually happen to real people and all not so very long ago. As someone who has read a number of wartime experience type of books I realised that I was woefully ignorant about the plight of American Japanese aliens during the second world war. Do read this wonderful work - you will not be disappointed.

Behind The Burqa by Sulima and Hala.
Set in Afghanistan the two women relate their escape to freedom from Taliban and Mujihaddin forces in Afghanistan.

I Have Lived A Thousand Years by Livia-Bitton Jackson
This book won the The Christophers Award. Written in short diary type of entries this memoir of Elli takes the reader from Hungary to Auschwitz. It is an inspiring work reflecting faith, hope, triumph and love. Compared to the others this is a short, relatively 'simple' read but full of depth.

#34 I thought about that one, but the title suggested to me that it takes place AFTER the war, no? (See #16.)

The Return of the Soldier is set during WWI. The soldier of the title is sent home shell-shocked--but the war is still going on. It's a story set entirely on the home front, though--the reader is never taken to the front lines. In the smallest of nutshells, it's about how his return affects the lives of several women.

I've been looking through the Persephone catalogue (thank you, christiguc!) and notice that many of their female-authored offerings deal with war. Here are just a few:

An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum, 1941-43
Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
Five Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson
On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany, 1940-46 by Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg

I just bought Shake Down the Stars by Frances Donnelly, set in WW II (haven't read it yet), and Coming Home by Rosamund Pilcher is also a good WW II read.
Both of these are about young women becoming adults during the war, and how their lives are changed by it.

How about Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy? Also, if you do a tagmash on women,war , it brings up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

This week I received an ERC of Our Longest Days by The Writers of Mass Observation, edited by Sandra Koa Wing. The editor sadly died in May 2007 at the tender age of 27. The immediacy of the diaries gives us an intriguing insight into life in Britain during the second world war. Obviously a few of the entries are by men but the vast majority are of women and the whole volume was edited and brought together by dear Sandra.

Despite so many other excellent suggestions this will be my read for June. I will record my thoughts as I have to read it fairly soon but will keep them to myself until June =) Anyone else out there who received this book I wonder?

Edited for silly typos.

#41 I put my name down for that, and have several other Mass Observation books in my library (and I'm a Mass Observer myself, but they couldn't have known that!) but I got another book instead. I will collect the set eventually. Looking forward to reading what people think of it.

LyzzBee That is really good news! Did you get it as an ERC as well? I think many of us are masss observers - I love people watching =)

Juliette - no I didn't get that particular book, but a small town housewife kind of one, which also fits my collection.

Are you an "official" Mass Observation observer too? Maybe I should set up a group?

LyzzyBee - no I am not an ''official'' Mass Observer. How does one become a mass observer?

What IS a Mass Observer?

Hope this is not too much off-topic - I found out about MO through reading a MO book about WWII, after all...

The web pages are here: http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm - they are always looking for different types of people so it's worth checking back regularly.

I found my book for this challenge: Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen

excellent - it's mine too! I'll see you in June...

Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood ( which seems to appear as A Model Childhood ) is a fascinating book about growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII -- I read it years ago, but may go back to it again -- terribly revealing about what it meant to acquiesce to governmental oppression and curtailment of civil liberties. -- the parentheses don't seem to be working, but you can get to the book via Christa Wolf

Mary Chestnut's Civil War is the diary of a prominent South Carolinian woman--her husband james chestnut was in Jefferson Davis' inner circle--during the American Civil War. It gives a fascinating insight into the development of the Civil War from a Southern, civilian, female, aristocracy point of view. There are other diaries by women of that era, but I haven't read them yet. This I have, several times, and I can recommend it highly.

Another excellent book is Drew Gilpin Faust's latest This Republic of Suffering, also about the Civil War--and how death was handled, by soldiers and civilians alike. It's definitely social history, very well written, so much so that I'm going to read Mothers of Invention (one of these decades, given my TBR shelves, all 12 or so feet of them).

I'm uncertain if this qualifies or not, but Willa Cather's One of Ours's last section deals with World War I, a young soldier from Nebraska, and an "epilogue" about the aftermath for the women that had me sobbing. Pulitzer Prize winner for 1923.

just bringing this thread back up to the top as June approaches. I'll put together some questions for the discussion only thread in the next week or so.

I just read a great one - The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa. This is a great topic - can we sort them - by war, or relationship to the war??

A few other ideas: Katherine Anne Porter, whether Ship of Fools focusing on the lead-up to WWII, or one of her short story collections, often filled with stories of the Mexican Revolution (like Flowering Judas - one of my all-time favorties!). The script for Hiroshima Mon Amour was written by Marguerite Duras, and it is a ground-breaking work on many levels, both as one of the first New Wave films and as a script that was dealing with both European and Asian incarnations of WWII. And you can just see the movie if you have trouble tracking down the script. ADDED: OK, it looks like Duras and Ship of Fools don't meet the criter (Duras focuses on post-war time, Ship of Fools on pre-war), but Flowering Judas would!

This is also a good thread to mine: http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=1600

I will post an updated list of questions to mull over ...etc. HERE next week (or perhaps sooner) in readiness for the June rolling discussion. I think we are going to try to use the same thread for the discussion also (unless we decide otherwise, and thoughts on this and other issues related to the theme reads are welcome on the thread called "future theme reads . . .". Fannyprice has some questions she wants to add, and I will rewrite the questions in the initial posts and cull anything from the 50-odd posts we have here already.

>54 A_musing: I think we are trying to keep the discussion to war-in-progress stories generally, so as to somewhat focus a rather immense topic. However, that said, I thnk we are pretty flexible.

If I didn't mention this one before The Art of Uncontrolled Flight by Kim Ponders a novel that came out of the author's experiences in the first Gulf War. She is one of the first US women pilots to fly in a war zone. Book is probably not available outside the US. While not a perfect debut novel, it is interesting. HERE is her wikipedia entry. I have not read her newest novel.

This will be my first theme read with the girlybooks group.

I'll be reading one that's been languishing among my tbr books for a couple years now: A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary. I love women's memoirs and biographies.

WOMEN AND WAR THEME DISCUSSION

1. theme: women and war
2. should be a war-in-progress (set during a war, not before or after)
3. any genre: fiction, memoir...etc.
4. book should be written by a woman.

In your comments please give a very brief synopsis of the story, including, of course, setting and what specific war.

Some questions to consider:
What aspect of war has your author chosen to portray?
What perspective of war does your author or protagonist bring to the story?
How are women portrayed in your book; what roles do they play?
How are men portrayed in your book; and what roles do they play?
Does the novel challenge any stereotypes?
Does your author have experience with war? In what way?
What might a woman author bring to a story about war that might be different?
What is your book trying to say about war, if anything?

These are just a few questions to get us thinking, but please don't feel you have to answer them.

Just posting one more suggestion: The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley. It's about a group of eight cousins in Cornwall and London and how the war (World War II) affects them. Sophy is only ten at the beginning, but the other characters are young adults; as such, the males all sign up for service and the women do their bit at home. Everyone, young and old, is affected by the war.

Just found this discussion group, so I'm late with my suggestion: Jackdaws by Ken Follett. It's fiction set in World War II. The British train a group of women to parachute into occupied France to sabatoge a telephone exchange. A fast moving yarn. Since I've already read it, I'll pick something else for the the June discussion. I'm looking forward to it.

>57 avaland:, Hey avaland, I see your questions and they actually cover the majority of points I was going to raise. I'm getting ready to go out of town for a wedding, so thanks for being on top of this!

I'm reading The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer for Women and War month. 1981 Iran/Iraq war along with the Revolutionary Guard ousting the Shah. Thank you Sisters.

>61 yareader2:, I'll be interested to see what you think. That has been on my TBR list for a while now.

I can't let this one go by without recommending Christabel Bielenberg's memoir The past is myself.

#59 Sorry, authors for Girlybooks theme reads must be female.

#64 Oops. Should have read the rules. :-P

#63 sodapop I am most certainly with you on that one! Great to hear it mentioned.

avaland - good questions. Looking forward to the discussion on this one.

I am torn between three that I already own: A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and March by Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm leaning toward March, but unsure whether that means I should re-read Little Women first to enrich the experience. If so, I may pick one of the others. Has anyone who has read March have any insight into whether it would dramatically improve the experience if I had read Little Women relatively recently?

No need to reread Little Women before March, it really is a separate book, not closely attached to it - except as a premise to write a new novel.

Little Women, I think you could get by without rereading.

Suite Francaise is a good story but remember it is just a manuscript and there is no ending. In case that would drive you crazy. Actually the story of the manuscript and how it became published is just as good if not better then the story itself.

I read Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War by Assia Djebar.

Assia was a student in France when the Algerian war began and she was unable to get home. She was 'punished' for her nationalistic proclivities (i.e. banned from the premises of the school she had been attending) and two years later, now married and her husband wanted by the French police, they fled to Tunisia through Switzerland. In Tunisia she wrote for a political newspaper and gathered information on the war at the Tunisian and Morrocan borders, while finished a graduate degree in History. This novel is her third, published in 1961, when she was just 26. http://www.assiadjebar.net/

Djebar has always been very interested in excavating and recovering "women's active participation in the collective history of North Africa" and I see this in this novel. She gives as much attention to women as she does to men in the story. The novel is set primarily in one day in 1956 in the town of Blida. There are nine chapters each focusing on a different character - five women, four men.

Her female characters are wonderfully varied:
Cherifa, in her late 20s and 2nd marriage but no children, is married to a carpenter who is working with the resistance secretly.
Lila, in her 20s, self-centered philosophy student, also married to a man who has left her to join the resistance.
Salima, is a boarding school teacher, imprisoned because of suspicion she was helping the resistance. She is at the end of a 10-day interrogation.
Touma, also in her 20's, educated and working as a secretary, fond of 'European ways' and flaunts it. A stool pigeon for the local police chief.
There is also Hassiba, a young girl, 16 (I think), who has joined the resistance, and Suzanne, a French-born lawyer whose husband, Omar, has left for France. There are a few other minor women characters also. Her male characters are equally varied but I won't profile them here.

I can only speak about this book and other books I have read with regards to women writing about war. And comparison is difficult because each book is different in its focus. In this book war is everywhere; there are no lines of battle, no 'fronts'. I think Djebar's novel presents a more 'holistic' view of war than many war books I've read. This might reflect the perspective she has chosen. Her people are interconnected, certainly sometimes even related, and she shows this in her story. What is also different is that there doesn't seem to be a sense of "heroes' or 'heroines' - nothing is idealized or glamorized, imo. She doesn't oversimplify by taking the "Arabs vs Europeans" approach; she knows it is more complicated than this. There is violence, of course, but she deftly portrays it without be too graphic or gratuitous.

I found the story captivating, even riveting in places. These people seemed real and I finished the book wanting to know what happened to them all. This is also a good Djebar book to start with (I wish I had read this one first).

NOTE: Feel free to write as little or as much as you like and say what you wish. My post is not an example for others to follow, it's just what I had say.

My novel for this theme was The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1948.

From the back cover: "In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II." It's the story of Stella, a forty-something divorcee-widow, her son who has just joined the army, her lover Robert, and an odd character, Harrison, who is following them. Harrison tells Stella that Robert is selling national secrets to the Germans. There is also a strange and pathetic young woman named Louie who opens and closes the novel, and her friend Connie. I'm not sure why they are in the book at all.

From the description, it seemed like The Heat of the Day would be the perfect book for this challenge. Yet, it so very much wasn't. The promised tension and dangerous atmosphere never showed up.

Obviously, I missed a lot of what was going on in this novel, but so much of it was terribly dry, and made me not care all that much. Some parts of it weren't dry, and were interesting enough, but really didn't tell me much about war. Looking at Avaland's questions in post #57, most of my answers would be "I don't know." I'm sure Bowen had something to say, but she didn't say it to me. The biggest impression of WWII that I got from this book is that people in London stoically went without a lot of everyday items, and everyone had to use blackout shades after dark.

Sorry, I'll try to make a better selection for our next read.

Nickelini, do you think it's just not a well-put together book? You are a pretty discrimating reader. I have read a lot of books that use war as a backdrop but not on the main driving force, if you will. Not sure I've put that well; will have to think about it a bit more.

#73 - No, Avaland, I think it's probably me. I find Elizabeth Bowen difficult, but challenging (I want to like her, and sometimes I do). I think this is one of those books that I'd probably like quiet a lot if I studied it in a class with a talented prof that helped me unpack the dense, dry language.

The book I chose from my tbr pil, also turned out to be somewhat problematic for this theme. Here's my review:

A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary ed by Gerald Schwartz

The title is truthful. Dr Hawks was a fully qualified doctor who practiced before and after the Civil War. But, during the war itself, neither the War Department nor Dorothea Dix's nursing corps accepted her application. So, although she did do some volunteer work in military hospitals, the predominant focus of this book is her time as a teacher of newly freed former slaves and black soldiers.

She and her husband, were ardent abolitionists prior to the war. Her husband, also a doctor, became the first surgeon attached to a black regiment. Dr Esther Hawks was engaged by the War Department as a teacher and superintendant/organizer taught basic literacy to the troops, their families and other blacks in South Carolina and Florida. These blacks were sometimes referred to as contrabands because they were not technically free citizens at that time.

Parts of it are very interesting. And yet, some of the most interesting details are told not in her diary, but in the footnotes. For example, she organized the first fully integrated school in the South. But it's only in the footnotes that the full story is told--that after a very short time the school was boycotted almost completely by whites objecting to be in the same classroom as former slaves and that after its very early days, the school had only one white student.

Throughout the diary, she encountered a lot of discrimination that she glosses over quickly. Her sewing circle was boycotted by those refusing to be in the same room with 'nigger teachers'. In the first year of Reconstruction, which is the last year of her diary, this anti-black sentiment was even more pronounced.

I honor her for acting on her convictions. I understand her motive in not dwelling on problems in her diary. And yet, the very fact that she skates rather quickly over the problems and often gives more room to recording pleasant times that broke up the monotony of her days--riding expeditions and small parties-- lessen the impact of what she did and the trials she went through.

Perhaps this is a problem with the editing, and the book and the story of the impact of her life would have been better served to have less of the actual diary entries and more narrative.

--So as to how the book relates to the women and war discussion questions is a bit problematic.

As an abolitionist, Dr Hawks saw the primary issue of the Civil War as freeing the slaves and giving blacks a place in society. She would have liked to play an active part in supporting the war by being employed as a doctor in the war theaters, but due to prejudices against women, women doctors, and even 'young' women doing nursing, was not allowed to do so.

Still supporting the war and her abolitionist ideals, she took the job offered to her by the War Department as teacher to newly liberated (not technically free) blacks instead. She became a competent teacher and superintendant, organizing not a few schools and respecting the people she taught.

Although prohibited by the social mores of the day from actively putting her life in the physical threat that would have occurred in a war zone, she nevertheless was willing to abandon her former life and career entirely and focus on the job she was allowed to do.

She was an independent thinker. She qualified as a physician only five years after the first American woman doctor did so. She bore the label of being not-quite-respectable for working with black former slaves. There are indications that her husband did not always fully support her efforts--for instance he vetoed her becoming the Florida superintendant of schools after the war ended.

When I think of those who cause change in history, I usually think of those who loudly and visibly proclaim their views and actively lobby for political change. Although Dr Hawks published letters and articles proclaiming her views in national periodicals, she is not among the iconic names of those who addressed these subjects. Dr Hawks’ efforts affected change by challenging the attitudes of those around her by her direct action and competency. Yet her individual work pushed the boundaries of how both women and blacks were perceived.

The suggestion was made to post a question at the end of of our book description. Would the woman in the book you chose have liked to play a more active part in the war? What stopped her?

#75 I haven't been on for a while and this was a wonderful description.

streamsong - I do not know the book at all but I am full of admiration for your reflections and insight -thank you for introducing the book.

Two women in war books I'd recommend:

Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (biography) by Caroline Moorehead

and

The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton, a novel by a contemporary writer who was a journalist in the middle east.

For this theme, I read Regeneration by Pat Barker. It’s a fictionalized portrayal of the staff and patients of Craiglockhart War Hospital, a mental hospital for British soldiers during WWI. Dr. William Rivers, one of the therapists there, was a pioneer in the humane treatment of shell-shocked soldiers.

Dr. Rivers’ views on the war and his role in it start to change when he begins treating Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and decorated officer. When the war broke out, Sassoon’s patriotism led him to enlist. By 1917, having had a distinguished career as an officer, he concludes that the war is being mismanaged and needlessly prolonged. He writes a declaration stating as much and mails it to the press, politicians and his superiors. He hopes that he will be court-martialed, which would provide him with a forum for expressing his views. Instead, in an attempt to silence and discredit him, a Medical Board declares him shell-shocked and sends him off to Craiglockhart. Rivers’ and Sassoon’s stories are intertwined with those of patients, friends and relatives, some real and some fictional.

I thought that all of the questions in post #57 applied to this book, so here they are, with my answers:

1. What aspect of war has your author chosen to portray?
She focuses on the toll that war takes on soldiers, their caregivers and loved ones.

2. What perspective of war does your author or protagonist bring to the story?
Dr. Rivers is in an akward position. He wants to serve his country, but his “service” is to heal the soldiers just enough that they are ready to return to combat. As the story progresses he becomes increasingly conflicted about his role.

3. How are women portrayed in your book; what roles do they play?
The women in the novel are the support system for the soldiers. The nurses, wives and mothers try to help the soldiers recover. Through Sarah Lumb, the girlfriend of one of the officers, we meet a group of working-class women who support the war effort by working in a factory, making detonators.

4. How are men portrayed in your book; and what roles do they play?
The men in the novel struggle to express their thoughts and feelings. In an era when men were expected to bury their feelings and obey authority, they have trouble putting their fears and doubts about the war into words. In many of the male characters, this manifests itself as stammering or mutism.

5. Does the novel challenge any stereotypes?
Yes, of several groups. During the course of the story, we find out that some of the characters are gay. The irony is that these men embody traditional ideals of masculinity and bravery. For one character, the thought of being arrested for soliciting is more frightening than the prospect of returning to the battlefield.

Stereotypes of the mentally ill are also challenged. Dr. Rivers takes the view that everyone has a breaking point and that his patients have simply reached theirs. This is the perspective that the author takes too. The descriptions of the horrors that these men witnessed (which I assume are based on real events) make you wonder how anyone kept their sanity during that war.

The working-class women who work in the munitions factory are also sensitively portrayed. They have found themselves in difficult circumstances and are doing dirty, dangerous work that no one else wants to do.

In each of these cases, we are left with the impression that the characters’ lives ended up on paths that they didn’t choose. They are doing their best to cope with their situations.

6. Does your author have experience with war? In what way?
According to some interviews I found on the internet, Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her parents weren’t married and she wasn’t given much information about her father. She was told that he had served in the RAF during WWII and had died. Her mother eventually met and married another man and moved away with him. Barker was left to be raised by her grandparents. Barker’s grandfather had fought in WWI and still had the scar from a bayonet wound. She was intrigued by her grandfather’s scar and his reluctance to talk about his war experiences.

7. What might a woman author bring to a story about war that might be different?
She portrays the war from the perspective that women have traditionally had: as those who support the men in combat and help them heal once they have returned home.

Her decision to focus on people who have been marginalized (gays, the mentally ill, working-class women) and the ways in which they are silenced is something that a woman is uniquely well-qualified to do, in my opinion. A lot of women have personal experience with being ignored and silenced. I’m theorizing that’s why she’s able to bring these characters to life with such compassion. (On a related subject, Pat Barker’s Wikipedia biography is two paragraphs long and leaves out almost every interesting aspect of her life. Siegfried Sassoon’s biography is 17 paragraphs long. I stopped counting the number of paragraphs in Dr. William Rivers’ Wikipedia entry when I got to 30!)

8. What is your book trying to say about war, if anything?
That it is brutal and that it causes lasting emotional damage, not just to soldiers, but to those who love and take care of them.

Wow, that was very insightful; thanks. My favorite of your comments is the 2nd paragraph of #7 where you talk about Pat Barker focusing on people who have been marginalized. Interesting. I thought Night Watch did this also.

Hi superfancy--thank you for your interesting thoughts. It sounds like a book I'll have to seriously consider for MT TBR.

Will you read the other two books in the trilogy?

How did you find the overall tone of the book? Disturbing? Depressing? Thought provoking? Hopeful?

How did you decide to read this particular book? (That's a question that always interests me--I'd like to ask Nickelini and avaland and anyone else who will be posting about their theme read the same thing.)

Also yareader & juliette07 thanks for commenting on my post. :)

oh, I read The Children of the New World because I had read another of Djebar's novels, Women of Algiers in their Apartment which featured women who had been on the front lines. In the latter she featured women of all kinds, some who were traditional wives, others who had been an active part of the resistance, some who had been imprisoned and tortured . . . and so on. That was a post-war novel, meant to give women their due place in Algerian history. Because women actively participated in the war for independence, they expected a certain equality in the new state; it didn't happen.

The former is a much earlier novel set, as noted, during the war. I really wanted to read a war novel where the women's roles were different than most novels to date.

For this group read I chose Civil War Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. I picked this book because even though I read quite a bit of her fiction, I had never read any of her non-fiction. This book consists of a series of letters Alcott wrote home while a serving as a nurse in 1862 and 1863. These letters were later published in a local newspaper.

1. What aspect of the war was portrayed?
She told of her service in a miltary hospital in Washington D.C. during the Civil War.

2. What perspective does she bring to the story?
Her perspective is that of a volunteer nurse from an abolitionist pro-Union background.


3. How are women portrayed and what roles do they play?
The women in this book are almost all nurses, like the author. She describes their job this way "we must soothe and sustain,tend and watch; preaching and practicing patience, till sleep and time have restored courage and self-control." She says, nurses do "the hardest work of any part of the army, except the mules."

4. How are men portrayed and what roles do they play?
The men are primarily wounded Union soldiers and medical personnel. There is even one "rebel" soldier despised by the other patients who Alcott says "was impervious to all kindness and she could find nothing in him for sympathy or romance to fasten to."
Alcott, who describes herself as a spinster of thirty seems to develop romantic crushes on some of the patients.

5. Does the novel challenge any stereotypes?
Yes, it challenged my notions about L.M. Alcott and her abolitionist family. Even though she describes the Civil War as "this great struggle for the liberty of both races", she uses terms like blackie, obsequious, trickish, lazy, and ignorant to describe the black people she encountered. It may well be that these were common feelings in the 1800's even for abolitionists, I'm not sure.

6. Does your author have experience with war?
Yes, as this is a nonfiction account of Miss Alcott's experiences during the Civil War.

7. What might a woman author bring to a story about war that would be different?
All the previous nonfiction I've read about this war were written by men. They all focused more on events like battles or speeches and less on personal experiences. This conclusion is based just on my personal experience.

8. What is your book saying about war?
This book reminds us that every war is first and foremost about the loss of human life.

#81: Yes, now that I've read Regeneration, I plan to read the other two in the trilogy. I'm really hooked on some of the characters and I hope they appear in the other novels.

The book wasn't depressing or disturbing overall. Although some of the scenes were upsetting, she writes with such humanity that I didn't have trouble getting through them.

I chose Regeneration from the list that avaland posted on this thread. A few weeks ago, I read Pat Barker's Union Street, and liked her writing so much I wanted to read another by her.

>>mona217; Thanks for the info on your book. It makes me think of LMA in an entirely different light. From your description, I would enjoy reading it. I love memoir by women and authors.

I think the overlap in our two books is very interesting. EHH also briefly worked as a volunteer in the Washington DC hospitals and describes incoming casualties from the Battle of Bull Run.

#85

I just re-read your entry on Dr. Hawks and is does sound like there are similarities in the books we selected. Both are about untraditional women and their Civil War efforts.

I think your final question was a great one. Would the woman in the book liked to have played a greater role, and if so, what stopped her? LMA would have liked to play a greater role but was stopped for 2 reasons:

1. Gender roles in the 1800's
2. Illness-as she contracted typhus while nursing

You are right about the prejudices women encountered at the time. Nurses were expected to be spinsters or widows. LMA at age 30 was considered a "spinster".

If you would like to read Civil War Hospital Sketches I have it listed on BookMooch. If you don't belong, I'd be happy to send it to you anyways.

#83 I really liked your discussion about Louisa May Alcott.

# 79 Amazing, wow you had a load to get off your chest. PAt Barker seems to do that to many people.

Like Nickelini, I read The Heat Of The Day by Elizabeth Bowen - set largely in the "lightless middle of the tunnel" which was England in 1942.

A few months ago I read The Last September, by the same author, and was blown away - I'd barely heard of her before, and I found myself wondering why I ever read any books that were less good.

The Heat Of The Day, however, was more of a slow burner for me. Partly this is because less happens - partly because the structure of the narrative is harder to figure out - and partly because the moral and emotional issues in the book are more dated. (One of the things which made The Last September so amazing for me was the psychological acuity about a young woman awkwardly coming of age - but it's a lot harder for me to judge whether this book is an accurate portrayal of what it feels like when you are told your lover is a spy.)

That said, there were some things I really liked about the book - for example, the way the first few chapters established the sense that because of the war, everyone had lost their roots - their traditions - and even their selves. By the end of the book I had decided that the apparent lack of structure might be deliberate - to convey the lack of grounding in people's lives during the war.

As for the questions:

What aspect of war has your author chosen to portray?

The emotional disconnection: the way that pre-war certainties have been lost, and the impact that has on individual lives.

What perspective of war does your author or protagonist bring to the story?

I'm not sure I quite understand this question. But the main character - Stella - is a divorcee (and widow), with a son who is a soldier, and a lover who she met during the Blitz. It's more about her life in the context of wartime Britain.

How are women portrayed in your book; what roles do they play?

An interesting question. I think women are portrayed as people who are looking for ways to survive emotionally during the war - and who have to put traditional morality behind them to do so. Stella is, in the old-fashioned phrase, a woman with a reputation: widely perceived to have divorced her husband for some illicit reason, and now in an occasionally casual relationship with her lover Robert. Most of her reaction to the thought that Robert might be a spy relates to what it means for them - will he have to leave her? if he's been living a lie, what does it mean for his apparent love for her? - rather than what it means for the country. Her story is counterpointed with that of Louie, a working-class woman whose husband is away fighting - who seeks emotional sustenance in casual flirtation and sex, but does not see this as a betrayal (being with another soldier makes her feel closer to her husband than when she is on her own).

How are men portrayed in your book; and what roles do they play?

Even more interesting question. There are three main male characters - Stella's son Roderick, her lover Robert, and the man who tells her that Robert is a spy - for his own murky purposes. I think the main thing about the men is what they decide to live for - for example, Roderick is left a manor house in Ireland, and when he is finally able to visit it, he cares for the first time about the fact that he might not survive the war. But I might need to think more about this.

Does the novel challenge any stereotypes?

Yes, for its time - in particular the sympathetic portrayal of both Stella and Louie despite their dubious personal morality, and the way that the question of Robert's possibly being a traitor is handled.

Does your author have experience with war? In what way?

The Heat Of The Day was written in 1949, so Bowen had lived through the war that she describes.

What might a woman author bring to a story about war that might be different?

Well, it's stereotypical to say so, but the focus on the home front, and the emotional/spiritual impact of war, seem to be more likely subjects for a woman to write about. This particular book is much more focused on female emotions and reactions than male ones, although male emotions and reactions are also there.

What is your book trying to say about war, if anything?

I think the overall message is about the importance of survival in a time of war - emotional just as much as physical.

Wow. Outstanding job, Wandering_Star! A+ for you after my solid C effort. I found the book too dry to make myself think about it enough to pull all that out of it, but I agree with every one of your comments. Excellent reading of Heat of the Day.

I'm going to go back and change my comments to: "what she said."

Thank you! I have to say I didn't find it easy - I've been reading a tiny bit at a time. But it's really helpful to have this thread - both because I was thinking about the book all the way through (instead of just thinking 'what's going on here') and also because some of the stuff I wrote I only thought of when I looked at the questions...

Although I intended to read a book for this read, I didn't get to it. However, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed reading every single discussion of a book someone read. Just wonderful and insightful.

I was laughing to myself though about what my non-reading friends/family might think about reading a book and then answering "essay questions" about it for pleasure. What a wondrous group we readers are. :-)

Well, this thread is ongoing, isn't it? :-)