Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900-1950

This volume by Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Dawson expands our understanding of an era of jarring cultural transformation and political crises between c. 1900 and 1950 by placing renewed focus on the historical agency and diverse experiences of women and children into a broader, and in places, global context. In moving beyond standard conceptual paradigms of civilian or victim, combatant or non-combatant, home front vs. battlefield, the contributors underscore the historical agency of their subjects through spiritedly written, carefully researched studies informed by the latest scholarship on such topics as wartime propaganda, wartime childhood experiences, the construction of historical memory, antifascist movements, and the role of women in international humanitarian organizations and philanthropy by placing them into dialog with politicized representations of women and children in wartime propaganda, education, and policy. Instructively, moreover, this volume’s analyses comparatively span an unconventionally broad periodization that encompasses the unique focus on both women and children as historical agents, spanning an equally singular period that encompasses the Armenian genocide, Russian Revolution, First World War, Spanish Civil War, and the fascist turn of the 1930s culminating in the Second World War skillfully advances our understanding of how the still understudied actions and experiences of women and children throughout the globe across multiple spaces of conflict and transformation. Chaudhuri and Dawson have commendably assembled an important ensemble of scholarly studies that each have much to teach experienced scholars and students alike about the complicated entanglement of the personal and the political.

Dr. Jeffrey D. Burson

Professor of History

Georgia Southern University

With verve and precision, Chaudhuri and Dawson have curated a collection that shows how the personal became political when the political impacted the personal. These superb essays take us to the home front and battlefields of war as women and children struggled for individual and social identities during crucial years of European conflict.

Eileen Boris

Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor

Department of Feminist Studies

Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Global Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara

Author of “Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019”