1.1 Women’s Military Roles

The reasons for women warriors’ fame and visibility relate to the broader gender history of modern warfare. In the nineteenth century, the working-class women who had accompanied Western armies to cook, clean, sew, launder, and care for them gradually disappeared as armies professionalised. Support and auxiliary functions were taken over by men who were given a legitimacy and considered to be ‘soldiers’ in a way that had never been the case for women.Footnote ¹⁵ In the nineteenth century, most armies forbade the enlistment of women.Footnote ¹⁶ However, during the American Civil War, for example, approximately 1,000 women enlisted in both the Confederate and Union armies. Although some newspapers admiringly described them as ‘Amazons’, they were frequently criticised. As Richard Hall summarises: ‘gender conventions and prejudices of the mid-nineteenth century on the home front dictated that by virtue of their bold … behaviour, these women must be abnormal in some socially significant way’.Footnote ¹⁷ Feminist theorists of warfare have argued that this nineteenth-century gendering of roles and military zones has remained at the heart of the military and militarism throughout the twentieth century. Cynthia Enloe, one of the most influential thinkers in this field, argues that in modern warfare:

This model did not apply consistently in all contexts or all forms of warfare. As Karen Hagemann and Stefan Dudink point out, despite the emergence in nineteenth-century Europe of the association of the rights and duties of citizenship with male military service, ‘citizenship was not masculinised to the same extent and in the same way everywhere – and the same thing holds true for the militarisation of masculinity’.Footnote ¹⁹ While European armies became almost exclusively male, there were styles of warfare elsewhere in the world that continued to include women. Some women were granted a form of warrior status in the Plains societies of North America. In parts of Africa, women had combat roles, including the most well-known and widely circulated example of the women who fought in the Franco-Dahomean Wars of 1890–4.Footnote ²⁰ More common was the organisation of women into ‘support cohorts’ throughout eastern Africa, which resembled the tradition of laundresses, camp followers, and cantinières who had performed similar functions in the West.Footnote ²¹ Women also carried out support, logistics, and healthcare functions, as well as more limited combat duties, in revolutions, uprisings, and civil wars such as those that took place in Mexico (1910) and China (1911).

During the First World War, combat roles and war zones were still regarded and presented as the reserve of men, even as the realities of industrialised warfare provided a stark contrast to mobilising imagery of male combatant bravery, mastery, and élan on the battlefield.Footnote ²² These gendered boundaries were challenged during and after the war, both by the extent to which millions of civilians as well as combatants participated in (and were the victims of) ‘total war’, and by the mediatisation of militarised women. But across the combatant nations, the majority of women mobilised by governments or the armed services were deployed in non-combat roles: as nurses, or in transport, clerical, or domestic functions.Footnote ²³ These women were subject to suspicion and criticism, especially those who were uniformed or given some form of military status such as the members of the women’s auxiliary services in the British armed forces, which reveals the extent to which their work was seen as a potential threat to the status quo.Footnote ²⁴ The civil wars, uprisings, and resistance movements that took place after the 1918 armistice, for example in Egypt, Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Russia, also included women, despite their marginalisation in some of the historiography.Footnote ²⁵ Polish woman Aleksandra Zagorska, for example, formed the women’s paramilitary organisation Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (Voluntary Legion of Women) in November 1918, took part in the Polish-Soviet War (1919–21), and was promoted to the rank of Major.Footnote ²⁶ From the 1920s onwards, Chinese women were enlisted to fight for Nationalist and Communist forces, creating as they did so ‘a new social category of person – the woman soldier who wore a new-style military uniform and engaged in mechanised warfare’.Footnote ²⁷ In Europe, women joined both fascist and anti-fascist paramilitary groups in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably the milicianas in the Spanish Civil War who engaged in armed combat.Footnote ²⁸ Some of these women were able to argue for a form of post-war veteran status, including state pensions, but claims for a more permanent military status were mostly unsuccessful.Footnote ²⁹

The Second World War is often seen as a watershed moment which signalled a much broader acceptance of the necessity of integrating women into the military in industrialised mass warfare. From early in the war millions of women volunteered or were conscripted into war work in the belligerent nations and their empires. Thousands of women were drafted into combat roles in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Nazi Germany, where 160,000 women were working as Flak Gun auxiliaries by the end of the war.Footnote ³⁰ Others actively participated in resistance movements in Axis-occupied Europe, or against the Japanese in China and Southeast Asia.Footnote ³¹ Yet Enloe’s definition of the ‘inner sanctum’ of conflict as inherently bound up with concepts of masculinity still largely held true. In Britain, for example, this was illustrated in debates about women’s entry into the Home Guard, which would have required them to be armed and was therefore seen as a step too far by the authorities.Footnote ³² Similarly, in underground and resistance movements, the women who bore arms continued to constitute a minority of resistant women as a whole, a fact that often led to an underestimation of their participation, as was the case in France.Footnote ³³

It was in this broader context that women warriors became the objects of both praise and approbation. Despite the widespread reluctance or refusal to accept female combatants within armies or armed resistance movements, women warriors were effective mobilisation vehicles. Examples of women carrying out combat roles demanded attention because of their difference from established gender norms. Their bearing of arms implied that the cause for which they were fighting was so important and so urgent that they were prepared to (temporarily) relinquish their ‘natural’ female roles and responsibilities to perpetrate violence, taking rather than giving life. In wartime, their defiance of broadly accepted understandings of men’s and women’s roles could be positively interpreted as proof of their valour and devotion to the cause. The stories and images of these modern women warriors were then frequently transposed onto familiar cultural models of armed female heroism such as the Amazons, Hua Mulan, Joan of Arc, and Agustina de Aragón, in order to fulfil their primary purpose of mobilisation.Footnote ³⁴ This was not the case in peacetime, when they were most often viewed as disruptive or dangerous figures. The standard pattern during this period was therefore for female combatants to be heroised or martyrised during a war, when their representations served belligerents’ purposes of mobilisation, nation-building, or resistance to occupation or oppression by a foreign power. Then, once the guns had fallen silent, they would be denigrated or forgotten. A common method of attacking and demonising women warriors both during and after conflicts was to question their sexual morality. Virginity was a key element of the persona of the woman warrior archetype; in turn, representing a woman warrior as sexually ‘deviant’, for example as lesbian or as a dangerous ‘sexual predator’, distanced them from affirmative models of armed female heroism.

During this period, industrialisation not only transformed the ways that wars were fought. It also had a significant impact on the dissemination of images of warfare. It enabled stories of modern women warriors to be discovered or re-discovered and circulated across the globe. These tellings and re-tellings consisted of illustrated postcards or photographic portraits (visual representations remained significant given the low levels of literacy in some parts of the world), articles or interviews in newspapers, published memoirs and novels, commemorative statues, poems, pieces of music, and other cultural performances. Different aspects of women warriors’ personas were emphasised depending on the different political uses to which they were put. Despite the radical potential of female combatants to challenge the masculinisation of citizenship and militarisation of masculinity, women warriors were regularly evoked to promote conservative agendas in relation to gender roles and warfare. Examples of brave, patriotic female combatants were held up as a means of ‘shaming’ men into taking up their ‘natural’ roles as combatants. However, this fact does not mean that their potential to disrupt the gender and social order was completely lost. For example, women warriors were used throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as figureheads for burgeoning women’s movements, especially in Europe, the United States, Egypt, and China. In effect, women warriors proved to be malleable cultural figures that could be used to support opposing ideologies.

1.2 Joan of Arc and ‘Travelling Memory’

To account for the global circulation of women warrior stories, a key concept within memory studies that this Element draws on is that of ‘travelling memory’. Astrid Erll’s work has explored the limitations of memory studies approaches that focus exclusively on the links between memory and the construction of national identities. She argues that Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, for example, in ‘bind[ing] memory, ethnicity, and the nation state together’, fails to account for the fact that ‘there are many fuzzy edges of national memory … [a] plethora of shared lieux de mémoire that have emerged through travel, trade, war and colonialism’.Footnote ³⁵ The same might be said for some of the scholarship on the function of hero myths in relation to nation-building in modern Europe. Clearly, as Robert Gerwarth comments, the rise of hero myths in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe was ‘intimately related to either the growing need of states to legitimate their existence or territorial shape, or the attempts of stateless (or occupied) nations to free themselves of foreign rule’.Footnote ³⁶ However, as Gerwarth also notes, there is an absence in the historiography ‘of comparative studies that could help us identify international patterns of myth-making’.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, hero myths often have significant cultural afterlives, crossing geographical borders and taking on lives of their own. It is in recognition of precisely this phenomenon that Erll proposes the concept of ‘travelling memory’, that she as defines as ‘the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms and practices of memory, their continual “travel” and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders’.Footnote ³⁸ As the examples examined in this Element will show, this is a valuable theoretical tool for shedding light not only on why exceptional female combatants were the objects of fascination (or, in some cases, fetichisation) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but more importantly also on how stories and images of some women warriors, such as the Rani of Jhansi and Emilia Plater, have travelled through time and space to serve different purposes for a range of state and non-state actors.

An important aspect of both palimpsestic and travelling memory that is immediately apparent in a global study of women warriors and their cultural afterlives in this period concerns the constant reference by European and North American journalists to Joan of Arc as the warriors’ ultimate foremother. As Marina Warner shows in her landmark study, in the centuries since her death Joan of Arc has proven to be a tenacious and highly adaptable model of female heroism:

In the nineteenth century, Joan of Arc remained the most popular point of reference in relation to contemporary women warriors. For example, Polish heroine Emilia Plater, who took part in the November Uprising (1830–1) that aimed to drive the Russian Empire out of partitioned Poland (present-day Lithuania), was presented as the ‘Polish Joan of Arc’ by a series of poets, playwrights, and political activists. In Adam Mickiewicz’s famous 1832 poem ‘The Death of the Colonel’, Emilia was transformed from a Polish countess to a virginal heroine of the people, embodying national survival under foreign occupation: ‘But this warrior though in a soldier’s attire,/What a beautiful, maiden’s face had he?/What breasts? – Ah, this was a maiden,/Lithuanian born, a maiden-hero,/The leader of the uprising – Emilia Plater’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The re-tellings of the Plater story by Mickiewicz in the poem, and in his speech to the Collège de France in 1842 to plead for the Polish cause in which he compared Plater to the Maid of Orleans, were explicitly designed to appeal to international audiences already imbued in the cult of Joan of Arc.Footnote ⁴¹ Another nineteenth-century female combatant who was given the epithet of Joan of Arc was Dutch heiress Jeanne Merkus. In 1871, Merkus experienced the violence of the Paris Commune when she cared for the sick and wounded in Paris alongside high-profile French female revolutionaries such as Louise Michel.Footnote ⁴² Two years later, Merkus donned a uniform adapted from local dress and joined Serbian military commander Mićo Ljubibratić in the revolt of the inhabitants of Herzegovina against the Ottoman Empire, motivated by her religious faith, and by her own childhood idolisation of Joan of Arc.Footnote ⁴³ In March 1876, she returned to Belgrade after being imprisoned by Austrian forces, and entered the city in triumph, riding a horse and wearing a Montenegrin cap and man’s cape. The Western press described her as the ‘Joan of Arc of the Balkans’ and ‘the Amazon of Herzegovina’. During a ceremony in Belgrade celebrating her heroism, a Serbian professor also compared her to Joan of Arc in his speech, and Serbian poet and political activist Georgije ‘Đura’ Jakšić wrote of her: ‘Our Joan, not the one from Orleans, yet her equal, as pure as an angel’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The tendency to compare modern women warriors to Joan of Arc continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1911, the world press covered the story of Tringë Smajli Martini Juncaj, sometimes known as Yanitza, who fought in the uprising against the Ottoman Empire that lasted from March to August of that year in the Malësia region in Northern Albania and eastern and central Montenegro. In May 1911, the New York Times printed an article with the headline ‘Albanian Joan of Arc’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In ethnographic mode, the article emphasises Smajli’s femininity and military prowess: ‘This new Joan of Arc is not yet 22 years of age … a tall, handsome and well-developed young woman. All the Albanian young women are brave, and are trained from their girlhood to the use of firearms.’ The story was taken up in France by the populist newspaper Le Petit Journal that published a striking accompanying colour illustration (Figure 2). A few months later, a French illustrated children’s newspaper presented Yanitza alongside female Mexican revolutionaries as members of a new breed of ‘young warriors, worthy sisters of Joan of Arc’ proving that ‘feminine bravery is far from extinct and only needs the right occasion to reveal itself’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Petit Journal illustration featured the black and red colours of the Albanian flag, while the composition of the image also overtly referenced Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ and Rude’s ‘Departure of the Volunteers of 1792’, aligning the Albanian warrior with familiar French models of female revolutionary heroism. However, what was lost in these American and French cultural translations was the tradition of the Albanian burrnesha: individuals born biologically female who were permitted within the customary laws of the region (the ‘Kanun of Leke Dukagjini’) to live and be identified as men.Footnote ⁴⁷ It seems clear that Smajli was a burrneshe who took on a prominent role in the 1911 uprising. Burrnesha were objects of fascination for Western travellers, who viewed Albania in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as wild and savage, with ‘barbaric’ customs, or as a population that the ‘river of evolution’ had left ‘stranded’, the view of British traveller Mary Edith Durham.Footnote ⁴⁸ Within this orientalist optic, as Aleksandra Horváth demonstrates in an analysis of a 1907 account by German doctor Ernst Schultz, Albanian burrnesha were re-interpreted for Western audiences as ‘sworn virgins’, thereby situating them firmly at one end of the virgin/whore dichotomy through which women were judged.Footnote ⁴⁹

Figure 2 ‘Yanitza, the Albanian Joan of Arc’, Le Petit Journal Supplément Illustré, 28 May 1911

Rather than using orientalist stereotypes, however, the French Petit Journal journalist Ernest Laut associated ‘Yanitza’ with Western models of women warriors:

Tellingly, Laut differentiates between ‘adventuresses’, who take up arms to satisfy individual desires, and ‘the true equals of Joan of Arc’, who sacrifice a feminised domestic role for patriotic reasons, and in doing so perform a crucial role as inspirers and mobilisers of others to their cause. This vision of Joan of Arc as a selfless, patriotic, and chaste young heroine whose example should be emulated was widespread on both sides of the political spectrum in early twentieth-century France, and neutralised the woman warrior’s potential to symbolise a transgression of the gender and/or social order.Footnote ⁵¹

Labelling a broad range of armed women as ‘Joan of Arc’, moreover, was not limited to European examples. Nana Yaa Asantewaa, an Asante Queen Mother who following the death of her brother played a key role in the 1900–1 Asante-British War (War of the Golden Stool), was regularly called ‘Africa’s Joan of Arc’ in the British press.Footnote ⁵² In 1901, Michael White published a book about the Rani of Jhansi, a leading figure in the Indian First War of Independence (Indian Mutiny) of 1857, entitled Lachmi Bai: The Jeanne d’Arc of India.Footnote ⁵³ In 1933, the Australian World’s News followed the example of other world newspapers when it ran a story about Yoshiko Kawashima entitled ‘Japan’s Joan of Arc’. Despite the headline, Kawashima’s identity was complex: a Manchu princess brought up in Japan, Kawashima relinquished a female identity in 1925 and dressed and identified as a man. Kawashima spied for the Japanese Army before founding a counterinsurgency unit in 1932 to suppress anti-Japanese resistance in occupied Manchuria.Footnote ⁵⁴ This tendency to use ‘Joan of Arc’ as a blueprint against which modern warriors were viewed and judged reveals a Western/non-Western power dynamic in relation to the images and stories of women warriors that were circulating around the globe. Comparing warriors to ‘Joan of Arc’ was a way of making a diverse range of individuals and political, cultural, and military contexts legible for the readerships of Western newspapers, and of controlling and limiting the meanings with which the warriors were charged. The nature of the individual conflicts, and of the diverse roles that the warriors played within them, is thereby smoothed over in favour of a Western model of feminised and patriotic Christian sacrifice.

The remaining sections of this Element consider in more detail the uses of women warrior figures in relation to their primary function as figures designed to inspire and influence the behaviour of others in wartime. Section 2 analyses the way images of armed women were used for mobilisation in the two world wars, focusing on visual culture in 1914–18 and the global circulation of depictions of Russian/Soviet women soldiers in both wars. Section 3 explores armed women as symbols of resistance in anti-colonial and feminist movements. First, it analyses the evolving depiction of the Rani of Jhansi, whose life and actions were depicted in contrasting ways after her death in, on the one hand, colonial and orientalist discourse and, on the other, as an icon of anti-colonial resistance. Second, it explores the varied uses of images of women-in-arms in global campaigns for female suffrage, including parades, pageants, books, and images, interrogating the complicated relationship between feminism, pacifism, and the uses of armed women as hero myths to popularise suffragist and/or feminist movements. Finally, the Element examines women warriors in relation to demobilisation and post-war memory cultures. Section 4 considers the ways that female ex-combatants themselves attempted – successfully or unsuccessfully – to instrumentalise their wartime profiles for personal, economic, or political purposes. Some of the warriors who feature in this Element have been examined individually by scholars, but rarely from a transnational perspective. This Element responds to the recent observation made by Boyd Cothran, Joan Judge, and Adrian Shubert that ‘it is necessary to widen the lens of analysis beyond the specific nation-states from within which the stories [of women warriors] have typically flourished’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In order to widen the lens in this way, I draw on several excellent studies of individual women warriors, but add to their conclusions by including additional examples, and by placing individual case studies in robust conversation with one another.Footnote ⁵⁶

2.1 Visual Culture and Mobilisation in the First World War

The visual culture of the First World War demonstrates how industrialised war simultaneously shored up and challenged pre-existing understandings of how and why wars were fought, and of what men’s and women’s roles were within them. As Pearl James observes, this is evident in both the style and the content of wartime imagery: ‘In war posters, new national identities coalesce around nostalgic visions of the past. Women wear both traditional and non-traditional guises. … Posters proffer a complex blend of folk art, traditional “high” art, and slick advertising sense’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This blend of the traditional and the modern can equally be seen in First World War posters and postcards featuring women warriors. There exist numerous examples of mythical or classical armed female figures embodying nations such as Britannia, Germania, Italia, and Marianne, or ‘universal’ values such as Justice, Liberty, and Victory.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the success of these idealised allegorical figures depended on the ‘unlikelihood of women practising the concepts they represented’: they remained in the symbolic order, detached from the real world.Footnote ⁶² Joan of Arc was also prominent in the First World War propaganda as an idealised embodiment of chaste and selfless patriotism, and played a key role in the mobilisation of both men and women. This was particularly the case in the United States, where she had enjoyed enormous popularity from the 1880s onwards, and inspired hundreds of works of art.Footnote ⁶³ In 1915, Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s statue of Joan of Arc was unveiled in New York, and was used as a gathering place to support American soldiers, and to celebrate the 1918 armistice. In 1916, Cecil B. de Mille released the film Joan the Woman, with a script by Jeannie MacPherson, which promoted American entry into the war. The film begins in 1916, and features the appearance of a ghostly Joan, ‘the Girl Patriot’, before a British officer in his trench, inspiring him to fight. As the inter-title explains to the spectators: ‘Joan of Arc is not dead. She can never die – and in the war-torn land she loved so well her spirit fights today’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1918, the Treasury Department exploited the success of Joan of Arc as a mobilising symbol of popular wartime patriotism in a poster designed by Haskell Coffin, which depicts a curvy Joan of Arc with sword held aloft and the accompanying message ‘Joan of Arc Saved France. Women of America – Save Your Country. Buy War Savings Stamps’ (Figure 3). The poster was aimed at a civilian audience, its romanticised imagery suggesting, as Claude Grimel remarks, that ‘frugality in the household is tantamount to bravery on the battlefield’.Footnote ⁶⁵ There is evidence that Coffin’s poster inspired American women to participate in overseas war service. One cohort of war workers who responded to Joan of Arc as a symbol of female patriotism were the ‘Hello Girls’, 223 bilingual female telephone switchboard operators who were trained and sent to the Western Front in 1918 to improve the performance of the US Army’s telephone networks.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the 1918 San Francisco War Bond Parade, the Hello Girls rode in a car bearing the slogan ‘We are on our way to France to serve our country’, and were flanked by a woman dressed as Joan of Arc riding a white horse, reminiscent of suffragist parades. Furthermore, in a surviving photograph of two members of the corps, sisters Raymonde and Louise Breton have a copy of Haskell’s Joan of Arc poster prominently displayed on the wall of their barracks at Neufchâteau.Footnote ⁶⁷

Figure 3 ‘Joan of Arc saved France’, Poster, H. Coffin, 1918

Another very different image of armed women common in the First World War presented them as sentimentalised or sexualised uniformed combatants, who functioned as promised sexual rewards for recruits. American artist and illustrator Howard Chandler Christy produced some of the most frequently reproduced examples, such as the 1918 Naval Reserve Coastal Guard recruitment poster ‘Gee!! I Wish I were a Man’, in which a woman in navy uniform has a ‘curve-accentuating pose, … plunging neckline and … sidelong, coquettish gaze’ that issue a sexual invitation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similar evocations of female combatants existed in all the belligerent nations in popular postcards, such as the series by Italian illustrator Adolfo Busi picturing scantily-clad pin-up models wearing military uniforms, and firing hearts from rifles, canons and grenades, or the French ‘Les Femmes soldat’ series, featuring highly stylised, shapely high-heel-wearing female soldiers (Figure 4). Such images drew on the popularity of male impersonators who had regularly appeared on stage from the 1860s onwards in European and American theatres and music halls, often dressed as soldiers, such as British music hall performer Vesta Tilley, whose song ‘The Bold Militiaman’ (1897) promised her male listeners sexual favours in return for military duty.Footnote ⁶⁹

Figure 4 ‘Russie. Pour Dieu & Pour le Tzar’ (Russia. For God & the Tzar), French First World War postcard, A. Noyer

The reception of these kinds of images is hard to gauge. Scholars have effectively argued against a view of belligerent populations as ‘blind pawns’, helpless in the face of propaganda, that exaggerates its effectiveness and does not account for the different ways in which audiences would have identified (or not) with the messages being disseminated.Footnote ⁷⁰ A more nuanced understanding of visual culture in the First World War that aimed to mobilise belligerent populations is provided by Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau: ‘What is called propaganda was not just a vertical process but also a horizontal one, even, to some extent, a great upsurge from below, sustained by … illustrators …, journalists, writers, film-makers, musicians and artists’.Footnote ⁷¹ This was certainly true in relation to images of women dressed as soldiers. For example, the popular figure of ‘Fräulein Leutnant’ had featured in pre-war Austrian and German popular songs and operettas before being the subject of two wartime films directed by Carl Wilhelm, and a series of patriotic postcards (Figure 5).Footnote ⁷² In German and Austrian ‘Fräulein Leutnant’ postcards, overt references to the theatre, including phrases from popular pre-war songs and plays that appeared as captions, set the tone for those who sent or received the cards, and positioned the uniformed women as coquettish performers of a well-known theatrical type who did not threaten the dominance of martial masculinity.Footnote ⁷³ Rather, as Bettina Brandt argues, the humorous staging emphasised both the support of the home front for mobilised combatants, and the distance of the stylised female figures from ‘the male domain of serious fighting’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 5 ‘Fräulein Leutnant’, German First World War postcard. Caption: ‘Wenn ich erst kommandiere/Zum sturm die infant’rie/Geht gern mit mir durches Feuer/Die ganze kompagnie’ (If I first command the infantry to attack, the whole company will gladly advance under fire with me)

Yet the meanings of such images were always double-edged, as they had the potential to embody a sexual reward for combatants, and at the same time to threaten the status quo by referencing the wartime incursion of women into military roles. Thus, a 1916 British Punch cartoon was able to play on the cultural anxieties brought about by uniformed women for comic effect, mocking women soldiers by implying that as soon as the ‘Amazon corps’ had finished their drill exercises they reverted to stereotypically feminine behaviour that indicated their unsuitability for military service, such as putting on lipstick and adjusting their hairstyles.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moreover, as David Boxwell argues, cross-dressing during the war, whether that was male impersonators in films and on stages behind the lines, or female impersonators in theatrical performances at the front, simultaneously neutralised and energised the possibility of same-sex desire, and thereby remained an inherently ambiguous performance of gender and sexuality.Footnote ⁷⁶

A final way in which militarised women appeared in First World War visual culture was as photographs or realist illustrations of heroised female combatants, designed to ‘shame’ men into enlisting, or to inspire women into non-combatant war work. For example, photographs of the uniformed members of the Women’s Voluntary Reserve (WVR), a British paramilitary organisation, appeared in the Polish, French and American press.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Warsaw daily newspaper Bluszcz described them as ‘women-soldiers commanded by Colonel Lady Castlereagh’, referring to the WVR’s founder, Edith Vane-Tempest Stewart, the 7th Marchioness of Londonderry. The article made it clear, however, that their example was cited not in a bid to encourage Polish women to take up military or paramilitary roles, but to engage in gender-appropriate war work.Footnote ⁷⁸ This was in line with the WVR’s own self-presentation, as they attempted to counter British press criticism of their uniforms and drill.Footnote ⁷⁹ In a speech delivered in 1915, the Marchioness of Londonderry declared that the members of the Reserve ‘were diametrically opposed’ to ‘ostentatious displays [of] women stamping up and down the country, bristling with firearms and making themselves ridiculous’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rather, she presented them as taking over the civilian duties of mobilised men. Other mediatised armed women included those involved in resistance networks in German-occupied France and Belgium, such as seventeen-year-old Emilienne Moreau in Loos-en-Gohelle, near Lens.Footnote ⁸¹ During the 1915 Battle of Loos, Moreau told the British about German gun placements, and allegedly killed at least two Germans with a British army revolver. Moreau’s story had all the ingredients the press was looking for, and Le Petit Parisien quickly offered her 5,000 Francs for an exclusive. Her photograph and portrait in mourning clothes (her father and brother had died during the war) featured widely in the Allied press, and she was the subject of an Australian recruitment film in 1916, The Joan of Arc of Loos, directed by George Willoughby.Footnote ⁸² One Sydney newspaper reported that at the point in the film when, inspired by the vision of an Angel of War and waving the French flag, Moreau rallies the retreating Allies back into attack, ‘the French section of the audience stood up and sang the Marseillaise’.Footnote ⁸³ Other newspaper reports, however, were critical of the film’s glorification of the battle, reflecting the wider debate over conscription in Australia. In France, Moreau was represented as much as a civilian as a combatant, symbolising stoicism in relation to the heavy losses of life and territory, the bravery, resistance and sacrifices made by patriotic civilians, and Allied cooperation under fire. Moreover, the contradictions apparent in the construction of a war heroine who combined innocent civilian war victim with patriotic woman warrior were not lost on the German press. Des deutschen Volkes Kriegstagebuch reproduced the French press photograph of Moreau with the caption ‘The so-called “Heroine of Loos” who is being celebrated in the English and French press because she murdered five German soldiers in the Battle of Loos’, strategically placed next to an article stressing the German nation’s desire for peace.Footnote ⁸⁴ Here, Moreau was presented as an example of a franc-tireur breaking the rules of warfare rather than a model of patriotic female heroism for others to emulate.

2.2 Russian Women Soldiers

The use of images of armed women as a means of inspiring and/or ‘shaming’ non-mobilised men and women was particularly evident in both world wars in relation to the global circulation of images of Russian/Soviet women soldiers. In 1917, four women’s battalions, two of which were known as Battalions of Death, and eleven communications detachments were established by the Provisional Government. A further ten all-female combat units were formed in units around the Russian Empire, but without official sanction, through the organisational efforts of local women’s groups.Footnote ⁸⁵ In total, between four and five thousand women served in the war, including one all-female naval unit.Footnote ⁸⁶ The First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death was led by Maria Bochkareva, a semi-literate peasant woman from Siberia who had been given special dispensation in 1914 to join the Russian army. Bochkareva was one of hundreds of Russian women who volunteered to become soldiers in the early years of the war. They were regularly compared by Russian journalists to the Amazons and Joan of Arc, both positively and negatively, echoing other press responses to high-profile European women soldiers, such as Milunka Savić and Flora Sandes in Serbia, or Dorothy Lawrence and Marie Marvingt, who both briefly fought for the British and French armies by ‘passing’ as men.Footnote ⁸⁷ The establishment of the all-female units in 1917 should therefore not be understood as an indication of a widespread acceptance by the Russian public or Russian authorities of women in combat roles within the armed forces. Rather, their formation was in part an attempt by the Provincial Government after the February Revolution to address a national emergency, and in part the result of efforts by groups of women with shared goals and intentions, spearheaded by progressive women seeking greater participation of women in the public sphere. By mid-April, both military and civilian authorities were profoundly concerned about the fighting capacity of Russia’s troops, and in May 1917 mass mutinies began to occur at the front. Female soldiers were seen as one of the solutions to the problem by Alexander Kerensky, Minister of War. In the midst of a highly unstable political crisis, the women’s battalions can be understood, as Laurie Stoff explains, as ‘a bold social experiment undertaken largely for propaganda purposes … to serve as inspirational symbols to boost morale among the war-weary troops and simultaneously to shame men into resuming their “patriotic duty” as defenders of the nation’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Bochkareva fully embraced her role as the figurehead for the Provisional Government’s attempt to mobilise Russian men and women in an increasingly unpopular war. Posters appeared with her photograph urging Russian women ‘to join the general effort for victory over the enemy’, and further images of her in uniform and wearing medals as proof of her bravery and service to the nation were published in newspapers and journals, for example in the journal Russkoe slovo produced in the United States by anti-tsarist Russian émigré Ivan Kuz’mich Okuntsov (Figure 6). Recruitment drives at theatres and other public venues starred Bochkareva declaring: ‘To create real soldier-women and to go with them to the front … must serve to shame those male deserters, who, on the eve of final victory over the enemy, run away from their civic duty. … And so, comrades, I ask you to join my battalion’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The appeal was successful and thousands of women came forward to offer their services, although not all were accepted. On 21 June 1917, Bochkareva and 300 members of the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death marched from their barracks to St Isaak’s Cathedral in Petrograd, where their battalion was consecrated by Bishop Andrei of Ufa, and they were presented with a banner sent by Kerensky, featuring St George and a skull and crossbones.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Marseillaise was played during this public spectacle, echoing Kerensky and the Provisional Government’s beliefs that ‘the noble symbols and images of the 1789 French Revolution would inspire Russian soldiers to the noble bellicosity of the soldiers of the French Revolution’.Footnote ⁹¹ Others referred specifically to the roles of women during the French Revolution in an effort to mobilise women, such as socialist war nurse Tatiana Aleksinskaia, whose pamphlet ‘Women, War and Revolution’ celebrated the contributions of French revolutionary female citizens to national defence.Footnote ⁹² To some extent, this was successful as a recruitment strategy, at least among young women. Ernest Poole, an American living in Russia, quoted a teenage girl linking her intention to enlist in the women’s battalion with the French revolutionary precedent: ‘How horrible it would be to look back and say, “I was young at a time like the French Revolution, but all I did was to … stay in a nice, quiet place on a river!”’Footnote ⁹³

Figure 6 ‘Head of the women’s infantry battalion, Bochkareva’, Iskri (Sparks), Weekly Supplement of Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word), Vol. 24, 1917

However, Bochkareva’s women soldiers only briefly embodied the spirit of Rude’s ‘Departure of the Volunteers of 1792’ leading reluctant Russian soldiers towards enemy trenches at the Battle of Novospassky Forest on 9–10 July 1917, in an attack that left two women dead, two missing, and thirty-six wounded.Footnote ⁹⁴ The First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death’s military service, alongside its members’ positive reputation as ‘warriors’ who could save the nation, were short-lived. In the following months, Russian women soldiers met with criticism, hostility, and failure. They were attacked by troops who blamed them for helping to prolong the fighting, and by the Bolsheviks for abandoning their femininity and being dupes of the bourgeoisie. In October 1917, a small number of women from the First Petrograd Women’s Battalion took part in the defence of the Winter Palace, and were branded as counter-revolutionaries, although in reality women soldiers joined both sides in the Civil War.Footnote ⁹⁵ Bochkareva joined the anti-Bolshevik cause and went to the United States, where she dictated her memoir, Yashka, before being tried and executed by the Bolsheviks in 1920.Footnote ⁹⁶

Images of Russian women soldiers also circulated globally, both as objects of fascination and as tools of mobilisation, and made Bochkareva an international media celebrity.Footnote ⁹⁷ As had been the case with Albanian Tringë Smajli Martini Juncaj, some Western journalists linked the formation of the battalion with cultural stereotypes of the savagery or exoticism of Eastern European culture, seeing Russian peasant women as physically better suited to combat, or Russian women as revolutionary in nature.Footnote ⁹⁸ The French newspaper Le Miroir published photographs that provided a striking contrast with the eroticised imagined Russian woman soldier in Figure 4, showing them in their uniforms and shaven heads during a physical training exercise in their barracks.Footnote ⁹⁹ The caption reads: ‘Here are the Russian women soldiers learning how to wrestle to develop their muscles’, and the journalist noted the frequently repeated claim that the soldiers ‘carried poison in case they were taken prisoner’. However, the Russian women warriors were not presented in the Western press as examples to follow, but as proof of women’s patriotism and of Russia’s willingness to continue to participate in the war (despite evidence to the contrary), designed to raise morale and reassure readers about the combined strength of the Allied Forces. For example, an article in the British press published in September 1917 stated: ‘Slaughter may not be women’s work, but the woman who will sacrifice her womanhood on the altar of patriotism is a heroine self-evident. … The energy of Russian women startles but does not appal. Their vitality has not unsexed them’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This kind of praise diverged from the private responses of Western diplomats stationed in Russia, who made their disdain clear in their letters and diaries. American General William Judson wrote in a letter to his wife in September 1917: ‘I enclose a picture of a Woman’s battalion. The Russians have a lot of them and they are very useless and absurd’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Similarly, Joseph Noulens, the French Ambassador, wrote in his diary: ‘I saw these unfortunates when they passed under the windows of the French embassy …. They marched in step, affecting a martial spirit which was obviously contradicted by their plump figures and their feminine waddle’.Footnote ¹⁰² These contradictory responses were particularly evident in the United States, where the mixed reception of the women soldiers crystallised ‘the debate about female citizenship and women’s claims for self-defence’ more broadly.Footnote ¹⁰³ While some articles praised the Russian women’s patriotism and sacrifice for the nation, other journalists questioned their sexual morality, and the New York Times stated that their primary function was ‘as an object lesson to the malingerers and peace mongerers’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Soviet evocations of Russian women who fought in the First World War produced in later decades aligned more with criticisms of female combatants as unwomanly or sexually deviant than with the praise of them as embodying a noble spirit of French revolutionaries. Karen Petrone notes that there were few cultural representations of women soldiers in interwar Soviet memories of the First World War, but that they became a more frequent reference point during the Second World War, when they were presented as undesirable female models tainted by their associations with the tsarist war effort. For example, in Sergei Sergeev-Tsenskii’s 1944 novel Brusilov’s Breakthrough, the hero Livensev is horrified by a female soldier’s ‘lack of true womanliness’, and the character functions, in opposition to Livensev’s love interest, a virginal war nurse, as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the tsarist army.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such romanticised Soviet visions of women’s wartime roles clashed not only with women’s participation in the Civil War, but with the realities of the Second World War, in which over a million women served in the Soviet armed forces and as partisans.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As the war progressed, increasing numbers of women carried out combat roles and carried arms, blurring the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant. However, despite the extent of women’s militarisation in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941–5, the majority of war propaganda posters produced in Russia offered a conservative vision of gender roles. Women were exhorted to step into men’s shoes, including for the armed forces, but this was presented as a temporary necessity to save the nation. Their potential as future brides and mothers was constantly emphasised, and a gendered hierarchy remained in place.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Thus, Soviet women working for the armed forces, including in combat roles, were represented and heroised according to a traditional hierarchical understanding of men’s and women’s wartime roles that followed the ‘double helix’ model as theorised by Margaret and Patrice Higonnet, in which ‘the changes in women’s activities during wartime did not improve their status’ as ‘the female strand on the helix is opposed to the male strand, and position on the female strand is subordinate to position on the male strand’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Although the double helix model does not explain more subtle and gradual transformation of the ways in which women’s relationships to the military and to the state were changed by their participation in both world wars, it nonetheless offers a helpful way of understanding how any shifts in women’s rights and roles in wartime, such as the extensive Soviet use of women in their armed forces, were often understood and presented at the time as temporary transgressions of gender norms that did not threaten women’s underlying femininity.

Soviet women were also used for wartime mobilisation in other Allied nations. In Britain, for example, Soviet-style imagery of women patriotically mobilised for war but maintaining their femininity was seen as an essential tool in the government’s need to swell the wartime workforce: ‘In British propaganda and popular culture, the Soviet woman … reconciled labour with domestic responsibility, maintained her good looks without succumbing to vanity, and embraced militancy without compromising women’s peacemaking and nurturing qualities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As a result, many British Second World War posters either directly or indirectly referenced Soviet women. However, this kind of discourse was more difficult to maintain in relation to female frontline combatants in the Russian armed forces, who were being celebrated for taking rather than giving life. Jean Knox, Director of the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) from 1941 to 1943, was keen to differentiate British women’s non-combatant war roles from those of Soviet combatant women:

This ambivalent attitude towards Soviet women soldiers in the Second World War is equally illustrated in the Allied representation and reception of sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who became a global media star. Before the war, Pavlichenko had been a history student at the University of Kyiv and paramilitary activist who already had some experience of shooting. She volunteered in summer 1941, and within a year allegedly had 309 kills to her name. Her achievements were first publicised in the Soviet Union by male combatants, including a Sergeant Grigorov who sent a sketch of her to Komsomolskaia Pravda, the official organ of the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from besieged Sebastopol. Her fame spread quickly, and she was regularly featured as a heroic ‘sniper girl’ in the Soviet press. Like Bochkareva before her, Pavlichenko was a willing participant in her mediatisation, writing articles and giving rousing speeches at rallies. Anna Krylova argues that the positive public reception of Soviet female soldiers and pilots in the Second World War led to a desire to repeatedly display their military prowess to their male supervisors: ‘the male gaze was … treated by young women pilots, snipers, and commanders as a prompt for self-display in combat’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In Pavlichenko’s case, her high success rate as a sniper was a key ingredient in her media profile as a war heroine (Figure 7). In late 1942, she was selected by the Young Communist League and Stalinist government to go on a tour of Britain, the United States, and Canada with three male comrades as a ‘role model of an active-duty, successful and confident female combatant’.Footnote ¹¹² Her heroisation as a glamorous young ‘sniper girl’ continued in the British, American, and Canadian press. Articles which featured her exploits had the primary aim of mobilising civilian women into a range of non-combatant wartime roles, as did the numerous invitations to speak at rallies and public events. Pavlichenko and her colleagues toured factories, warehouses, and dockyards, and spoke of their admiration of civilians’ contributions to the war effort on behalf of the Soviet people.Footnote ¹¹³ Her story appealed to wartime populations, and she attracted large crowds.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Journalists expressed their fascination for the ‘unlikely’ combination of her glamorous, feminine appearance, and ruthless efficiency as a sniper: one caption beneath a photograph of her aiming her gun described her as ‘The Girl with Deadly Aim and a Dimple’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ At the same time, they continually and firmly emphasised the fact that other Allied women’s contributions to the war effort should be in non-combatant roles.

Figure 7 ‘Female sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko in a trench’, Smema Magazine 12 (1942)

As had been the case in the First World War, journalists and other commentators argued that while women like Pavlichenko should be lauded for their bravery and patriotic devotion, these sentiments should be channelled into more gender-appropriate activity in the case of non-Soviet Allied women’s war contributions. Thus, Russian/Soviet women in both world wars were depicted in contradictory ways in foreign press coverage. In the Second World War Canadian press, for example, the representation of Soviet women soldiers was aligned with that of Chinese guerrilla fighters as ‘battle-weary and tough’, in contrast to Canadian servicewomen who were ‘portrayed through images of heightened femininity and womanliness’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the world wars, Russian/Soviet women warriors were used to mobilise Allied men and women into the war effort, but there were clear limits to their function as direct role models for other women in nations where the idea of women in frontline combat roles remained taboo. In order to differentiate between Russian/Soviet and other Allied women, reporters regularly resorted to ethnographic stereotypes, emphasising Russian/Soviet women’s ‘hardy’, ‘brave’, or ‘virile’ nature, and categorising the societies to which they belonged as ‘backward’ or ‘uncivilised’ in relation to the West. More critical portrayals attacked them for straying from the norms of chaste Joan-of-Arc-like heroism, and hinted at either lesbianism or promiscuity in their sexual behaviours.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In contrast, other Allied women continued to be portrayed in traditional ways as support workers for militarised men who maintained their femininity and concomitant potential to give birth to future citizen-soldiers. Despite the reality of thousands of women performing frontline combat roles in the world wars, in Soviet recruitment propaganda that lauded motherhood as women’s primary national duty, and in Allied receptions of Russian women soldiers, attempts were repeatedly made to retrace the boundaries of traditional gender norms in relation to the changes to men’s and women’s wartime lives. In other words, Cynthia Enloe’s definition of militarisation in which ‘the inner sanctum [of] combat’ is inherently bound up with concepts of masculinity and national identity was still very much in evidence.

3.1 The Rani of Jhansi

The Rani of Jhansi is another example of a woman warrior figure whose long and complicated cultural afterlives follow the pattern of demonisation followed by a series of ‘re-discoveries’ of her as a warrior-heroine by nationalist and anti-colonial movements. Lakshmi Bai (née Manikarnika) fought against the British in the First War of Independence in India, and was the widow of the Maharaja Gangadhar Rao, who died in 1853, earning her the title of Rani. Following the revolt against British rule in 1857, in which the town of Jhansi was besieged, she joined other rebel forces to defend the town, allegedly on horseback and wearing male clothing. She was eventually killed on the battlefield near Gwalior, and in the decades following her death became a figure of fascination both within and beyond India, inspiring a spate of novels, poems, plays, statues, songs, films, and television dramas.Footnote ¹²³

Harleen Singh’s detailed study of cultural and political representations of the Rani of Jhansi reveals her popularity as a figure in British Orientalist writings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. British portrayals of her ranged from praise of her courage as the ‘Indian Joan of Arc’ to damning indictments of her ‘deviant’ sexuality. These responses not only mirrored the usual ways in which armed women were represented in this period but also embodied the contradictions to be found at the heart of British imperial policy, in which Indian women were frequently positioned in colonial and orientalist discourse as vulnerable women to be protected and rescued from oppression. Thus, as Singh notes:

This political context explains the frequently contradictory and ambiguous representations of the Rani of Jhansi produced by British writers and journalists. Some accounts presented her aggressively sexually pursuing British men, thereby positioning her as a femme fatale, the negative other of a chaste warrior-heroine. In contrast, other re-tellings of her story overtly aligned her to Joan of Arc, such as Michael Reference Abena OseiWhite’s 1901 novel Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of India (Figure 8). In this novel, her difference from other Indian women is emphasised:

White thereby ‘whitewashes’ his protagonist, retaining a sense of her ‘exotic’ feminine appeal while aligning her with a Western model of female armed heroism and distancing her from negative representations of resistant Indians. The tradition of comparing Lakshmi Bai to Joan of Arc in an attempt to offer a positive colonial vision of British-Indian relations continued amongst British writers into the twentieth century. In a Foreword to his 1933 play Rani of Jhansi, for example, playwright Philip Cox wrote: ‘No one who studies the very meagre evidence that is available concerning this remarkable woman can help being struck by resemblances between the chequered life of the Rani and the reputed career of the Maid of Orleans’. Cox expressed the wish that rather than provoking nationalist resistance to British rule, ‘a sympathetic portrait of the Indian counterpart of Joan of Arc may do something to bridge the gulf of ignorance and prejudice that separates Britain and India’.Footnote ¹²⁶ In reality, however, his portrayal of a love affair between the Rani and a British officer in his play provoked widespread protest in India.Footnote ¹²⁷

Figure 8 ‘Her horse leaped forward, straight for Sindhia’s guns’. Illustration in Michael White, Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi: The Jeanne d’Arc of India (1901)

Amongst Indian artists, poets, and writers, the Rani of Jhansi became a potent and popular symbol of resistance. She was evoked as a role model in different traditions of Indian nationalism, but especially by nationalists seeking to promote an alternative to Gandhian non-violent revolution. Shortly after her death, she was immortalised in songs and ballads, and paintings of her adorned shrines in Indian temples and homes, in which she was usually identified with Hindu goddesses. In these images, she was depicted in warrior mode on horseback, half-Queen, half-deity. As Joyce Lebra-Chapman notes, ‘the Rani’s wearing of male battle regalia is related to the theme of Hindu deity as androgyne’, therefore representing her as a Hindu goddess protected her from potential accusations that a woman had transgressed her ‘natural’ duties by usurping a male military role.Footnote ¹²⁸ As is the case with other mythical female warrior figures, in these images her powers remain situated firmly in the realm of the symbolic, and do not pose a threat to the patriarchal status quo.

In the 1920s and 1930s, images of the Rani of Jhansi continued to be used as a call to resistance by Indian nationalists both within and beyond India. The front cover of the May 1926 issue of The United States of India, the journal of the pro-independence Pacific Coast Hindustani Association (which was later renamed the Ghadar Party), for example, featured a drawing of the Rani in male clothing brandishing a sword, and described her as the ‘Heroine of the War of Independence of 1857’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Following the marking of her grave in Gwalior by the Archaeological Survey in 1929, Indian poet Krishna Baldev Verma published an article praising the Rani in the nationalist newspaper Vishal Bharat, which was immediately banned.Footnote ¹³⁰ One of the best-known twentieth-century literary portraits was the Hindi poem ‘The Rani of Jhansi’ by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, first published in 1930, and which after independence became a staple of school and college curricula and was inscribed on a stone table at the entrance to the Fort of Jhansi.Footnote ¹³¹ Nehru described her in his 1934 memoir written in prison as ‘the one bright spot against [the] dark background’ of 1857, as a ‘girl-widow, twenty years of age, who donned a man’s dress and came out to lead her people against the British’.Footnote ¹³² Finally, in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1939 novel Across the Black Waters, which tells the story of Indian participation in the First World War, the Rani is once again compared to Joan of Arc, but this time as a critique rather than as a justification of colonial rule:

Here, Anand uses the encounter of Indian sepoys with a statue of Joan of Arc in France to unmask the ways in which his education led the protagonist, Lalu, to internalise colonial models of military heroism. Whereas at this point in the narrative, as Santanu Das notes, ‘imperial war and nationalist resistance get conflated in the excitement of military service’, Lalu gradually comes to view the British use of Indian troops as another form of colonial exploitation.Footnote ¹³⁴ For the novel’s readers, this scene underscores the dramatic irony of the protagonist’s evocation of Joan of Arc and the Rani of Jhansi, both leaders of violent uprisings against British power, as vehicles for mobilising Indian troops to risk their lives for the British Empire.

Nationalist interpretations of the Rani’s story generally included details that firmly placed her within traditional gender codes, such as the popular depiction of her as a warrior with her child tied to her back.Footnote ¹³⁵ This combination of sword-wielding resistance heroine and mother is a familiar trope in cultural evocations of warrior women during this period, and constitutes an attempt to neutralise the warriors’ potential to challenge the primacy of motherhood in models of female identity. The trope is also present, for example, in depictions of Nene Hatun, a Turkish heroine of the Turkish-Russian War (1877–8). When Nene Hatun participated in the armed defence of the Aziziye Bastions at Erzurum against Russian forces, taking up the rifle of her brother who had been wounded, she was a twenty-year-old mother with a three-month-old son. She was originally only remembered in Erzurum, but in the 1930s her story appeared in the national press, and in the anti-Soviet mood in Turkey following the Second World War her identity as an iconic woman warrior gained further traction, particularly when she was visited in 1952 by US General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, NATO Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, which helped to propagate her story. In 1955 she was named ‘Mother of the Year’ by the Turkish Women’s Union. More recently, in 1998, a statue was erected (Figure 9) depicting her triumphantly holding her rifle aloft with her baby strapped to her back. Her twentieth-century incarnation as ‘the Mother of Mothers’ of the Turkish nation, in which her military defence of her homeland is seen as a natural extension of her maternal nurturing of her child, is reminiscent of many nationalist depictions of the Rani of Jhansi.Footnote ¹³⁶ As Cynthia Enloe argues in her analysis of a photograph of a Spanish Civil War miliciana holding her baby, ‘interweaving the images of woman as combatant and mother so tightly suggests that as soon as the immediate threat recedes, as soon as the “war is over”, the woman in the picture will put down the rifle and keep the baby’.Footnote ¹³⁷

Figure 9 Metin Yurdanur, ‘Nene Hatun’, Erzurum, Turkey, 1998.

Photograph by Eğitmen Mahmut

Even in post-independence India, when nationalist writers and poets were able to write freely about 1857, portraits of the Rani of Jhansi tended not to transgress gender norms. However, not all re-tellings of her story represented her as a mythical warrior-goddess-mother rather than as an armed role model for twentieth-century Indian women to emulate. On 14 August 1945, the Rani of Jhansi was again the central character in a play, this time performed in Singapore by the Indian women of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, which had been founded by nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose two years earlier.Footnote ¹³⁸ Around 1,500 women in Burma, Malaya, and Singapore enlisted in the Regiment as part of Bose’s attempts to mobilise Indian communities in South East Asia for the liberation of India. Bose’s nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s had been marked by a relatively progressive vision of women’s rights and roles, as he sought to abolish child marriage, purdah, and the prohibition on the remarriage of widows, and promoted female education and economic independence.Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1941, he escaped house arrest and travelled to Nazi Germany, where he organised 4,500 Indian POWs who had previously fought for the British in North Africa into an Indian Legion, supported by Nazi authorities. However, after becoming disillusioned by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union he was transferred via German and Japanese submarines to South East Asia, and there attempted to revive an Indian National Army. His choice of the Rani of Jhansi as the name of his ‘unit of brave Indian women’ can be seen as a ‘safe’ choice, given her high profile in nationalist circles on the one hand, and the extent to which the majority of Indian cultural representations enfolded her within traditional feminine and/or religious models of female identity on the other.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The narrator of Jai-Hind, an anonymously published diary of a member of the Regiment, claims to have first heard Bose on the Berlin Radio in April 1942, and describes how ‘thrilled’ she was by his nationalist rhetoric, before he arrived in Singapore and directly called for female recruits to form a ‘death-defying regiment, which wields the sword which the Rani of Jhansi wielded’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bose’s recruitment efforts were aided by the Regiment’s leader, Dr Lakshmi Swaminadhan, an obstetrician and nationalist activist based in Singapore who helped to persuade Indian women and their families of the respectability and urgency of the cause. Jai-Hind, which like other published memoirs by former members offers an overwhelmingly positive assessment of the motivations and actions of Bose’s nationalist Azad Hind movement, suggests that the women soldiers were keen to live up to the ideals of heroic militarised womanhood that the regiment embodied:

In reality, however, the Regiment’s actions did not lead to any military or tactical successes. After training, the women were deployed to Burma from March 1944 to August 1945. When the British advanced, they were forced to retreat, and after the surrender of Rangoon to the British, veterans were repatriated to their homes in Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, and Dr Lakshmi Swaminadhan returned to India.Footnote ¹⁴³ Bose died when the Japanese plane he was travelling in crashed on 18 August. The performance of the play on 14 August, then, was the final dramatisation of the Regiment’s members ‘wielding the sword’ of the Rani.

The use of the Rani of Jhansi as a mobilising figure for Indian female combatants resonates strongly with two other groups of female combatants in the Second World War who were named after nineteenth-century women warriors. In Greece, the ‘Bouboulina group’, an underground resistance organisation in Axis-occupied Greece, was named after Laskarina Bouboulina, a military leader in the Greek War of Independence in 1821.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The Bouboulina group was founded by Lela Karayanni (or Karagianni) in May 1941, and initially helped Allied soldiers flee to the Middle East, before becoming associated with the wider intelligence network of resistance groups in Greece. Karayanni was betrayed and arrested on 11 July 1944, and was executed on 8 September 1944 at the Haidari camp in Athens.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Greek writings on and cultural representations of Karayanni produced since the end of the Second World War have tended to present her, like her group’s namesake, as a remarkable and singular national heroine, ‘on the one hand … as a Superwoman of the Resistance who ran her own group and planned her activities without any assistance, and on the other hand … as a devoted housewife of impeccable middle-class credentials, devoted to the family values of twentieth-century Greece’. In reality, Karayanni was one of many Greek ‘soldier[s] in the secret army who had to follow orders’ of British intelligence organisations, but her status as a national Greek war heroine has been aided by her association with Bouboulina.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The Emilia Plater Regiment was founded in 1943 as an all-female unit of the Soviet Polish Army, and was largely made up of Polish deportees from occupied eastern Poland in 1940 and 1941, alongside Soviet and Polish communists. Members were called ‘Platerówki’, and numbered up to 8,000 in total. When they entered Polish territory alongside the Red Army in 1944, they were received ‘with a mixture of pity and awe’, which is reminiscent of responses to the Rani of Jhansi Regiment as described in the memoirs of former members.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While the political contexts in which these three groups of women soldiers in the Second World War were formed differed, their names reveal the extent to which nineteenth-century female warriors had the power to mobilise women into military roles in the mid-twentieth century. The Rani of Jhansi, Bouboulina and Plater not only acted as role models of bravery and patriotism for female recruits, but crucially gave their armed war service respectability, enshrining it within national identity myths that protected them, at least in part, from gender-based criticisms as women who were taking up frontline combat roles.

3.2 Women Warriors and Women’s Rights Campaigns

Another key use of armed women as inspiring role models in the early to mid-twentieth century, and one that offered a more disruptive vision of women warriors in terms of traditional gender roles, was in feminist and suffrage campaigns. Pageants and parades were a key strategy deployed by European and North American first-wave feminist movements, and regularly featured suffragist activists dressed as inspirational resistant women from the past. Given her widespread fame, it is unsurprising that Joan of Arc was the most popular choice. Different tendencies within the suffrage movement emphasised different aspects of her myth in order to rally their supporters and broaden their movement’s appeal to new audiences. For some suffrage activists, Joan was depicted as a triumphant military leader, leading her troops to victory, while others emphasised the Catholic vision of her as a saintly martyr, called to fulfil a righteous mission. Both these versions were discernible in early twentieth-century suffrage representations of Joan of Arc.

In June 1913, British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison laid a wreath at the foot of a statue of Joan of Arc at the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) Summer Fair and Fete in Kensington the day before she was killed stepping in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Davison’s spectacular funeral procession included fellow WSPU member Emily Howey dressed as Joan of Arc on horseback, and banners in purple silk printed with Joan’s alleged final words ‘Fight on and God will give the Victory’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This was not the first time Howey had performed the role: Joan of Arc was a staple of suffrage parades, both in Britain and in the United States, where the role of suffrage herald mirrored the British suffrage visions of Joan, ‘representing moral authority and righteousness for the cause’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In American parades, pacifist feminist Inez Milholland performed this role astride a white horse, and her appearances were much commented upon by journalists. Interpreting Joan of Arc through the lens of the New Woman and the popular revival of medievalism, Howey and Milholland embodied an alternative model of female identity, and did so in spectacular fashion. The press ‘lapped up the medieval spectacle of banners, floats and bands’, helping to bring the ‘mass media exposure that transformed the cause into a mass movement’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ When Milholland died in 1916, her casting as Joan of Arc continued to be foregrounded in the suffrage press and she was presented as a martyr of the American suffrage movement.

In the British movement, Christabel Pankhurst described Joan of Arc in her autobiography as the spiritual foremother of the suffragettes, and claimed her as the movement’s patron saint.Footnote ¹⁵² Christabel Pankhurst, alongside her mother Emmeline, was comfortable with a militarist version of Joan of Arc as a model of feminist resistance. This is evidenced after the outbreak of the First World War when Joan was featured in martial mode on the front cover of WSPU journal The Suffragette in May 1915 as ‘The Great Patriot’, reproducing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingrès’s painting ‘Joan of Arc at the Coronation of King Charles VII’ (1854), and thereby realigning her as a symbol of both the movement and the Allied war effort.Footnote ¹⁵³ In contrast, the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, founded as a constitutional non-militant suffrage organisation, and renamed St Joan’s Social and Political Alliance in 1923, carried an embroidered banner in suffrage processions featuring Joan of Arc alongside the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Marie’, emphasising the religious elements of her persona.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ These examples demonstrate how the varied depictions of Joan of Arc in suffrage material showcased different conceptions of women’s active citizenship and a range of opinions amongst activists about what forms resistance to the state should take, including disagreements about the role of violence. The malleability of Joan of Arc as a warrior-heroine or martyr-saint meant that she could be adopted by both militarist and pacifist feminists. However, neither feminist vision of Joan necessarily tallied with broader cultural understandings of her myth. In Britain this was illustrated in December 1913, when a performance of Raymond Roze’s opera Joan of Arc, which was attended by the King and Queen, was disrupted by three WSPU members who used a megaphone to proclaim to the Royal Box ‘We wish to draw an analogy between the opera your majesties are witnessing and … the policy of persecution adopted towards women fighting for a principle and an ideal for liberty’. Press reports attest that their cries were greeted with calls of ‘Sit down’ and ‘Throw them out’ from a ‘wholly unsympathetic’ audience, revealing the limitations of their attempts to co-opt Joan of Arc to their cause among the wider public.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The tensions at play in the uses of Joan of Arc to represent the diverse strands of early twentieth-century feminism, whether radical or moderate, pacifist or militarist, religious or secular, were not only evident in the West. Joan of Arc also appeared as a model of female identity in the Chinese women’s press in the early decades of the twentieth century. Collections of life stories of ‘Famous Women’, or what Alison Booth terms ‘collective biography’ or ‘prosopography’, had been a popular genre across the globe for centuries, and served didactic and nationalist functions.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Chinese examples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as female poet and educator Xue Shaohui’s Biographies of Foreign Women, often included Joan of Arc. They were influenced by the 1898 Reform Movement, which was triggered by China’s defeat in the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese war, leading elite Chinese men and women to turn to the West for models of reform, including exemplars of virtuous womanhood.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Chinese collections were also influenced by the popular trend for women’s ‘self-help’ literature in Japan in the Meiji period. While some of the Chinese portraits of Joan of Arc underscored traditional understandings of women’s identities, others offered a more critical view of the status quo, and presented Joan as a radical example of active citizenship for women. For example, the Magazine of the New Women’s World of China, which was published in Japan from 1907 by Yan Bin, a medical student and member of the Society of Chinese Female Students, aimed to create a ‘female citizenry’ and included Joan of Arc as one of its Euro-American models for its readers.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Mei Zhu, the biography’s author, claimed that in contrast to Hua Mulan, who was famous for and motivated by her devotion to her father, Joan was the more impressive warrior as her devotion was to France and its survival.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In this way, the journal uses the figure of Joan of Arc to promote Chinese women’s potential to take up public and political roles for their nation, rather than being confined to familial duty.

Joan of Arc also regularly appeared as an inspirational example of heroic womanhood in the women’s press in Egypt in the same period. Marilyn Booth notes that in published collections of biographies of ‘Great Women’, Joan of Arc was a more frequent point of reference for the Egyptian women’s movement than African or Arabic mythical warrior women such as Khawla bint al-Azwar.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Once again, Joan symbolised different political and ideological positions depending on how and why her image was deployed by Egyptian activists:

The biographies of Joan that appeared in the Egyptian women’s press targeted a readership of elite educated women, including the members of the Egyptian Feminist Union, founded in 1923 and affiliated to the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. Egyptian nationalist feminists were therefore operating within an international context, and were influenced by the feminist interpretations of Joan common in Europe and the United States. However, in what is one of many examples of the ‘travelling memory’ of Joan of Arc in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the biographies that appeared in the Egyptian women’s press were equally shaped by emerging anti-colonial thought.Footnote ¹⁶² Thus, while Joan of Arc appeared across the world as a ‘timeless’ heroine in didactic literature aimed at providing appropriate role models for young women to emulate, in 1920s Egyptian women’s journals she was featured ‘in full nationalist garb bedecked with dazzling anti-British trimmings’. For example, in the third issue of the journal Young Women of Young Egypt, Zaynab Sadiq evokes in her depiction of Joan’s English enemies the ‘plunder and pillage’ of British colonists.Footnote ¹⁶³ The adaptability of Joan of Arc as a woman warrior meant she could be used in colonial and anti-colonial contexts, representing the ‘soul’ of France in Catholic imperial right-wing publications on the one hand, and functioning in a newly independent Egypt as a ‘perfect 1920s … female patriot and representative of the nation’ on the other.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Joan of Arc was also made to embody anti-British sentiments in performances by Constance Markievicz, who as a member of Irish paramilitary organisations and central figure in the Irish Republican movement frequently played on her persona as a woman warrior in her political activism. Markievicz linked nationalism and feminism, presenting women as the victims of both colonial and patriarchal domination, and condoning the necessity of violence in opposition to both.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In a speech to the Students’ National Literary Society delivered in Dublin in 1909 entitled ‘Women, Ideals and the Nation’, Markievicz evoked the ‘magnificent legacy of Maeve, Fleas, Macha and other great fighting ancestors’ in her call to arms to twentieth-century Irish women, extolling them to ‘dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank and buy a revolver’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In 1914, the Irish Women’s Franchise League organised a ‘Daffodil Fete’ that included four theatrical tableaux featuring Joan of Arc performed by Markievicz.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In one scene (Figure 10), she liberates a female suffrage prisoner wearing full armour and carrying a sword. Although the tableau is dramatising the political enfranchisement of women, by 1914 Markievicz was well-known as an Irish revolutionary, lending the pageant a nationalist as well as a feminist message for its audience.

Figure 10 Photograph, ‘Constance Markievicz in a pageant as Joan of Arc appearing to a woman political prisoner’.

Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

The Irish pageant was based on Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women, a British suffrage play that ‘gathered many famous names together to present a theatrical picture of female solidarity and strength that would motivate, educate and move the audience’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The pageant debuted in London in November 1909, and then toured Britain before its final recorded performance took place in Liverpool in 1912.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ It featured a cast of women warriors including Joan of Arc, Boadicea, Emilia Plater, Agustina de Aragón, and the Rani of Jhansi. The role of the silent group of Women Warriors in the play was to challenge the declaration by ‘Prejudice’, the character representing anti-suffrage arguments, that force is the last and ultimate judge: ‘tis man/Who laps his body in mail, who takes the sword/The sword that must decide! Woman shrinks from it/Fears the white glint of it and cowers away’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The armour-clad, sword-bearing ‘Captains and Warriors’ who entered the stage deny these essentialist claims about women’s inability to take up combat roles. Hamilton’s play thus praised armed women not only for their devotion to their causes but also for their transgression of traditional models of womanhood. However, unlike Constance Markievicz’s performance of Joan of Arc that married militant feminism with armed resistance to British rule, the Warrior Women scene in Hamilton’s play reinforced a colonial vision in its description of the Rani of Jhansi: ‘Thou dark-eyed princess of an eastern land,/Ruler of Jhansi, captain proved in war/Though but a child in years, thou tak’st thy rank/Among thy fellows’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The language here is reminiscent of British Orientalist depictions of the Rani’s ‘exoticism’ and bravery and no mention is made of the fact that the men she was fighting were British soldiers. The Rani was played in one performance by suffragist Munci Capel, and in another by Anglo-Indian actor and suffragist Adeline Bourne.Footnote ¹⁷² Bourne was a prominent member of the Actresses’ Franchise League, and after initially being ‘frightened of the militants’ and the potential risk to her career prospects of feminist activism, she devoted herself to the suffrage cause.Footnote ¹⁷³ Bourne performed other ‘Orientalist’ heroines, including Cleopatra in a pageant of Shakespearean heroines for the Women Writer’s Suffrage League in 1912, described as the ‘climax’ of the show, and Salome in Oscar Wilde’s play, which a reviewer in 1911 states was indicative of a more widespread fashion for ‘Easternisms in the theatre’, giving a ‘real atmosphere of the Arabian nights’ in London.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Playing the Rani in Hamilton’s pageant was therefore consistent with the roles in which Bourne was regularly cast during her career, although reviews did not reference her Anglo-Indian background. More importantly, however, the description of the Rani in A Pageant of Great Women reveals how Western feminists fell back on orientalist stereotypes when they used African or Indian warrior women as exemplars to support the suffrage cause, thereby eliding the racist colonial roots of the power structures against which the resistant women were fighting.

The common use of women warrior figures as mobilisation tools in global feminist and suffrage movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is explained by a number of factors: the worldwide recognition and adaptability of Joan of Arc as a heroine, the popularity, translation and global distribution of collective biographies of ‘Great Women’ as a literary genre, and the desire by feminist activists for role models who could embody active female citizenship in writings, parades, pageants, and stage performances. This analysis has also shown how different aspects of the women warrior figures were foregrounded in feminist discourse, which reflected the different tactics and divergent ideological roots of the broader women’s movement. Such tensions were equally apparent in responses of first-wave feminists to the deployment of female soldiers in the First World War. The outbreak of war polarised women who were active in suffrage and women’s rights movements, sometimes dividing those who had worked closely together, with some rallying unproblematically to their nation’s flag, and others remaining (or becoming) staunchly pacifist, defining and refining their ideological position as the war progressed.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ These divisions can be seen in the reception of the Russian women soldiers amongst feminists. Emmeline Pankhurst, a prominent supporter of the Allied war effort, visited Russia in summer 1917 and expressed her admiration for Bochkareva’s Battalion of Death, seeing in it a new basis for winning citizenship, and proclaiming to its members: ‘I greet you in the name of millions and millions of women’s hearts who anxiously await the results of your heroic attempts to show that women have the right and CAN participate in society in any situation and can be everywhere on the same level as men.’Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In contrast, pacifist feminists like Emmeline’s daughter Sylvia presented female combatants as part of the problem not the solution to women’s oppression, perpetuating the violence that they associated with patriarchal power structures. Accordingly, in a diary entry describing Emmeline Pankhurst’s visit to Russia, Sylvia described the female soldiers her mother inspected as ‘ill-starred companies of women’, and commented in the journal she edited, The Female Dreadnought, that the name the ‘Battalion of Death’ ‘was well chosen’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The same tensions were also apparent in the United States. Journalist Bessy Beatty, one of several female American journalists who reported on Russia in 1917, saw in the women soldiers a vision of a new society: ‘Not the isolated individual woman who has buckled on a sword and shouldered a gun through the pages of history, but the woman soldier banded and fighting on masse – gun companies of her, battalions of her, whole regiments of her’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ On the other side of the argument, Louise Bryant, a socialist feminist who published another eye-witness account entitled Six Red Months in Russia, attacked them as class traitors in their role of shaming peasant men into enlisting.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Russian women soldiers were also regularly attacked by anti-suffragists who questioned their ‘mannish’ appearance and morality, and saw in them a doomed future for mankind. Once again, the familiar tropes of sexual immorality, lesbianism, and anti-feminine behaviours used to demonise armed women were never far from the surface in debates about armed women during this period.