“Women in War: WWII”(University of Pittsburgh, 30 November-2 December 2007) is the second of two interrelated international conferences devoted to the discursively generated identity of women in modern war. The first, “Women and War: Recent Conflicts” (The Ohio State University, October 26-28) examines the wars in Afghanistan (1979-89), the Balkans (1992-95), and secessionist Chechnya (1994-96, 1999- ).

 
The Pittsburgh conference focuses primarily on Poland and Russia in World War II, while taking Belorussia, Ukraine, and Germany into account.  Until recently, the copious scholarship on these wars (in English and in the languages of the pertinent countries) has downplayed the role of gender, though, as Joan Scott accurately observes, “The great wars of the twentieth century have typically been characterized as watersheds for women.” Indeed, the editors of a major publication on the topic maintain, “War must be understood as a gendering activity, one that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society, whether or not they are combatants.”  Our interdisciplinary conference analyzes the processes of gendering, and specifically the construction of womanhood in sundry cultural forms: film, graphics, literature, music, propaganda, and television.