Women and the Great War: A Gendered Reading

Warfare has taken a great to strengthen the man-woman binary. It's time to realize that this gender binary is no more than a myth just like the myths of ‘glory of war' or ‘patriotic death'. Women not only played the role of a bereaved mother, wife or daughter in this war. A number of them were actively involved in it-be it as a disguised male soldier, a nurse or a worker of munitions factories. They have seen the wounds, the deaths, horror of the war and conveyed it through their writings. Their letters, reports, diaries are based on their real life experience of war. Their poems, novels and stories of war are no less passionate than those of their male counterparts. This present paper aims to bring some light to the willing forgetfulness about the women of WWI because if one has to get an unbiased and clear concept of the war he must pay the right dues to those neglected women folk of First World War.