Contents: Introduction: Warfare, history and gender / Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi p1. Heroines and heroes: sexual mythology in Australia 1914-18 / Carmel Shute p23. Day mothers and night sisters: World War One nurses and sexuality / Katie Holmes p43. Female desires: the meaning of World War Two / Marilyn Lake p60. Lesbians and loose women: female sexuality and the women's services during World War Two / Ruth Ford p81. Consuming passions: romance and consumerism during World War Two / Lyn Finch p105. Remembering romance: memory, gender and World War Two / Kate Darian-Smith p117. A crisis of masculinity?: Australian military manhood during the Great War / Alistair Thomson p133. The gendered battlefield: sex and death in 'Gallipoli' / Rose Lucas p148. The gendered figuring of the dysfunctional serviceman in the discourses of military psychiatry / Joseph Pugliese p162. In a cloud of lust: black G.I.s and sex in World War Two / Kay Saunders p178. Return home: war, masculinity and repatriation / Stephen Garton p191. Comrades-in-arms: World War Two and male homosexuality in Australia / Garry Wotherspoon p205. A bit of the other: touring Vietnam / Robin Gerster p223. 'All the passion of womanhood': Margaret Thorp and the battle of the Brisbane School of Arts / Raymond Evans p239. Socialist women and gendered space: anti-conscription and anti-war campaigns 1914-18 / Joy Damousi p254. Feminists, food and the fair price: the cost-of-living demonstrations in Melbourne August-September 1917 / Judith Smart p274. Anzac mythology and the feminist challenge / Adrian Howe p302. 'Shut up, you bourgeois bitch': sexual identity and political action in the anti-Vietnam war movement / Ann Curthoys p311. Contributors p342. Index p345.
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War has been a key part of the Australian experience and central to many national mythologies. Yet more than most activities, war polarises femininity and masculinity. This exciting collection of essays explores the inter-relationship of gender and war in Australia for the first time. Traditional images of Australians during wartime show the 'digger' making history in battle, while women play a supportive role as nurses, or wives and mothers on the home front. Yet as this book shows, war offers opportunities that erode gender boundaries. Women may be empowered economically, politically and sexually, while the trauma of war can leave men emasculated. First published in 1995, Gender and War focuses on women's and men's experiences in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War. This interdisciplinary collection addresses a wide range of subjects, and promises to change the way we think about women, men and war in the twentieth century.