Alison S. Fell, "Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello and welcome. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today on the New Books Network talking to Professor Alison Fell, who's Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool. Alison's widely published and her most recent monograph is on women as veterans in Britain and France after the First World War. She's also played a leading role in large scale research projects with the Imperial War Museum and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Welcome to the podcast, Alison.

Thanks for inviting me, Alison.

This book on warrior women starts in 1850 and ends in 1945. Why did you begin and end your story here? What's special or interesting about this period?

So the series that the book is part of, which is the Cambridge Elements in Modern War series, actually starts in the 1850s. So that's one answer. But a more interesting answer is because the topic I was exploring, which is the way in which images of armed women were used to mobilize populations, the way those images moved across borders and through time, really changed in the late 19th century because of the way that the press developed and press agencies developed and the reason that I stopped it at the end of The Second World War was because after that period, there were more and more women who were more officially integrated into armies across the globe. Now, this was not consistent, and there were certain, as my book says, there were women who were more officially integrated before that date. But I noticed a difference in the way that female combatants, armed women, were represented and the ways in which they were instrumentalized in the second half of the 20th century onwards, because it didn't have the same visibility and the same impact, because it became more normalized. So that's one of the reasons why I started 1850 and ended in 1945.

So basically your sources changed dramatically before and after this period.

Yes. Yeah, go ahead.

So there's two big theoretical concepts driving this book. The first is palimpsetic memory. So you start by talking about the Wonder woman movie from 2017. So thinking about Wonder Woman, can you tell us what you mean by palancetic memory and why it's a helpful term that maybe we should all use?

I think it's a helpful term in relation to the woman warrior figures that I'm looking at because.

They'Re always both individual women responding to very particular circumstances and icons, you know, archetypes. And I think because of the particular function of armed women in relation to modern warfare, which is to act as a mobilizer, a galvanizer. If you think about palate cests in which the layers are always visible of the past, all representations of the warrior women that I looked at draw on some of those iconic archetypal images from the past. So Joan of Arc is the most obvious example that I talk about. But there are other iconic warrior women figures like the Amazons, that also play an important role. So although one of the interesting aspects I was thinking of is how modern it's a mechanized warfare, industrialized warfare in the world wars, changed the way in which wars were fought, changed the relationship between combatants and civilians, which was clearly also the case in civil wars or guerrilla warfare or resistance groupings. That palancestic memory, the sense in which sort of beneath descriptions and images of modern women warriors, there was always these traces of pre existing, stereotypical archetypal women warriors, was something I really wanted to think through and talk about. So that's why I think palimpsestic memory is so important in relation to women warrior figures, because like a lot of female figures in cultural history, they always have this aspect of, you know, functioning as an archetype as well as being a representation of an individual woman, which.

Actually makes them really hard to talk about sometimes. The other thing you talk about in the book is traveling memory, which you unpack by talking about Joan of Arc in Egypt and Ireland. How does memory travel?

So traveling memory is a concept that I found particularly useful because one of the first sets of sources I was looking at was newspapers, the press and, you know, magazines and specialist journals. But what I noticed after I was kind of following these stories of female competence in various conflicts around sort of tracing them as they popped up in the US or the UK or in France or in Germany or in Russia, is the role of press agencies. So, you know, people when they're journalists, when they're covering warfare, are often seeking stories that play a particular role that are something a bit different. They're going to catch the imagination. So one of the ways in which memory travels, definitely through the rise of the press and through international press agencies in this period. So, you know, this. This meant that.

You could have a woman who was originally only known in a very localized, regionalized setting in a very, you know, in a conflict that may not have lasted very long. But suddenly this story actually takes on a cultural afterlife of its own because it's told to one journalist and then, you know, goes viral, as we'd say, today, and then maybe taken up 20 or 30 years later, either by the original.

Nation in which it took place or elsewhere to play a different function. So I think it was. Yeah, it was looking at my original set of sources that were mostly press sources that got me thinking about how. How memory travels, how it borders.

How did Joan of Arc get to Egypt?

So Joan of Arc is a particularly interesting example because she was so malleable as an archetype and because she was so widespread. So Joan of Arc starts meaning different things within the Western world. So she's used to. So in France, you know, we start where she originated. She's used by both the right and the left. She's used by different groupings to support the current French regime, the political regime, or oppose it. She's used by Catholics and by secular activists. So one of the ways she gets to Egypt is by some of these representations where she can be used as a kind of figure of resistance or a figure to embody the values of a state, including an imperial state, means that when you're looking at former empires, she's there partly because she becomes very important in education. She's mentioned in textbooks. She's mentioned in popular biographies of famous people. So she sort of travels through popular culture, but she's also traveling through political networks, through networks of resistance. So in Egypt, the particular context in which I look at her is by Egyptian women's movement in the early 20th century. And she's kind of performing two functions, really. So Jo La Bart was used widely by the global women's movement as an example of a sort of active woman who shows the importance of the.

Independence and defying patriarchal limitations that would limit women's rights, on the one hand. So she's kind of really common figure in feminist pageants in the US and in Europe. But at the same time, she's also really interesting in Egypt because she becomes an anti imperialist figure. So she's used to talk about the problems of British imperial policy. And so she becomes a kind of model of Egyptian nationalism at the same time. So, you know, she's very. Because of. She can be represented in a series of different ways, and different aspects of her myth can be emphasized by different groupings. She could kind of mean lots of different things, so lots of different people, which is why she was such a successful archetype and why she can appear as a, you know, anti British feminist figure in Egypt and also represent the kind of Catholic far right in France.

Interesting. As you mentioned before, a lot of this book's about images of women, and many of your key sources are photographs and drawings and posters. So how were female combatants represented visually during the First World War?

So visual representation is really important, partly because in some of the parts of the world where female warriors are used as a mobilizing figure, literacy rates were still low. And the representations, I think, are examples of palimpsestic memory. So they. They do hark back to other iconic female forms. So sometimes you can see in the representations or the statues of women warriors.

Female figures used to represent nations, you know, Mayan, Britannia.

Nearly always they have their weapon drawn, which I think is to differentiate them from very traditional or other functions and uses of female figures in visual representations. So, you know, they're often a sword aloft or a rifle are lost, and it's. This is part of the use of women warriors to suggest that women are prepared to step outside of their traditional functions as wives and mothers and nurturers because the cause is so. Just because the cause is so important. So they nearly all have weapons drawn. Sometimes, though, there are other props, if you like, in terms of the visual imagery to suggest that this is a temporary transgression or maybe seen as a usurping of a male warrior role. And when the cause is won or the war is over, they will return to what would be understood as their traditional role. So I look particularly at some images where you have women warriors who also carrying babies. So the Rani of Jansi, who was the Indian queen figure I looked at, has lots of representations of a. With a baby strapped to her back. And there's another Turkish.

Woman warrior that I look at where she's also depicted with her small child that are photographs that sort of play with women as mothers and women as warriors. And I think this is because of. Often they're quite conservative, actually, gender discourse that lay behind some of these visual representations. And it's to reassure the spectators or the viewers. Viewers of these images that they're temporarily usurping their roles. It's not a permanent state of affairs. It's not actually, you know, the gender order will return and remain intact once the fight is won.

So especially because it's temporary, it makes a bit of sense to see why female combatants are popular with World War I. But when you start talking about female Russian soldiers in the first half of the 20th century, it was much more difficult. Why were they particularly difficult for people to know what to do with?

I think that Russian soldiers are. Well, first I think we have to look how they're depicted within Russia and then beyond Russia. I think that their function within Russia was largely.

As far as some of the state authorities that allowed it to happen, was kind of a solution in a state of emergency, in attempt to shame men into themselves being mobilized for combat. So they attempted to represent them, you know, with. With dignity as true patriots of the Russian state of kind of the Russian empire. And it was. However, the photographs of these Russian women soldiers were necessarily troubling in gender terms, as Judy Butler would say, because they are. They look androgynous, they shave their heads, they are wearing very similar uniforms. And when you see about how they were represented and discussed and debated beyond Russia, you can see that there's this inherent ambiguity into how they were received and accepted or rejected. So in my book, I kind of talk about how quickly a positive representation of an armed woman as, you know, true patriot, going beyond the patriotism of men, because it's a bigger step for women to take and easily switch into them being aberrations, being sexually deviant, you know, representing the other, the negative, other positive representations of women as wives and mothers and repopulators of the state. So you can see this with the way in which Russian women soldiers are received. So there's a lot of criticism of them, attempts to ridicule them. There's accusations of sexual impropriety, there's suggestions that you know, it's indicative of where Russian society is in relation to so called civilized societies. At the same time, because they're an ally and the allied press is a sense in which there is some more positive receptions of them as, you know, brave and an example to us all. But, but it's, it's very double edged and as soon as the, you know, the First World War is over in Russia after, when it, when it moves into the civil war following the revolutions, these women become.

Either depicted as dukes of the bourgeoisie, as class traitors or as ridiculous or as sexually deviant within Russia as well as. So I think Russian women's soldiers are interesting because they sort of crystallize the way in which all armed women in gender terms.

Are very inherently ambiguous and praise is only ever partial, limited and usually dependent on and understanding that this is a temporary role that they're taking on.

You also mentioned Lakshmi Bhai or the Rani of Yancy a bit earlier. So she comes from India and how does her Indianness intersect with her gender when it comes to the way she's represented in popular media?

So it depends who's representing it, as is always the case. So there are.

Orientalist depictions of her by British journalists, writers, playwrights.

In which she is seen as the Indian Joan of Arc. And we can see key tropes of colonialists, colonial understandings of Indian womanhood that are just mapped onto the Rani of Jansi. It's interesting because obviously she's a figure of resistance against British rule, but there's a certain sort of romanticism in the way that.

The British representations try and position her. Some really good scholarship by Indian historians that I drew on that show how a lot of the British 19th and 20th century Representations of a kind of whitewasher by suggesting that she was very different from other Indian women, that she had more in common with European womanhood. So there's, you know, showing how difficult it was in a way for an Indian woman to be positioned as a Jonah Arc figure. But in terms of Indian representations of her.

What you see there, I think is she becomes a kind of goddess figure which again protects her from accusations that she's usurping a male warrior role. She becomes a very important sort of mobilizing figure for Indian nationalism.

And.

That importance and fame has kind of increased over the decades. And so one of the things I was, was trying to do in the book is, is look at the differences when she's represented in India in Britain, but also then say in the, in the US or by other groups later in the century. So she, she's a bit like Joan of Arc, has multiple representations and actually.

You know, different aspects of her are come to the fore depending on who's representing her and for for what reason.

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Learn more@disneyplus.com what's on thinking beyond the people getting represented to what people do with it, it's easy to see how female combatants might have been inspiring for women's rights campaigners like the British suffragettes. Were suffragettes overwhelmingly positive about female combatants, or was it actually a bit more complicated?

Well, the debate over female combatants, whether that's women who were soldiers, like the Russian women in the First World War, or the use of kind of iconic archetypal figures like Joan of Arc to represent the suffrage movement, I think mirrors the debate within the women's movement around pacifism and around the use of violence. So, you know, obviously the difference between a suffragettes and suffragists would said would sometimes revolve around the use of violence and direct actions to further the cause. And equally in France, for example, the French women's rights movement tends not to turn to Joan of Arc as readily as the US and the British women's movement. And that's partly because I think of a nervousness amongst the French women's rights movement to be associated with violence or extremism or direct action because they felt that would, you know, majority of them felt that would be counterproductive in terms of the campaign for the right to vote, for example. So you kind of certainly have divided opinions around female combatants, whether that's the right for women to bear arms more broadly, the right for them to be integrated into armies, or, or the Use of armed women as icons. And that's because there was fundamental disagreement about either the use of violence or direct action, or about the attitude to war. So pacifism was a uniting factor in a lot of late 19th century, early 20th century women's movements.

And it became a factor that split the women's movement during the first World War, where some feminists refused to continue to take part in internationalism, and other feminists thought internationalism was as important as ever and attempted to continue the international congresses as part of their anti war activism. So I don't think it's surprising that female competence are quite.

Divisive figures actually in the women's rights movement, because I think that just reflects the broader divisions.

They're a bit of a double edged sword in some ways.

Literally.

Yeah. So far you've been talking mostly about how female combatants were represented to mobilize other people to support a war or another. But what happens after the wars finish? Does the way that people talk about female combatants change when they're no longer needed for mobilization purposes?

Yes, definitely. I mean, there are some women who retain their power as, you know, symbols of a movement, national heroes, but they tend to be the women who didn't survive. So in the immediate aftermath of war, sometimes female combatants, armed women who were killed, become part of memory cultures and play very specific functions. They can be seen as martyr figures, they can be seen as kind of figures of resistance. And there may be images of them or statues of them, or hagiographic life stories published. And they can play an important part in the sort of memory battles or commemoration activities following wars. I think for, for the women who survived, it was often much more difficult to sustain a positive reputation once the wars are over. And that was manifested both, for example, in the battles for women who'd seen active combat duty to get pension rights or other rights awarded to veterans in the wake of war during this period. There are examples of it, but it, you know, there is just as many examples of women who never received pensions and never accepted as having performed war service in the same way as men. Equally, for some women who, you know, do not wish to return to a traditional, if you like, peacetime role.

Going back to the household or ceasing to have a public or political role play it, continue to play a part in national life. It was very difficult because.

It was often then a situation in which their war service is viewed with suspicion. They can become figures of ridicule.

You know, there are, for example, women who attempt to continue to serve the armed services in peacetime, and they're not accepted. So it's really once the primary, I would say their primary purpose in the way in which they do, you know, have a degree of cultural capital, have a degree of state or popular support, Is much harder to sustain Once the war's over. So there's lots of, you know, stories of women becoming very disillusioned, Feeling that their actions weren't appreciated, that they're ignored, that they're not taken seriously. In the kind of first person sources that we have, there's often quite similar types of narratives about, you know, their struggles for recognition or compensation. And once the wars are over, and.

With the end of war, we start to get towards the end of the book. And you finish with talking about the female army of the kingdom of dahomey in africa. And they play a big role in the movie Black Panther from 2018.

What is the way that hollywood portrays the dahomey amazons? Show us about palimpsestic memory and traveling memory?

I think the reason I wanted to end with that Was the kind of. It was bookended with wonder woman, in a way, Is to show that it's helpful to think of the way in which the stories and images of these women.

Traveled and were maintained as an ongoing process that doesn't end. So, you know, the dahomey amazons, as they're often called, Were depicted According to racist, imperial visions of african womanhood for a long time.

And black panther shows us, I think, how hollywood is perhaps responding to alternative visions of african womanhood, Alternative visions of Africa's past, you know, afro futurism. And I think it was, Even though I don't talk about it in much depth, and there are scholars who written really, really interesting work on the way in which the women of the kingdom of dahomey have been represented and continue how their representation continues to evolve.

I just felt it really did show that this is going to continue to be the case. That.

You know, women warriors still have a powerful role to play. In terms of our cultural understandings of war, Our cultural understandings of what men's and women's roles, you, know, have been in war, what that says about their relationship to nations and state, and, you know, what. What their role is today. So even though I say, you know, things definitely changed in the second half of the 20th century onwards, some of the ways in which female competence Are being represented today, Whether that's in films, whether that's in current conflicts, you, know, it's not that they have nothing in common with some of the representations and some of the women's stories that I look at in my book.

Thank you very much. That's about all we have time for today, but thanks so much for talking us through this topic. And of course, if people want to find out more, the books available on Amazon and a lot of other places.

Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure.

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