Sent: 12 September 2007 04:00
Subject: Conference Report: GENDER, WAR AND POLITICS

 Conference Report: GENDER, WAR AND POLITICS: The Wars of Revolution and
Liberation - Transatlantic Comparisons, 1775 - 1815 (The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute of Arts and Humanities, May 17-19, 2007)
by Katherine Aaslestad (West Virginia University) and Judith A. Miller (Emory
University)

       The University of North Carolina's Institute for Arts and Humanities
hosted an international conference, GENDER, WAR, AND POLITICS: THE WARS OF
REVOLUTION AND LIBERATION - TRANSATLANTIC COMPARISONS, 1775-1820 from May
17-19, 2007. Along with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the
German Historical Institute in Washington DC, Duke University, the research
group 'Nations, Borders, Identities: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in
European Memories' funded by the German Research Foundation, and the French
Consulate General in Atlanta provided the necessary support for this extremely
successful and stimulating meeting. Ninety scholars of different generations
from four countries who work on war, gender, race and national liberation
during the period between 1775 and 1820 met to address how these powerful
forces intersected during the revolutionary era. The rise of the modern
military and warfare emerged as the common touchstone among all scholars as
they sought to explore how war, in particular wars associated with independence
or liberation, emerged as key sites in the negotiation and construction of new
gender norms and national identities. All participants probed the degree to
which novel forms of mass mobilization for war contributed to increasingly
rigid notions of masculinity and femininity, despite the obvious fact that
women participated in the war effort in military institutions and civilian
society. A collected volume of selected and revised papers is in progress.
           Following a warm welcome by hosts Lloyd S. Kramer (UNC Chapel Hill),
Gisela Mettele (GHI Washington), and Alex Roland (Duke University), Karen
Hagemann (UNC Chapel Hill), the true organizational force behind the
conference, presented an introductory lecture, in which she critically
discussed the state of research and developed a gendered concept for the
analysis of this period of the first modern world wars, legitimated as
'revolutionary wars', 'national wars' or 'wars of liberation', and fought with
mass armies. Despite exciting new scholarship on this era, she pointed out that
much remains overlooked. The past dearth of collaboration between military,
social, and gender historians has contributed to the general omission of the
gendered dimensions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century warfare.
Hoping that this conference would change that state of affairs, she proposed a
gendered concept of "total war" of the revolutionary era that requires scholars
to sharpen perceptions of the far-reaching consequences of the various modes of
mass mobilization for war and mass warfare for the state and the military,
economy, society and culture. This approach must look beyond the military and
the conduct of war, to the relationship between the state and the nation as
well as those between the so-called "combat front" and "home-front," soldiers
and civilians, and men and women. She pointed to the apparent paradox of
revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare. On one hand, war offered new and rich
opportunities for men and women to redefine their relationship to their state
and nation as combatants and civilians. Yet, war seemed to strengthen an
emerging and more inflexible gender order that assigned all men the
responsibility of defending their homes and states while defining all women as
mothers and housewives regardless of their social status. <>

        The first panel entitled "Gender, War and Empires" featured the
Caribbean, South America, and the Atlantic World. David Eltis (Emory
University) commenced with a discussion of gender in the Atlantic slave trade
and investigated how war influenced the slave trade. Drawing on the large
database of 35,000 voyages that will soon be available on a website, he
revealed that the slave trade reached its peak between 1785 and 1795 and
moreover, that there were two slaves trades, one in the North Atlantic and the
other in the South Atlantic. While the wars brought a sharp, but temporary,
halt in the northern trade, the southern trade continued relentlessly. Of
importance to this conference, his team's data showed that during the
Revolutionary era, increasing numbers of women and children were forced onto
slave ships. Laurent Dubois (Duke University) followed with an investigation
into the evolving relationship between gender, race, and citizenship in the
French Caribbean with a comparison of Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. He
highlighted the intersection of race and gender to redefine new legal
categories during a time of war and rebellion, including possibilities for
women of color to petition for citizenship based on traditional republican
virtues. He also addressed the emergence of a wartime economy and how it
offered women new opportunities as they struggled to preserve their homes,
rights, and families. Sherry Johnson (Florida International University)
explored the highly militarized society of Cuba to underscore that both gender
and racial norms could be breeched due to the demands of warfare and Cuba's
vulnerability. The maintenance of codes of military conduct and honor were
expected from both genders and all social strata, just as military benefits to
widows and orphans were available to free women of color and white women alike.
Johnson traced the passage of Cuban gender regimes from those of the eighteenth
century and the wars, which offered greater fluidity and more active roles for
women, to those of the nineteenth century, which infantilized free women and
brutalized slave women, while developing an exclusionary discourse of race. A
significant contrast with other areas was the heavy role of the state in the
construction of gender and color regimes-for instance, through military
benefits and the encouragement of marriage for soldiers and civil servants.
These papers, the comment by Sarah Chambers (University of Minnesota) and the
discussion emphasized the diversity in the many labor, racial and gender
regimes of the Caribbean, as well as differences in the impact of the wars, and
in particular highlighted the need to consider issues of race and slavery in
any discussion of the period's evolving understandings of gender.
        The second panel featured "National Masculinities and Femininities and
Their Others" and began with a very interesting discussion of Revolutionary and
Napoleonic visual culture by art historian David O'Brien (University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). He traced a transformation in history painting
that highlighted the male body and the performance of gendered identities on
the canvas as artists, often with difficulty and ambivalence, sought to
redefine honor away from an aristocratic privilege  toward one associated with
merit, and finally, with Bonaparte and the Empire. Jane Rendall (University of
York) then explored the world of British women poets and their diverse
renderings of war and empire. Though most British reviewers did not consider it
appropriate for women to write about war, that criticism did not stop women
from composing poetry focused on both the horrors and glories of warfare.
Rendall explored the works of two poets, Anna Barbauld and Anne Grant, in order
to underscore the diversity in women's war poetry as well as the politicization
of war and empire in the public realm. Understood by the public as political
commentary, these two poets asserted their rights to assess the moral and
military state of Britain. Matthew Brown (University of Bristol) addressed the
construction of national heroes during and after the Spanish Wars of
Independence between 1810 and 1826. He argued that with masculinity under
pressure during war, those who would be commemorated as heroes had to be killed
at the right time, in the right way, and by the right person. He especially
examined gendered notions of honor to emphasize that personal honor and
morality were tied tightly to political ethos and operated within the
commercial and literary networks of the Atlantic world. The discussion, spurred
by comments by Anna Clark (University of Minnesota), focused on the many issues
of representation that the papers had raised, especially the contested
typologies of masculinity, and the ways in which the war reenergized the
question of gender differences while making warfare and empire palatable to a
broader public.
          Linda Colley (Princeton University) provided the keynote lecture for
the conference entitled, "Grand versus Francis: Gender, Imperial Warfare, and a
Wider Atlantic World." Her lecture featured the notion of the "privilege of
masculinity" absent a martial emphasis, as well as the self-fashioning
opportunities for women in the "frontier community" of India. She analyzed the
lawsuit of Philip Francis and George Francis Grand in late eighteenth-century
British India to illustrate that the local environment initially could trump
traditional notions of identity: gender, nationality, and religion. Grand sued
Francis for "criminal conversation" with his sixteen-year-old French Catholic
wife, Catherine Noëlle Verlee (Worlee), who had been born in the Danish colony
of Tranquebar (Tarangambadi). The case showed that eighteenth-century India,
with fewer, yet more visibly active women in a colonial community that, itself,
was made up of many nationalities and religions, offered a more fluid
environment than the British imperial rule of the nineteenth century.
Ultimately, though, under the stress of war and intensifying British
nationalism, unconventional female conduct, even on the frontier, presented too
great a challenge to the emerging political order, indicating the increasingly
close assignment of masculinity and politics.
        The conference commenced the following day with the panel "Men at War:
Masculinity and Soldiers' War Experiences." Alan Forrest (University of York)
explored the relationship between masculinity and military qualities under the
Revolution and Empire. Forrest highlighted the military's complex situation
after 1792 as new notions of revolutionary honor, morality, and selflessness
redefined both civil and martial conduct. Forrest illustrated that if the
military recognized women soldiers, they praised their masculine qualities,
rather than the women themselves. He concluded with a fascinating description
of enduring conscription rituals, the fêtes des conscrits, as celebrations of
masculinity. Stefan Dudink's (Radboud University, Nijmegen Centre for Gender
Studies) paper on the relationship between masculinity, politics, and military
careers continued the theme of military masculinity. Dudink drew an interesting
comparison between two Dutch officers to illustrate different forms of
masculinity within the military. His nuanced case study presented clear
distinctions between one officer, Herman Willem Daendels, who was strongly
committed to revolutionary reforms, and to another, David Hendrikus Chassé, who
instead championed apolitical loyalty and duty to the nation alone. Dudink
pointed out that only one successfully survived after 1815 in the Netherlands,
the officer who drew on politically neutral concepts of the citizen-soldier in
service to the state rather than to a revolutionary ideology. Claudia Kraft
(University of Erfurt) likewise explored distinctive and evolving
understandings of femininity and masculinity among the nobility in Poland, in
particular a shift from an active military identity to an administrative
bourgeois masculinity by 1815. At the same time, she traced the transformation
of femininity among the Polish elites, which swung from the inclusion of noble
women in military mobilization to their exclusion from later bureaucratic
performances, rituals that emerged as the new qualifiers for civic engagement
in a "manly self-government." Finally, Gregory Knouff (Keene State College)
explored the intersection between race and gender among poor white, free black,
and Native American men in western Pennsylvania during the American
Revolutionary wars. He argued that whiteness, masculinity, and military service
replaced property ownership in defining citizenship in the young republic.
Moreover, he asserted that such new distinctions of citizenship emerged on the
frontiers in local militias, in western Pennsylvania for example, where white
settlers (regardless of their cultural or ethnic background) felt it imperative
to distinguish themselves from Native Americans and thus viewed the War for
Independence also as a race war. This panel, therefore, offered a variety of
important insights into the various manifestations of military masculinities
and the politicized transformation of men into soldiers. Commentator Brian
Holden Reid (King's College, University of London) asked, "What are armies
for?" and spurred a lively discussion about significance of local and national
contexts in any answer to such a question.
        As a pendant to the previous panel, the following session, "Women at
War: Female War Experiences," explored women's participation in war. Holly
Mayer (Duquesne University) outlined the many areas of female activity in the
American Revolution, from camp followers to national heroines such as Molly
Pitcher. Despite women's participation in the insurrection against British
rule, Meyer argued that American leaders immediately sought to turn these rough
women into virtuous and self-sacrificing mothers and wives in order to generate
their vision of a well-ordered society. Catriona Kennedy (University of York)
addressed British women's perception of warfare at the Battle of Waterloo and
stressed that women experienced and recorded the war with more than one voice
and that they regarded themselves as "eye-witnesses" even though they were
physically removed from the field of battle. Her work emphasized that viewing
the wounded and dead as they come off the battle field was very much a war
experience, as was their fear of rape and pillage by a victorious enemy. Thomas
Cardoza's (Truckee Meadows Community College) presentation featured the vital
roles of women in the French military as support personnel. He explored the
continuities in as well as significant transformations of women's status as
sutlers and laundresses in the armed services under four different regimes
between 1780 and 1830. During the revolutionary and Napoleonic era women were
constrained more aggressively in their participation in combat as soldiers, in
particular by the law of 30 April 1793, yet gained legal status as holders of
licenses (patentes) in the armed forces. He pointed out that many
women-laundresses or sutlers-could end up in combat as their numbers grew
alongside the escalating  campaigns; yet, the state only recognized their
participation in armed conflict as a purely defensive action and acknowledged
them as such, but without pensions for their service or compensation for their
injuries. These papers and the comments, by D'Ann Campbell (U.S. Coast Guard
Academy), underscored that women did not have to be active on the field of
combat to be participants in the war experience and that, once again, the local
context-religious, frontier, and national-did much to shape women's
participation and how it was understood.
        The final panel of the day, "Home Fronts: The War at Home," explored
the consequences of war on domestic and civic life. Patricia Lin (University of
California, Berkeley) examined the transformation in British pension programs
for the families of soldiers and sailors. She argued that the army's and navy's
new approaches to state support for widows and orphans broadened the state's
responsibilities toward families, most interestingly, by expanding the casualty
payments, salary remittances and forms of care to include women in interracial
marriages and multi-racial children around the globe. Alexander Martin
(University of Notre Dame) presented a case study of "civilian masculinity" in
a time of war, that of Johann Ambrosius Rosenstrauch. He pointed out that
Napoleonic Wars contributed to both the spiritual awakening and financial
independence necessary for the self-fashioning of this alternative masculinity.
Martin's case study identified a form of masculinity that was not martial,
aristocratic, or plebian, which crossed national and religious borders and
appeared to contribute to the restrained and prudent bourgeois identity of the
nineteenth century. Elizabeth Colwill (San Diego State University) shifted the
discussion to the Caribbean and the intersection between the state and free
women claiming a civic identity for themselves and their families. Colwill
revealed the state's efforts to couple productivity and matrimony through laws
that sacralized marriage and banned divorce, while imposing a return to
plantation labor. Whereas the Republic offered new protections and legal
status-by encouraging marriage and rewarding large (legitimate) families, as
well allowing the registration of children in the state's état civil-women's
responses reveal their nuanced and determined resistance to the new system.
Even as they hastened to register their legitimate and illegitimate children to
solidify the ties of kinship and to claim "social being," they rejected both
the labor codes and the state's idea that marriage alone formed the legitimate
basis of family. The discussion, sparked by comments by Gisela Mettele (GHI
Washington), probed the models, whether generated by the state or broader
culture, that underlay the gendering of identities.
        The last day of the conference began with the panel "Gender, Nation,
and Wars: Patriotic and Revolutionary Actions and Movements," which examined
the intersection of gender and patriotism in times or war. Emma V. Macleod
(University of Stirling) addressed the forms of patriotism available to British
women during the revolutionary era and underscored the evidence of "independent
patriotism" based on the correspondence of English bluestockings. This
"non-gendered and non partisan engagement with the political affairs of the
nation" represented women's political involvement despite limits on their
sphere of action and proscribed conduct for patriotic sentiments. Similarly,
Katherine Aaslestad (West Virginia University) traced the eighteenth-century
origins of a gender-neutral civic patriotism in the republican city-state of
Hamburg. She outlined the decline in this patriotism and the emergence of new
militarized and gendered patriotic actions and rhetoric during the Wars of
Liberation in 1813. Cecilia Morgan (University of Toronto) addressed the
intersection between service to the Crown, patriotic language, and performances
of masculinity in Upper Canada during the War of 1812. Her paper probed the
gendered language of patriotism to illustrate the marginalization of women as
well as both sexes of Native Americans and Afro-Canadians, though Mohawk
narratives asserted their own service to the Crown and masculine courage.
Finally, Karen Racine (University of Guelph) addressed the gendering of nation
building in Spanish America during the Wars of Independence. Her work
emphasized the impact of European rhetoric, especially British models, in the
family-based and gendered discourse of the era. The image of the father, the
padre, as opposed to female allegories of "Liberty," especially, opened a means
to reconceive the bonds of patriarchal authority as the revolutions progressed.
She identified a shift from a fraternal identity of "brothers in arms" during
the 1810s to the "familial state" of the 1820s, united under the authority of
the "founding fathers." These papers demonstrated the diversity and dynamism of
patriotic language and its potential for rapid transformation in times of war
and national liberation. Mary Beth Norton (Cornell University) challenged the
participants by posing some broad themes that were emerging from the
conference, most importantly, the possibility that warfare allowed the
consolidation of new trends, most especially, the creation of separate spheres
and the linkage, very new, of women, the household and "private" life.
        The final panel of the conference, "Gendering War Memories" addressed
the shifting representations of masculinity and femininity in the gendering of
the commemorations of these wars throughout the nineteenth century. Sarah
Chambers (University of Minnesota) explored the state's process of constructing
memory in Chile and underscored how it used women, in particular widows, as
tools of national reconciliation to highlight common services to the state and
presented women as gullible victims, not active resisters in liberation
movements. She revealed that once-exiled "founding fathers" were exhumed and
brought back to Chile to heal the memories of suffering and internal divisions.
Kathleen Duval (UNC at Chapel Hill) used the story of Nicanora Ramos, wife of
the Spanish commandant Cruzat, to explore the lives of forgotten women who were
drawn into war against their will. Ramos was kidnapped by a Scottish trader in
the dangerous Mississippi borderlands near Chicksaw Bluffs. Drawing on her
captors' notions of honor, Ramos not only negotiated housing for herself and
her dependents in the leader's quarters, but also used her position to secure
information that she passed along to Spanish officials when she was released
three weeks later. Like many of the women who fled invading armies, or who
followed soldier-husbands, Ramos coped as well as she could in a situation not
of her own making. Turning our attention to the continent, Ruth Leiserowitz
(Free University of Berlin) addressed gender images in literary representations
of Russia's 1812 Patriotic War. Leiserowitz explored fictional heroines from
the middle of the nineteenth century who urged their soldier-fiancés to greater
acts of sacrifice and heroism. While some renderings portrayed the young women
as independent, patriotic and courageous, with time, the representations
reduced their roles to that of waiting anxiously and passively for news on a
secure home front. Wolfgang Koller (Free University of Berlin) explored the
gendered images of the War of Liberation in German feature films during the
Inter-War years. Probing the male characters in key Ufa productions, especially
those of Gerhard Lamprecht and Kurt Bernhardt, he highlighted the martial cult
of the male hero and the ways in which images of femininity and masculinity
revealed Weimar and Third Reich wish projections. The commentator, Judith
Miller (Emory University), raised the question of the impact of new
genres-novels, films-coupled with new modes of representation found in state
documents, such as family registers, in consolidating and naturalizing the
emerging gender regimes. This final panel concluded that the process of
commemorating, remembering, and forgetting wars remains highly politicized and
gendered, as that accounts of post-war trauma, victim narratives, and nostalgia
converge in the politics of commemoration and memorialization.
           The conference wrapped up with a final panel of distinguished
scholars to pull together the many issues raised by the variety of fascinating
papers. This panel consisted of Christopher Dandeker (Kings College, London),
Catherine Davies (University of Nottingham), Karen Hagemann (UNC, Chapel Hill),
Lynn Hunt (University of California, Los Angeles), and Alex Roland (Duke
University). The panel emphasized the instability of gender praxis in the era
of revolutions. Moreover, concepts of masculinity and femininity were not
unitary phenomena and instead were profoundly shaped by local conflicts and
norms, and the models themselves moved rapidly across boundaries only to be
reconfigured in their new contexts. War and revolution placed further strains
on those volatile models, raising the essential question about how to channel
violence and restore order when old understandings and hierarchies have been
swept away. If gender lines appeared to harden during the war, that development
emerged from the instability of a new gender axis where manhood was not a
given, and instead had to be performed, repeated, and naturalized. The
politicization of war and the growing sense of the citizen's "right" to comment
on the moral and military state of affairs could not be monopolized by one sex,
social group, or ethnicity and this expansion of politics generated new efforts
to reorder society. Historians have generally framed these processes within
specific national boundaries, but this conference demonstrated that the
dynamism of revolution, war, and liberation must be explored within a
transnational structure that includes the very complex and rich concept of
gender. The conference ended with an enormous debt of thanks to its principle
organizer, Karen Hagemann, whose level of intellectual rigor and organizational
energy made this highly productive and stimulating international conference
possible, and to Laurence Hare, the conference assistant. The wonderful
hospitality of the University of North Carolina was deeply appreciated by all
participants in particular the last night with local barbeque, Tommy Edward's
Bluegrass Experience and dancing at the Center for the Study of the American
South.
--
Judith A. Miller
Associate Professor
Department of History
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
Ph: 404-727-6564
Fax: 404-727-4959
Email: histjam@emory.edu
 --------------------------------------
Bruce E. Baker
Lecturer in United States History
Royal Holloway, University of London
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/unra/373/
List Editor, H-SOUTH

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