The field of gender history is now in its third decade, but histories of Eastern Europe have, until recently, remained surprisingly “ungendered.” Perhaps this is because historians are often attracted to study Eastern Europe by the region's dramatic political history—the revolutionary transitions from empire to nation-state; the radical nature of nationalist, fascist, and Communist regimes; and the Eastern front as a backdrop for war, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and the Holocaust. Demonstrating that none of these grand themes in Eastern European political history can be understood without reference to gender, Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe represents some of the best recent research in Eastern European history.

Several important themes link the essays in this collection. First is the role of gender in structuring moments of political and social transitions—from empire to nation-state, war to peace, and occupation to liberation. Maureen Healy's essay on efforts to “cleanse the war out of the warriors” in Austria after World War I is a particularly illuminating contribution to the largely unwritten history of masculinity in Eastern and Central Europe. On the one hand, returning soldiers were expected to use a firm hand to restore order and paternal authority to the allegedly disorderly wartime family (and to Austrian society at large). At the same time, observers feared that returning soldiers would bring war and social disruption home with them in the form of violence, criminality, and disease. The family was therefore literally charged with domesticating former soldiers, transforming them into restrained and “civilized” civilians. In postwar Hungary, meanwhile, Eliza Ablovatski shows how conservative revolutionaries enacted a violent counterrevolution in the name of restoring gender order. While virtuous “white” women “became a symbol of the nation in need of protection,” the stereotype of left-wing women as unfeminine and “sexually depraved” served to exclude them “from norms of chivalrous protection,” justifying the violence inflicted on “red” women by counterrevolutionary forces (82).

Second, as the editors explain in their introduction, several essays convincingly challenge the traditional binary between a female home front and a male fighting front. Alon Rachamimov highlights the diplomatic power exerted by aristocratic nurses engaged in POW relief for the Austro-Hungarian army in Russia—even if that political authority was exercised “under the socially-acceptable label of ‘nursing’” (41). In an essay on conservative women in the occupied Bohemian Lands, Melissa Feinberg suggests that the “double helix” model of gender and war, whereby war exaggerates the boundaries between female and male worlds, breaks down in the context of occupation since “both men and women generally remained at home, fighting together in a very different kind of war” (96). In the Bohemian Lands during World War II, Czechs responded to occupation in ways that are not easily classified as collaboration or resistance. Above all, they rallied together to protect ethnic and cultural “Czechness,” a battle in which women featured prominently. By publishing a guidebook for women on how to prepare traditional Czech foods without fat, meat, or eggs, for example, conservative Czech women urged women to protect Czech culture and “normality” in the home. Mara Lazda's article on the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Latvia also stresses the extent to which the experience of occupation encouraged forms of nationalism focused on the family and the home. Both the Soviet and Nazi regimes, moreover, advertised their regimes' potential to “liberate” women (whether from domestic serfdom or factory work) to win Latvian support. While the experience of occupation did not necessarily segregate men and women into a fighting front and home front, Benjamin Frommer suggests that women's opportunities for collaboration were structurally limited in occupied Czechoslovakia. These structural differences, he maintains, explain why women were much more likely to be tried for denunciation after the war than men and why denunciation is typically remembered as a female offense, even though a greater number of men than women probably informed on their neighbors.

Finally, as the above examples indicate, this book is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on gender, memory, and nationalism. Maria Bucur's and Melissa Bokovoy's articles each explore the ways in which nationalist memories of World War I and World War II were gendered in both official contexts and in women's own memoirs. Katharine Jolluck's imaginative essay on memory, shame, and the body is particularly groundbreaking. Jolluck explores Polish women's immediate memories of exile in the Soviet Union, arguing that women recounted the experiences of bodily pain and discomfort that they shared with men using a redemptive, Polish nationalist narrative of collective martyrdom. “Women located the reason for their starvation or beatings in their Polishness,” she argues (213). Other perceived degradations, such as “mixing” with men in sleeping quarters, toilets, and baths, served to contrast Polish cultural superiority with Russian “barbarism.” But those offenses directed specifically at women, such as body-cavity searches and sexual violence, “did not seem to fit with the tragedy of the nation” and could not be easily reconciled with women's self-images as “respectable” Poles (213). Such experiences were therefore discussed only obliquely, if they were discussed at all. Although both men and women starved during World War II, Lisa Kirschenbaum's article on memories of the siege of Leningrad, meanwhile, highlights the extent to which Soviet women recalled and experienced starvation in gendered terms—as an assault on the female body, which was supposedly rendered shamefully “sexless” by emaciation.

While this volume is remarkably coherent in its scope and organization, we can only hope that it will inspire further research on the themes investigated as well as on other neglected topics in Eastern European gender history, such as gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the history of sexuality, gender and anti-Semitism, gender and migration and ethnic cleansing, and gender under Communist rule. As it stands, Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe is a starting point that will remain essential to scholars and students of Eastern Europe for years to come.