In Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II, Yvonne Trasker, professor of film studies at the University of East Anglia, has written a provocative and important book examining the contradictions found in cultural images of women in the military. Trasker suggests that “real world concerns and representational histories” (3) are fundamentally linked. To make her point, she holds up a mirror between women who actually served in the military and their fictional counterparts in British and American movies and television. The result is a valuable study, clear in its purpose, and well supported by research. Trasker uses feminist scholarship as a foundation to bring together sexual politics, sociology, women's history, film genres, visual imagery, and gender concerns – a wide range of issues, all woven into an excellent cultural history.

Trasker isolates the post-World War II war genre as a suitable primary location for her postfeminist point of view because the necessary recruitment of female “manpower” during World War II provided a truthful excuse for the on-screen empowerment of women. Although it was not uncommon in those years for films about women to place heroines in spaces generally assumed to be “masculine” (boardrooms, western towns, science labs), war movies presented a new, socially endorsed and historically verified space for women to take action. (Films set in World War I also offered this option, but Trasker begins her study with World War II.) Traditionally, the woman's film and the war film are narrative opposites. The first focusses on a single woman; the other is about a group of men. Love and romance are central to the action of the woman's story, while the men are forcefully engaged in political combat action. However, it is this very incompatibility that inspires Trasker's central question: does our culture allow us to see a female as both a woman and a soldier? Trasker's decision to use films which cross gender lines allows her to examine cultural issues of contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity regarding women. She reveals the image of the military woman as both a barometer and a challenge to common ideas about gender and power.

Soldiers’ Stories is presented in three parts that might be called Definition, Variation, and Progression. In Part One, Trasker considers the terms “woman” and “soldier” as cultural contradictions. She uses World War II movies, posters, magazine ads, and recruitment materials to ground her arguments. Well-designed advertisements which contain drawings of slim and attractive young women dressed in military uniforms illustrate her points. “Be A Marine,” says one poster; and “Don't Miss your Great Opportunity, The Navy Needs you in the Waves” says the other (30). Are these perfectly fashionable women to be seen as sex symbols or as members of the military? Such contradictions present what Trasker calls the “auxiliary” and the “provocative” that create “gendered anxiety” (9). She also explores the visual presentations of the military nurse, in films about nurses set on Bataan (Cry Havoc, So Proudly We Hail). The women are soldiers in active combat danger, but are also, as nurses, representing the traditional nurturing female figure.

Part Two of Soldiers’ Stories addresses how Hollywood continued to use the image of the military woman after World War II. Trasker extends her central point – and the paradox created by women in uniform – across the series of escapist musicals and light comedies of the era which feature military women (Skirts Ahoy etc.) as the central story figure. Although military service in peacetime (or in a nostalgic World War II setting) liberates a female into a freer, more authoritative position, it also subjects that authority (and her compromised femininity) to becoming the source of humor, with the foregrounding of the femininity-versus-authority contradiction. Female military experience which might have become transformative, providing an escape hatch for women, becomes instead a comic lip service to the concept.

In Part Three, Trasker brings her discussion forward from the 1970s to the modern era, in which real-life women are actual combatants. This cultural change, however, does not cause the media to address the issue directly or create any new clarity regarding sex and power. Although there are exceptional stories, such as the television drama China Beach (with its purpose “to make visible military women and female veterans”), military women are more often seen in thrillers or movies casting them in legal or criminal situations. Their characters are often isolated emotionally, and they are either heroes or victims. Times change, but the paradox endures.

Studies such as this, grounded as cultural and analysis and research, seldom consider any detailed visual analysis of actual cinematic usage: framing, lighting, editing, and so on. The cinematic apparatus itself can very powerfully shape a viewer's opinions and attitudes about what is being seen, and sometimes provides a subtle subtext that has a contradiction of its own. Trasker doesn't do in-depth cinematic analysis, but she has written a comprehensive social and cultural history of how we've been asked to view women in the military since World War II. Her book provides a foundation for further examination because it goes beyond her military boundaries.