Abstract

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War's aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

Lidia D. Sciama is a Research Associate of the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and a former Director of Oxford's International Gender Studies Centre, where she is currently a Senior Research Associate. She has conducted long-term research in Italy and England with a focus on women's crafts, city life, narrative, memory and relations between anthropology and literature. Among her publications are A Venetian Island. Environment, History and Change in Burano (Berghahn Books 2003) and Humour, Comedy and Laughter (Berghahn Books, 2016).

Fiona Armitage-Woodward has held various teaching and research posts, including at Oxfam. She was a founding member of the Swaziland Society (1991). Her publications include contributions to Focus on Swaziland, which she has edited, and "Imitating Ethnicity: Land, Territoriality and Identity in a Swazi Christian Church" in Land and Territoriality, ed., Michael Saltman (2002).

Shirley Ardener, has carried out many years anthropological fieldwork in Nigeria and in Cameroon where she is still involved with the National Anglophone Archives in Buea which she and her husband Edwin set up. She was the Founding Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women (1983-1997) renamed the International Gender Studies at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford University of which she is currently a Research Associate, and a Research Associate of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford. She works on gender, microcredit, nudity, and humour. Books include Swedish Ventures in Cameroon (2002) and Changing Sex and Bending Gender (ed. 2005).

"Interesting and timely. Using different research methods to arrive at the story of women involved in war and conflicts adds value to existing feminist research methods. The academic, and especially feminist, readership will benefit from this volume." · Nahla Abdo, Carleton University

"I enjoyed reading this book and admired its range across time and space. The variety of cases included is its main strength." · Linda McDowell, University of Oxford