Democracy and War: Women as Stakeholders

Devangana Rathore and Maahum Hussain
Indraprastha College For Women
Semester 4

Democracy and War: Women as Stakeholders

Keywords: War, Women, Soviet, Snipers, American, Cryptographers, German, Pilots

Abstract: Since time immemorial, women have been considered a part of the private domain, of the
domestic sphere, and especially more so during the conflict. Womankind is the first to be sequestered and
hidden because patriarchal narratives would have one believe that women have never participated in the
conflict in any capacity, and have always featured in said narratives as powerless victims of forces beyond
their control. The paper attempts to challenge this stereotype and elaborate upon the role of women as
equal, albeit marginalized, stakeholders in the socio-cultural, economic, and political structures of their
times.
Divided into two parts, the paper will look at female representation in the most documented conflict of
human history: World War 2. The two parts will include an investigation into the detailed accounts and
histories of German Pilots (Primary Text: The Women who flew for Hitler: The True Story of Hitler’s
Valkyries by Clare Mulley), and Soviet Snipers (Primary Text: The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana
Alexeivich). All of the texts revolve around women who changed the face of World War 2 as it were, demonstrating overlap of the personal with the political, along with an intersection of various identity
positions to achieve the most personal yet political of institutions: democracy.
Deriving from personal accounts, memoirs, translated testimonies, recorded interviews, and government
corroboration, the paper will attempt to highlight the under-representation of women not only in the public
sphere, but also in a personal capacity, bring to light the relationship between democracy, armed conflict,
and women who exist in the centre of it as active participants and not as placid sufferers.
Paper:
“This war, more than any other war in history, ( World War II) is a woman’s war.”
-John G. Winant
4 million. A number which is near impossible to ignore, no matter what the context. This is the total
assumed number of women who participated in World War II, for unlike men, very little detail is divulged
about the number of women involved in wartime activities. World War II remains the most documented
war to date, with a plethora of work and literature from all the involved parties, including personal
memoirs, second-hand accounts, military documents, etc.
Yet, somehow, despite a paper trail a mile long, the female contribution to World War II is rarely even
acknowledged, let alone understood or celebrated. It was only with the late 1960s that various nations
made public their substantiation from World War II, allowing historians a glimpse into the contribution
of the “other” gender, which found acknowledgment only in select female historians in the West. Some of the most prolific male historians of World War II continue to deny or airbrush the role of women in the
war. This paper seeks to counter this narrative, no matter how minutely, and highlight not just female
involvement in World War II, but also highlight that how the personal became political for these women
who, despite being caught in the middle of a severe identity politics, fought for their nation, though the
morality of their values is open to further discourse.
SOVIET UNION-SNIPERS
The Soviet Union saw the most contribution of women in the war, despite Stalin being a deeply
misogynistic man who famously said: “a woman with ideas is like “a herring with ideas: skin and bones.”
(Vajskop, p.8) However, Stalin strove to uphold the communist ideal, which dictated that men and
women participate equally in the war. This is what led to him reluctantly allowing women to join the
frontline ONLY after all the manpower, so to speak, had been exhausted.
The Soviet Union has always had a history of female resistance and leadership in battle, which is why
even in the eve days of World War II, they pressurized local authorities, and eventually, the national office
of the Komsomol for the right to serve at the front lines. Perhaps the most direct and brutal involvement
with the battle, young girls who volunteered to serve the “Great Motherland” were sent to Sniper School,
where even as they were trained for the war, they were looked down upon by their supervisors, who would
frequently use patronizing language, such as:
“How am I to make soldiers out of you, dear Girls, and not targets for the Fritz?”
“They’ve foisted girls on me. What is this, some sort of women’s round dance?”
“What am I going to do with you, my dears? Where did they find you?” ( Alexivich, p.12-14)
The misogyny did not end there. Even as the Soviet women learned how to use guns and rifles, their
commanding officer would often mention:
” After the war, the men will be afraid to marry you…. You'll fling a plate at his head and kill him.”
(Alexeivich, p.16)
Even after surpassing men in shooting capabilities, they were still treated like second class soldiers, and
sent in pairs to take-out high-profile German targets, because they were not trusted to complete the job
individually, and would need another person for emotional support.
However, they became so adept at their tasks, that the fellow male comrades of the Red Army were forced
to reluctantly accept them as equals. This can be easily supported with their kill counts, which was almost
always upward of 50, the most famous of them being Lyudmila Pavlyuchenko, with a kill count of 309.
Those on the Soviet side too had their reservations despite seeing them at work. The reason for this
ideological conflict between the ideals of communism and the inability to treat women as equals has been
explained by sociologist and historian Samantha Vajskop.
“Stalin changed the image of women to serve the needs of his regime and to teach Soviets
(especially men)…..On one hand, there was the idea of a woman as an equal participant as a man. But on
the other hand, the Soviet campaign also showed this ideal woman as “sweet, innocent, untroubled by
hardship, let alone by war.” The ideal Soviet woman was not merely a hard-working, active citizen; she
was also a loving wife and mother. This tension would become an issue for men both during and after
World War II in dealing with women as comrades in arms.” (Vajskop, p.11)
Thus, despite their accomplishments on the field as well as off it, as soon as the war started to come to a
close, a lot of these women received dishonourable discharges, permanent medical leaves, as well as being
referred to “menopausal personnel” which, according to Stalin, rendered women permanently
incapacitated and therefore, unable to fight anymore.
To conclude, perhaps the most strikingly tragic occurrence is not a story, but a statistic. Out of the 150,000
people decorated after World War II in Soviet Russia, less than 0.1 % were women, even though in totality,
they formed more than 10% of the Soviet Army by the end of World War II.
GERMANY-PILOTS/DIPLOMATS
Germany too had great reservations about employing women in battalions and such. Even so, Hitler
inducted upwards of 5,000 women into aviation, which was considered one of the most important
technological pursuits undertaken by the Germans after their crushing defeat in ww1. This was because
of Hitler's earlier passed laws that women were not supposed to be trained in combat weaponry. However,
despite the national as well as international contributions of these pilots, they find very little mention in
contemporary history. Evelyn Zegenhagen finds the reason for this as twofold: not just because of the
subject’s relative obscurity, but in what she refers to as “a conscious effort in society before and after
1945 to neglect and ignore female contributions to aviation.” (Zegenhagen, p. 579-596)
In the early days of World War II, Germany recruited several women with a pilot’s license only for
acrobatic shows because with women at the face of flying, Germany's aviation looked charming and non-threatening, appeared civilian and modern rather than martial and revisionist. This also camouflaged the
fact that they were evading the laws laid down by the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed heavy
restrictions on German aviation developments. They were given aviation training, but not allowed to
apply for combative aviation licenses.
Also, the feminist sentiment of emancipation seemed to be missing from women pilots. Even as they
covertly lobbied for the rights to fly for battle, they would continue to appeal to the male gaze by
emphasizing upon their feminine features, characteristics, and beauty:
"I believe I can say, in the name of the German women pilots, that in us the hierarchy of values of all
womanhood has in no way been altered, and that aviation never [was] a thing of [achieving]
emancipation. We women pilots are no suffragettes." (Zegenhagen, p.584)
"And yet I am a woman pilot with all my heart, only with the limitation that I remain a woman, with all
my weaknesses" (Zegenhagen, p.584-585)
According to Zegenhagen:
"That women pilots remained "truly women in the most beautiful meaning of the word" meant
above all that they remained aware of their inferior position in aviation and never tried to challenge male
superiority. By stressing a disinterest in emancipation, announcing their intentions in humble words, never
challenging official politics that limited them in all areas, and presenting themselves as feminine and technically challenged, women pilots made sure that they were accepted by the male pilots' community,
and by society in general." (Zegenhagen, p.584-585)
Emancipation was not a concern for them. What WAS a concern for them was the defence of the
Fatherland, their ambitions not to free themselves, but free Germany from the oppressive Versailles
Treaty. As such, they were trained for a short period of six months in acrobatic flying, before they were
sent to foreign lands to perform shows for people. On the surface, female pilots looked charming, non-
threatening and welcoming as opposed to the male pilots who were seen with scrutiny and suspicion.
However, behind this innocent surface was Hitler's true goal: to use these women as ambassadors to revive
the lost German reputation. Women pilots also carried out propaganda missions abroad for Germany's
political goals. Thus, Hitler managed to utilize prevailing gender roles to his advantage, by painting
women as non-political entities, all the while making them propagate the German cause, which is further
made evident by the close eye that Germany's foreign office kept on them.
However, it is only in 1944, with a sharp lack of male pilots, those female pilots were finally employed
with the army outside of acrobatic shows. Hundreds of women pilots followed an appeal in the summer
of 1944 to be trained and employed as gliding instructors for the German Army. Even so, very few of
them got to fly again, most women restricted to the role of gliding instructors only, and out of the 5,000
women capable of flying, only 60 were ever allowed to see conflict. In the two newly founded Germanies
after World War II, the services of these women aviators were no longer required. Women pilots
underwent a quick and in most cases easy denazification, and very few ever took up flying again, most
succumbing to societal gender roles.

CONCLUSION
Though there may be two very different portrayals of women in war, one side actively encouraging women
to participate, and the other actively restricting them, some core problems prevailed with both sides. On
both ends of the conflict, their personal lives met the political and were often considered state property.
Women had to deal with the societal pressures of conforming to gender roles of femininity even as they
strove to make it to the frontlines, with varying degrees of success. D'Ann Campbell comments on why
there may be such imposition on women:
"Young men saw military as validation for their virility, and as a certificate of their manhood. If women
could do it, then it was not very manly, was it?" (Campbell, p.321)
She also emphasizes that it was only a lack of sufficient manpower and not feminist ideals that allowed
women to fight at all. Women at the battlefield presented additional problems. What do you call a female
rifleman or a commander, or a tank driver? There was no feminine term for a lot of martial roles, which
gave rise to a linguistic issue, as well as a lack of facilities specifically for women, such as ill-fitting
uniforms, no washrooms for female use, etc. though these are ruminations for a separate discourse.
There is also a strong need to recognize the contribution of these women as impactful, consequential and
of some import. It is only when there is acknowledgement of their actions, that they can be held
accountable for those actions, and be condemned for the same, as is the case of the German pilots. If one
never even accepts their role in the World War, there can be no further discourse on the morality of the
values they stood for, and there will be no acceptance of the fact that a lot of their actions were not to be
glorified, but to be castigated. Therefore, there is an urgent requirement to delve deeper into this area of
study.
Nevertheless, World War 2 saw the involvement of more than 4 million women across all sides, as not
just the traditional roles of nurses and caretaker, but as messengers, codebreakers, riflemen, drivers,
snipers, pilots, mechanics, airplane operators, etc. all of which has often been conveniently glosseded by
history to pretend as if they never happened, and brings to light a severe need to address this gap in
knowledge and awareness, and to acknowledge women as more than placid sufferers at the whims of men
who machinate such wars.
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