Women at War, A Comprehensive Bibliography

The core of this book is a substantial, 170-page, annotated bibliography organized alphabetically by author and focused mainly on publications of the last two decades. It will inevitably recall the two-volume biographical dictionary Amazons to Fighter Pilots (2003) edited by Reina Pennington. An updated edition of AtFP was being discussed while the just-printed copies of the book still had their fresh-off-the-press smell. That edition was never published, possibly because a revised edition would have been outdated before it could be proofed due to increased scholarly interest in the broad topic of women and war. This book could be considered not only timely, but long overdue.

It may seem unfair to compare a two-volume edited work with contributions by recognized scholars to a monograph undertaking a task “throughout time and space,” but that’s what it says on the cover. Christian P. Potholm was the DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government at Bowdoin College until his retirement in 2022 and is the author of numerous books. His courses included Women at War and The Daughters of Mars, a first-year seminar. The book seems intended for students in such courses. It is potentially helpful for more experienced scholars seeking current material outside their main research field. Let’s face it, when discussing women in military history that is still almost everyone.

Being in the process of updating a very old syllabus, this reviewer, a medievalist, had an opportunity to put the book to the test and quickly located (mirabile dictu!) an article discussing of the military objectives of the pharaoh Hatshepsut (85). This was, unfortunately, beginner’s luck.

Part I is a 55-page introduction in four chapters discussing such topics as the antiquity and ubiquity of war, the written and archaeological primary sources, and the case for the role of women in this pan-human activity. The assertion that women have been there all along raises the inevitable question of why they have been largely neglected by established military historians, a list that would be familiar to NYMAS members. The trope of exceptionalism – treating martial women as oddities that do not merit inclusion in serious military history – is introduced early on and this in turn brings up the broad topic of gender. The socially-constructed masculinities and femininities that are at least as old as war itself have defined the study of history and decreed that women’s roles, especially in war, constitute the “most insignificant exceptions.” (Pace! Keegan.) Also discussed are the western-centric viewpoint that had dominated the field, that the exemplars of female military agency from non-western cultures were left to the anthropologists, and some of the trends that have increased interest in the study of women in war. Although the section reads like lecture notes that were not prepared for publication, much of it would be new to beginning students and die-hard exceptionalists. These chapters provide an important entry point.

The book appears to not only have been intended for beginning students but perhaps produced by them. The problems of editing and proofing begin with the first endnote (3) and continue throughout. There is no consistent format for the citations, suggesting that those who collected the bibliography entries simply copied what they found, perhaps not recognizing any need to regularize citations. This is particularly notable when repositories like JSTOR provide copy-and-paste citations in multiple current standard formats. Pick one and stick to it.

While it is possible to find the miscited articles, this book models sloppy research habits for students who are all too used to plugging terms into a search engine, copying whatever comes up, and seeing no reason to keep notes. Worse, it can discourage beginning researchers who might not know the workarounds.

The publication date suggests that the book was being worked on during the covid lockdown that began in March 2020. The lockdown perhaps freed up some time to work on publications, but it also hindered access to research material and interlibrary loans which may explain such things as a reliance on articles from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History while the Journal of Military History and other scholarly journals are absent. Admitted, the JMH is not an obvious choice when thinking of feminist scholarship, but it would seem prudent to at least scan the TOCs of the leading U.S. military history journal. Doing so would have turned up Joan Cashin’s bibliographic essay on women in the U.S. Civil War [JMH 81.1 (2017), 199-204] along with the relevant works from Cashin’s footnotes. This gap may be the result of relying on tagging which leads to an over-reliance on low-hanging fruit, i.e., books and articles with the terms “women” and “war” and “gender” where a search engine can find them. Thus, excellent articles such as Patricia Skinner’s “‘Halt! Be Men!’ . . . Gender . . . ” (p. 199) and Meghan McLaughlin’s “The Woman Warrior: Gender . . . ” (p. 164) are at risk of becoming footnote fodder – more cited than read – while articles that tackle such questions as the objectives of the Normans at Dyrrachium and how the presence on a battlefield of a middle-aged mother of ten contributed to their achievement are overlooked.

The Journal of Medieval Military History has, for example, published articles on Sichelgaita of Salerno and Matilda of Canossa (Valerie Eads, JMMH 3, 2005; JMMH 8, 2010) and Elionor of Sicily (Donald Kagay, JMMH 17, 2019), but the only article from this journal picked up by the HiPS researchers, who are acknowledged in the Preface, is Kelly Devries’ translation of J.F. Verbruggen’s “Women in Medieval Armies,” originally published in 1982. Jan Verbruggen was a major figure in medieval military historiography and making his work better known is laudable, but equally relevant articles were inexplicably missed.

Beginning researchers could understandably think that articles like McLaughlin’s and Skinner’s are all there is and so miss Frederick Cheyette’s biography of Ermengarde of Narbonne (Cornell, 2001), Kimberley LoPrete’s magisterial biography of Adela of Blois (Four Courts, 2007), and Katherine Sjursen’s multiple articles on the War of the Two Joans (Medieval Feminist Forum 51.1, 2015). The struggle over the succession to the duchy of Brittany undertaken by Jeanne de Montfort and Jeanne de Penthièvre is a fascinating sidebar of the 100 Years War. None of these are found in HiPS.

Sometimes the author seems to misunderstand the cited text. Chapter 2, placing women in the context of war, opens promisingly with what is described as a quote from the poems of Enheduanna, the first named author in history (7). Her work is full of powerful and gory images of the goddess Inanna. It is available online. But the unsourced quote is not Enheduanna’s work; it is taken from Daniela Gioseffi’s “freely adapted” reworking and addresses a God of War which is odd in the given context.

In conclusion, Hiding in Plain Sight is potentially useful but would have benefitted greatly from more careful copyediting and proofreading.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Valerie Eads is a medieval historian researching female lordship and military history with a focus on the career of Matilda of Canossa. She is a member of the faculty of Humanities & Sciences at the School of Visual Arts.

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Note: Hiding in Plain Sight is also available in paperback &e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

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