Being a Woman in a Man's World: The Representation of Women in American War Narratives

Throughout history, women have fought for their right to participate in many aspects of the world: in making major decisions, being recognized as equal to men, and just generally noticed as valued members of the society with individual needs, wishes, and abilities. After a long period of fighting for their rights, through suffragette movements, protests, and petitions, women finally reached this long-awaited equality. They even got the opportunity to be a part of the most men-ruled area of life – war. During the conditions of war, men are surrounded mostly by other men, their fellow soldiers, and this is the opinion of the general public. But the issue at question is how women are positioned in the war, the army, what their actual role is, how other people and their combatants see them, and how they are presented to the public. As literature has always been a mirror of the current state of affairs, examples of women's position in the world can be found in it. In this paper, three novels are analyzed in order to point out how women in war are perceived: Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (1961), Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990) and Kayla Williams' Love my Rifle More Than You (2005). Catch 22 is a story told by a male protagonist and which puts women mostly in the roles of nurses and prostitutes. The Things They Carried is a novel in which women are shown merely as a comforting idea, along with a few strong female characters. And on the complete opposite end there is Love my Rifle More Than You, a novel written by a woman, at war, which brings a new and fresh view of a woman's position in the world. However, these novels which seem different at a first glance have one very important thing in common: they clearly show that women in the military are still seen through their gender. Their gender decides which position they hold, how they will act when they achieve something, and how important they are