Session A-2: She Fought for the Fatherland: Gender, War and Memory in the Soviet Union Subject: History

John Keegan once wrote, “Warfare is…the one human activity…from which women have always and everywhere stood apart. Women…do not fight…and they never in any military sense, fight men” (John Keegan, A History of Warfare, 76). Yet in the Second World War, an estimated 120,000 Soviet women served in combat roles. This presentation uses photographs of women in combat and images of Soviet war monuments and to help students reconsider wartime division of gender roles. It also prompts students to examine how women’s contributions to war were commemorated in a country that supposedly championed gender equality