Wonder Women & Rebel Girls: Women Warriors in the Media, 1800-present

Online workshop, 4 September 2020 | Co-organised with the War Through Other Stuff Society

This workshop explored the depiction of women warriors on screen and in print within a broad historical context.

The explosive popularity of recent films such as Wonder Woman (2017) and initiatives like Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls (2016; 2018) reflects a growing appetite in today’s media for depictions of women on the front lines, ‘strong’ female action heroes taking up roles other than victim, girlfriend, or grieving widow. At the same time, however, the waging of war off-screen continues to test the limits of policies of gender equality, with women’s admission to combat positions in the military only granted in the last few years in many countries and opposition to it remaining widespread.

The complex interaction between media representation and reality in the sphere of women and war has a long history. Women have been formally and informally excluded from armies for centuries, including an outright ban in 1790s Revolutionary France in response to women’s attempts to petition for change, and marginalised in military history. Beneath the surface, of course, exceptions are everywhere: from joining armies in disguise to winning open acceptance and even leading troops into the field, women have taken part in innumerable conflicts across the world throughout history, but the narratives around their roles remain contested.

Women soldiers’ tales are more often seen as semi-fictional sources than authoritative pieces of military history, and frequently their histories have to be read through the biases and preferences of male colonial and military officers and foreign travellers. Even where media places women warriors front of stage, inequalities in representation along the lines of both sexuality and race may continue. In most modern scholarship, women’s participation in war remains separate from general surveys of conflict, while historical depictions of women who fight have rarely been studied in comparison with those of today.