ARTICLES

A COMPANION TO WOMEN’S
MILITARY HISTORY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
HACKER, Barton C., & Margaret Vining, eds., Leiden: Brill Publishing,
2012, hardcover, 720 pages, $273 USD, ISBN 978-9-00421-217-6
(E-ISBN 978-9-00420-682-3)
Reviewed by Major Chris J. Young, CD, MA, member of the Concepts
Team at the Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre (CALWC).
The editors of this massive 720-page tome are both
curators of armed forces history at the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of American History,
and they have managed to put together a very
interesting collection of essays from assorted experts
on women’s military history. Where this compilation
succeeds is by providing—dare I say it—muchneeded
attention to the role of women within the
military environment. Women’s military history, as the editors point out, has too often
been subsumed into other historical areas or events.
This collection is intended to further the institutionalization of this field as a distinct historical
field of study by providing a focal point for further research. Specifically, the essays within
represent a significant contribution from a historiographical point of view. Each essay provides
a very clear outline of the literature available within the field, backstopped by detailed and quite
useful bibliographies. That being said, this collection does represent a very (perhaps overly)
ambitious project intended to cover the entire timeframe from the Classical period through to
the present. There is one significant gap in that coverage—as the editors note up front, material
on the Dark and Middle Ages is missing, the result of commissioned work failing to appear.
The book is divided into three parts and provides coverage beginning with the Classical period,
jumping to the 1400s and pushing forward through the two world wars to the present. Given
the timeframe covered, it is not surprising that the essays are quite broad in scope. The first
part begins with an exploration of the traditional and non-traditional female roles within the
military, generally broken down by specific periods of time. The eight “survey articles” explore
a host of female roles, including those of camp followers, military wives, war fighters, civil
defence specialists and military medical staff, among others. The papers are well written and
quite illuminating in their coverage, and they do a very good job of balancing history with
historiographic coverage. There is one issue, and again, the editors have acknowledged it up
front: material featuring non-Western experiences is quite sparse. As they point out, “too little
of the necessary spadework has yet been done.” That being said, there is some coverage of
experiences with Russian and Chinese militaries (regular and otherwise), and it does represent
a good first step.
The second part of the book is a thought-provoking pictorial record featuring an assortment
of lithographs, drawings, paintings and photographs, from the 16th century through to the
136 THE CANADIAN ARMY JOURNAL VOLUME 16.2 2016