Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars (Pandora, London and New York, 1987), pp. xiii + 330, f 16.95. ISBN 0 86358 046 7. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1987), pp. xvi + 228, $19.95. ISBN 0 465 09214 4. (Harvester, Brighton, 1987) ISBN 0 7108 1238 8). eds, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983, pp. viii + 310. ISBN 0 300 03687 6. Michael Renov, Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor and London, 19881, pp. x + 275. ISBN 0 8357 1813 1. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854-1914 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 19881, pp. xii + 371, f9.95. ISBN 0 7102 1338 7.Feminists of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been divided as to whether wars promote the cause of women. In her radical attempt in 1970 to appropriate a biologized and gendered dialectical materialism for feminism, Shulamith Firestone claimed that, for improvements in the position of women in society, 'feminists are forced to welcome wars as their only chance." Post hoc but not necessarily proprer hoc, western feminists have been writing historical and sociological accounts of women and the First and Second World Wars, investigating and in general refuting the notion that the wars of this century advanced women's liberation.2To begin with, these scholars have concentrated on the 'objective' dimensions of women's situation before, during and after the war -in politics, in education, in industry, and in relation to social p~l i c y .~ Exemplifying the best features of this approach is Gail Braybon and Penny Sumrnerfield's Our of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars. Written in tandem, this joint work builds upon the authors' earlier studies of women workers in the world wars, with Braybon still covering the First and Summerfield the
