The four articles in this cluster reflect new directions in women's history and feminist scholarship on militarization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). All four authors highlight the value of twentieth century developments for contemporary questions of gender and militarization that remain unsettled in theory, commemoration, or policy. The region's modern history of women in combat overshadows that of the rest of Europe in variety of roles and sheer numbers involved. Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and responses in the region have further raised the salience of recruitment and training policies. The four authors have ably made the case for regional historical case studies and the need for specific national precedents to inform such policies and public debates surrounding them. Several common themes unite the articles: the importance of women's activism, the challenge of rejecting limits to combat service, the potential for ideology to bolster women's claims, a need to seize upon national threats to amplify women's military value, and the importance of individual and institutional commemoration of women's service. Each article also highlights elements of national distinctiveness alongside potential implications for the relationship between militarism and feminism. Such connections in turn generate questions about the endurance of masculinized military institutions and cultures in otherwise demilitarized societies in the twenty-first century. Taken as a whole, these articles continue a conversation about war and gender that extends well beyond the bounds of CEE and remains tragically relevant as Putin employs war to restore the boundaries of the past century.

In each of the national case studies presented here, women's activism and seizing of the initiative drove military training and service breakthroughs. In the Polish and Yugoslav cases, that meant true pioneers contributing to national liberation and defense. For Polish women in particular, veterans who volunteered without previous training sought to prepare a new generation of feminine citizens who could not only vote, but also had the paramilitary experience to fight for their republic. With Soviet women in the Red Army as well as British servicewomen, the challenges of military life included pushing back against marginal status. To defend their countries from the German threat, British women persisted despite circumscribed roles and Soviet women endured limited visibility in press coverage.

Such activism was essential in the context of narrowly conceived and short-term state support for women's training and service across regime types. In Yugoslavia, only the crisis of foreign invasion prompted the anti-fascist movement to facilitate women joining combat units. Soviet and Polish women had access to a paramilitary training space apart from the army, but without concrete mechanisms for their integration into regular forces in wartime. Ideology played an ambivalent role in shaping leaders’ decisions across the CEE states in question. Among Yugoslav and Soviet communists, women's equality warranted some inclusion, but as a secondary role, numerically, to noncombat positions in their respective war efforts. In Yugoslavia, at least, women's military service received consistent postwar recognition, though neither state equalized military peacetime service requirements. In Poland, interwar civic nationalism helped paramilitary women gain recognition as a category of recruitable citizens that had roots in a century of resistance struggles.

Each author varies in her focus on the importance of quantitative measures of military women in favor of the precedent they set for future cohorts and the potential they held to disrupt traditional gender dynamics. Whatever the scale, fewer women served in combat than men, and fewer women in novel wartime roles served as combatants than in other facets of resistance efforts. Numbers did nothing to diminish the threat their service, and especially their achievements, posed to the institutions and norms that set the military realm apart as a masculine redoubt amidst other challenges to gender regimes in the early twentieth century. Indeed, even small numbers of women seemed to alarm Soviet censors, who limited the frequency and accuracy of periodical coverage of women's successes in combat. Whether in a matter of months or years of the postwar period, all states ended women's military service and limited the impact of their service as a precedent.

Finally, every article notes the role of women in documenting or commemorating their military service. Memoirs and ego documents played an outsized role in that process for most women, with public spaces and national events lagging decades behind. While lacking visibility, women's writings provided a space to interpret their experiences in connection to their own life trajectories, the triumph or tragedy of the war effort, and the national or ideological context in which they and other women operated during and after their military service. Among the veterans cited in this cluster, the feminist character leaps out to the reader even as their narratives emphasize the primacy of the immediate tasks confronting them on duty or the training grounds. Each scholar persuasively argues for an end to the artificial categorization of women's actions as either feminist or nationalist and instrumentalized, seeing emancipatory potential in wartime preparation and service. They conclude with overlapping calls to elevate the military sphere as a space for feminist analysis and the outsized relevance of CEE women to that interpretive shift.

Each article raises interpretive questions with different points of comparative or theoretical emphasis and connects to the impact of the war in Ukraine on insecurity for women in the region. Jelušić takes the most direct approach to quantitative measures of women's military roles but remains focused on the limits of emancipation and equality as categories of analysis. She emphasizes the importance of postwar commemoration for cementing the impact of military service on women's fight for equality. Combat roles had greater visibility in socialist Yugoslavia than in many of its successor republics, which Jelušić notes in connection with her larger concern regarding the need for feminist scholarship to preserve the impact of twentieth century feminist struggles. Jelušić also uses Yugoslav women's experiences to highlight the gendered reality of wartime violence. Sexual violence against women combatants receives separate attention in her discussion because it linked both partisan combatants and civilians. The endurance of gender-based violence into the present-day prompts Jelušić to temper her assessment of the prospects for militarization as a feminist project. Discussion of dualities characterizes the piece overall and seems to shape her sober conclusion about the small scale of change in both perception and policy surrounding women's place in warfare.

Zalietok provides a direct comparison between the asymmetric cases of Red Army women combatants and Britain's servicewomen with emphasis on anti-aircraft artillery units. Both sets of women pushed back against the limits placed on their service and endured additional material hardships relative to male soldiers. In turn, both states demobilized women early in order to curb expectations about postwar military service possibilities. Zalietok highlights the role of media coverage in shaping postwar legacies in each country, rather than the extent of military service. She finds British wartime periodicals far more accurate in their discussion of women's military service than their Soviet counterparts. Zalietok's comparative approach allows her to highlight how across Europe, not just in CEE, depictions of women in war distorted reality to preserve the ideal of masculine protectors. The greatest strength of her article lies with the fruit of countries compared: favorable coverage of British women who served in fewer combat roles enjoyed state-supported resocialization and had a greater postwar legacy. In contrast, the feats of Soviet women across most branches of arms earned them little postwar social capital and no institutional support when state media rendered them invisible during and especially after the war. She thus concludes with a call to scholars of militarization to not simply denounce patriarchal aggression but to demonstrate the precedents for a universal civic duty to defend one's country.

In what stands out as the more nationalist of two studies of Polish women's paramilitary movements, Nowakowska-Wierzchos analyzes the motives and methods of the veterans who formed training organizations in the interwar period. Before finally acknowledging the fraction of Polish women who participated in training, she emphasizes the ambition of women veterans and the potential of their movement to integrate women into national defense. Nowakowska-Wierzchos presents Polish women paramilitary trainers as pursing a vision of women as full citizens in the second Republic who would accept the duty to defend it after gaining the right to vote. While state officials remained ambivalent about integrating paramilitary women into national defense, women activists persisted with a movement that espoused complementary feminist and nationalist values. Nowakowska-Wierzchos above all presents a useable past narrative for feminist militarization in Poland. Her work presents Polish paramilitary women who supported the defense of their national republic as a counterexample to the paramilitary fascist groups that helped define the interwar period.

Focused on the commemoration of women's military contributions in Poland, Grzebalska seeks to situate examples from CEE in larger feminist debates about militarization. She juxtaposes the problem of military women's erasure from histories, museums, and monuments with a methodological erasure in Western feminist scholarship. Grzebalska surveys Polish women's increasing visibility in formal commemorations and cultural depictions of the country's tradition of armed resistance to challenge scholars’ separation of historical nationalist and feminist activism. She makes the sharpest argument in the cluster that feminist scholars’ anti-militarism leads them to perpetuate a protector–protected gender binary. While acknowledging the potential for conflict, Grzebalska argues that military women have pursued agendas of emancipation or equality within nationalist movements. Scholars, as much as those activists, have accepted the masculinization of nationalist movements, rather than highlighting the disruptive nature of military women to the gender order. Grzebalska argues for the integration of examples of feminist militarization from Poland and CEE into transnational scholarship and activism. Her application of such approaches to Putin's aggressive war against Ukraine as highlighting the divide between Western and CEE feminists stands out as more complex than her discussion acknowledges. The merit of supporting Ukrainian women in arms as part of a larger feminist tradition raises the problem of Russian women seeking to emulate their great-grandmother combatants. Putin's disingenuous war aim of denazification potentially allows misinformed Russian women to see themselves as serving both feminist and national politics alongside male conscripts.

Grzebalska's discussion thus makes explicit what otherwise operates as a source of tension throughout the articles: how women's new roles affected men's status and prompted adaptations in military masculinities. Both the institutional and cultural facets of threats to masculine militarization in the West have received considerable attention inside and outside CEE.¹ Institutionally, historians have conclusively established the emergence of militaries as homosocial institutions as a modern development.² As military historian John A. Lynn concludes in Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe: “The presence of women with early modern armies was not trivial, but fundamental to the character of military institutions and conduct of war, particularly before 1650. And the participation and fate of women in the campaign community illuminate our knowledge of the evolution in military institutions and practices.”³ Lynn's work links changes to women's presence in European armies with the emergence of the modern state that began around 1650. Only after that date did male state employees begin replacing women to facilitate the logistical needs of expanding armies. During the era Lynn describes, feminine militarization supported rather than challenged the status quo. In contrast, the total wars of the twentieth century exposed the vulnerabilities of pre-industrial military institutions and their masculine values. Beginning in 1914, European states that had to mobilize men into both military and industrial roles struggled to justify the exclusion of half the population from such roles.

Grzebalska's article also highlights the implications for military masculinity. The changes each author describes during the twentieth century affected the cultural value of soldiers as defenders. Technological changes eroded masculine ideals of bravery and honor in battle in World War I as combat occurred at greater distances with increasingly anonymous artillerists and machine gunners killing riflemen. Women's growing presence in combat discussed in these articles partly challenged the masculine qualities surrounding violence and killing, and more significantly the masculine duty–capability to defend. Whether the figurative nation or women, children, and the elderly, defending the fearful and vulnerable underpinned most notions of soldierly masculinity. The disruptive potential of women protecting themselves, be they Soviet, British, or Polish, challenged masculine power in each society.

While intuitively threatening to militarized masculinity, these articles challenge both the dominant and the hegemonic masculinities of the military institutions that women entered or sought to join. In masculinities studies, dominant masculinity refers to the “most celebrated, common, widespread, or current form of masculinity in a particular social setting.”⁴ A dominant masculinity might thus be understood through a celebrated hero known for bravery in the face of danger, skill with weaponry, and bodily endurance of pain in battle or deprivation while on guard. Hegemonic masculinities “legitimate an unequal relationship between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and among masculinities. . . by embodying materially and/or symbolizing discursively culturally supported ‘superior’ gender qualities in relation to the embodiment or symbolization of ‘inferior’ gender qualities.”⁵ The hegemonic formulation would fit a more general conception of the soldier as a man not only prepared to take enemy lives to protect others, but also willing to sacrifice his own because he was so committed to the act of protection. In that role, he would stand in contrast to the vulnerable but life-nurturing feminine qualities of women he protected as well as the civilian population that labored and sheltered behind its military.

The distinction between these two masculine types highlights the variety and disruptive potential of feminine militarization that the authors here present. Any of the British, Soviet, Yugoslav, or Polish military women might be considered what sociologist and gender scholar Mimi Schippers refers to as pariah femininities because they possess or practice traits that “are deemed, not so much inferior, but as contaminating to the relations between masculinity and femininity. The possession of any one of these characteristics is assumed to contaminate the individual.”⁶ The far more disruptive pariah femininity therefore emerges among women trained for self-defense and seeking to train other women in peacetime. Readying women to defend themselves and protect elderly and child dependents undercuts a militarized hegemonic masculinity that justified both the peacetime and wartime gender order. The militarized femininity of peacetime training movements also holds greater disruptive potential, as it unfolded without the crisis of war to disrupt daily life in ways that make exceptions to norms seem unavoidable. Wartime mobilization of women, while disruptive to the dominant masculinity of soldier heroes, remained under the control of male-dominated military hierarchies and civilian leaders. British and Soviet wartime mitigation efforts varied before both countries rapidly demobilized women once the wartime crisis reached its end. The peacetime feminine militarization that the authors document and advocate may well prompt adaptation from hegemonical masculine cultures rather than capitulation. While adaptation might make the men and women of CEE only a little more secure, the region's twentieth-century examples have even greater potential to move the scholarly discussion of war and gender forward.