War's Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich

Many of these women were in their teens when they enlisted, and they joined the war effort (though no one asked them to, and sometimes inspite of family opposition) because they loved their country. These and more are described in the book through the personal voices of these women. The book continues with the initial war experiences, first brush with violence and death, how these women soldiers felt about killing enemy soldiers and how this impacted them emotionally, whether they found love in the trenches in the midst of war and whether that love survived the war, whether their feelings towards the enemy soldiers changed after the enemy was defeated, how the reunion with their family went after the war, how their country treated them after they came back from the war, whether the war left a lasting impact on their lives. The book starts with how a young woman decided to go to the warfront, what her family’s reaction was to it, her initial experience of being one of the few women out there, how men reacted to a woman soldier or sniper working with them, how the commander treated the new women recruits.

In this book, Svetlana Alexievich asks the question, what about the women who were actually at the warfront? The women who were soldiers, snipers, sappers, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, tank drivers, engineers, technicians, pilots, mechanics, cooks, laundresses, sailors, partisans? After asking this question, Alexievich goes on a quest into the past, finds out more about these women who were in the Russian / Eastern front during the Second World War, meets with many of them, interviews them and discovers their stories and compiles them into this book. The second type of book or story is about how women handled the challenges in the homefront when their male family members were away at the warfront.

Normally, when historians and commentators and biographers write about the role of women in a major war, it is typically about how women worked as nurses and tended to wounded soldiers, like Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war, or like Vera Brittain in the First World War, an experience about which she wrote movingly in her memoir ‘ Testament of Youth‘. So, I was surprised when I discovered this book, which is on an unconventional topic, atleast unconventional for its time (this book was originally published in Russian in 1985, so it was far ahead of its time). I knew Svetlana Alexievich mostly as the writer of ‘ Secondhand Time‘, which seems to be her most popular book.

I discovered Svetlana Alexievich’s ‘ The Unwomanly Face of War‘ sometime back.

War's Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich