Introduction

The war myths of many cultures tell of women who are victims and of men who are heroes, of women who are passive and of men who are active. But these are, after all, only myths. The fact is that women have always been in war. The women soldiers George Bush sent to fight in the 1991 Gulf War did not constitute an unprecedented break in the ways wars have been fought. They merely exemplified the fact that women are increasingly represented as participating in war: U.S. women marines carrying a "full pack" on their way to Saudi Arabia, Israeli military women, Palestinian mothers with their daughters and sons at barricades, Argentinian mothers protesting their sons' and grandsons' disappearance, Pakistani women at target practice, Sri Lankan women caught up in communal violence.