ABSTRACT
The ‘fighting forces’ of the title refer not only to the women who contributed to the national effort to combat the enemy, but also to the women whose subjectivities were the arena for a battle for power between socially and historically located discourses. They are also women who, as an ideological stance, chose to ‘fight’ against force as an acceptable means of resolving international disputes. The other involved a great deal of archival research, seeking out forgotten novels, reading journals, magazines, pamphlets and unpublished memoirs in order to discover how women, at that historical moment, related their gendered identities to their possible roles in war time. Women’s alterity was an accepted trope of the day, but it frequently had more to do with fuelling the home fires and maintaining racial superiority than with enabling a social re-birth.
