There Are More Women Military Historians Than Ever Before. Why Hasn’t the Field Noticed?
There is a lovely expression in my adoptive home of Georgia: “bless your heart.” It can be used as a genuine expression of sympathy, but more often, at least in the classroom setting, it is a good response for when someone said something unusually awkward or problematic.
I am a military historian of the ancient world, and this fall semester, I had an unexpected “bless your heart” moment in my upper-level history course on Greek and Roman Warfare. I assigned a book chapter that I had published under my first initial and maiden name (I had academic, rather than vanity, reasons for assigning the chapter). To my surprise, several students in the class, in discussing the piece, assumed that it was published by a man.
As someone researching and publishing in the field of ancient military history, I am aware that traditionally the field has been dominated by men. But I have not noticed this historical baggage much when attending conferences, because the field of Classics now does have a number of excellent women military historians. Furthermore, I have been fortunate to be able to collaborate with amazing women military historians outside of Classics.
For example, in February of 2012, together with a former colleague and a leading historian of Latin American and Caribbean history, Nicola Foote, I co-organized an international conference on Civilians and Warfare in world history. An edited volume of essays stemming from that conference was just published this fall. Close to half of the conference participants, and just over half of the contributors to the volume are women. Nicola and I did not consciously set out to find women to participate in the conference or the volume. We simply sought out scholars researching civilians’ involvement in wars in different areas of history and related disciplines, and gender balance among the contributors happened organically.
Two things happened recently, however, that have given me pause and made me wonder if perhaps the acceptance of women in academic study of military history is still far from secure. The first is the incident in my class that I just mentioned. The second is more alarming.
In the same week as the incident in my class, Bryn Mawr Classical Review published a review of a new edited collection on Greek and Roman military history, in which every single contributor, from the editor down to even the author of the brief preface, was a man. The volume was greeted with a well-deserved outcry among my Facebook classicist friends. Instead of merely stating that such a book is problematic, though, it is worth taking a step back and considering the following question that some have raised as well in response to the collection: why is it a problem? In other words, what is the harm in an academic, peer-reviewed collection of essays that does not include any women? After all, one might argue, isn’t the quality of scholarship the main goal that peer review aims to achieve? So, therefore, as long as the essays in a volume are of high quality, it shouldn’t matter who wrote them, right?
These are complex issues that deserve a serious response. I would like to propose some answers here, first addressing the problem of my students’ assumptions about military historians, and then considering the harm done both to the quality of scholarship and to the perception of the field by men-only collections (or panels or conferences) on military history. The two issues are, I believe, related and systemic.
Role models feed assumptions. For the past several decades, we as a society have been telling young women that they can do any job that men can do. Yet saying this means little unless women see role models who live and breathe a particular career and are flourishing while doing so. Watching someone who is utterly miserable is not likely to inspire the observer to follow that person’s life path. (As a side-note, by the way, this is why the #metoo stories in academia right now are so important for us to hear and take seriously. How many women have been driven away from academia by predators and harassers?)
I had a rather idyllic educational experience, as I now realize. I loved my educational experience as an undergraduate at UVA and as a graduate student in Princeton, and had the most talented and kind people in the field of Classics teaching and mentoring me every step of the way. Perhaps the most formative experiences, looking back eighteen years later, took place in my first year of college: the surveys of Greek and Roman history that I was blessed to take with the inimitable professor Elizabeth Meyer. It was because of her classes that I decided to break up with Vergil (we’re still good friends, though!) to focus specifically on ancient history.
Professor Meyer did so much more, however, than just instill in me a life-long love for ancient history. She had a talent for making her female students want to be her by showing us a model for a serious scholar who also happened to be a woman. Indeed, Professor Meyer’s track record is formidable in this area. I can think of half a dozen other lady historians she taught and mentored just in the three years when I was her student who are now bona fide leaders in the field.
As a student at every level, I looked up especially to my female professors to show me what it meant to be a woman in academia. The reason that I pursued a career in academia is, in part, because I saw all of my professors take joy in all aspects of their work. I was awed by Professor Meyer’s intelligence and talent as a teacher as well as a researcher. It was also important for me to see that she seemed truly happy in her life.
I am now the ancient historian in a Department of History in a regional comprehensive state university. Newt Gingrich used to teach in my department before taking his talents elsewhere (yes, the emeriti have great stories!). The department has made an effort since the 1990s to hire women, and we are now almost evenly balanced. It really is a wonderful place to work — my department chair has even babysat for me in a pinch. At one of those babysitting sessions, my then 6-year-old son remarked on his weight, with that filter-less honesty for which 6-year-olds are known. I still got tenure. The students on average epitomize everything good about the South: they are polite, genuinely kind, and lack any trace of entitlement.
And yet, we as a department still fall into the usual stereotypes on who should teach particular topics. There are several faculty members in the department who regularly teach courses on military history, but I am the only woman whose main research focus is war. I am also the only woman who does not have an interest in gender and women’s history, unless it pertains to matters of war. For our majors, therefore, the stereotype that military history is largely a men’s field continues to be unintentionally reinforced.
I see some hopeful signs that my classes are challenging the stereotypes. Although 65% of the students majoring in history are male, my classes generally attract quite a few women, many of whom say that they have never taken a military history course before. The conversations that occur during office hours and by email remind me of my own desire for an academic role model when I was their age. Several female students who have taken classes with me have gone on to take additional classes in military history, and some have written their undergraduate or graduate thesis on a military topic. While I cannot take sole credit for shaping their interests, I suspect that my classes did have a role in the process. And the recent incident with the students who assumed that my article was written by a man turned out to be a wonderful teaching moment.
My impact may be restricted to my own campus and the students who take classes with me, but that’s something. Yet the same assumptions that my students held about the uniform maleness of military historians are also very real in the historical profession itself — and professional historians’ assumptions, unlike those of my students, are capable of causing real and serious harm to both the quality of scholarship that is published and the perception of the field of Greek and Roman military history more broadly.
This brings me to the second point that I would like to make here. This is a controversial assertion to make, perhaps, but I believe that for a variety of possible reasons, including perhaps that women are socialized differently, their scholarship on military history is often different from the scholarship traditionally done by men. Put simply, women tend to ask different research questions about the nature of war than men have done, and tend to be more interested in the human experience and the reality of suffering in war for all who experience military conflicts. Therein lies the unique value of women’s scholarship on military history, and that perspective is woefully missing from the conference panels and collections that exclude women. Furthermore, whenever women are absent from professional gatherings or publications on military history, their absence continues to feed the old stereotype of military history as a men’s field.
The idea that studying war was not something that was expected of a woman never occurred to me when I was a student. Thus it came as a surprise when I went on the academic job market, and was repeatedly asked the following question, sometimes by male and at other times by female interviewers at several institutions: why did I, a woman, choose to become a military historian? I am sure that the interviewers meant no harm, but I am equally certain that they would not have asked me such a question had my research been on, say, women’s history.
The assumptions behind these questions actually used to be valid: they reflect the state of the field before 1980 or so. Can you name a woman working predominantly on Greek or Roman military history before 1980 or thereabouts? I can’t. (Sure, we all love Lily Ross Taylor, but she was doing more of political and religious history than anything else. Although her record of mentoring other notable female historians of Greece and Rome is yet another example of the power of role models in challenging assumptions. After all, all of ancient history used to be a men’s field.)
It is no longer 1980. Women have been producing some of the most innovative scholarship in military history in the past couple of decades. Not all of them would necessarily classify themselves as military historians, but all of them are doing path-breaking work that presents a more complex and nuanced picture of Greek and Roman warfare than one might find in such standard classics of the field as Kendrick Pritchett’s monumental (pace Finley) five-volume tour-de-force The Greek State At War.
Overall, I would argue that women’s work on military history, whether ancient or modern, exemplifies the best of what historians now call “New Military History” — the study of war that looks beyond battles and campaigns. Acknowledging that war was a horrific and painful process that affected real people, women’s scholarship on war is much more likely than the scholarship of men to deal with those issues related to suffering and trauma to both combatants and civilians. As a result, also, many women scholars who work on war consider gender issues as they relate to war. Others look at the impact of war on society more broadly.
To give just a few examples of great women scholars who are publishing on various aspects of Greek and Roman military history, the folklorist Adrienne Mayor has won a slew of awards for The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. One of Mayor’s earlier books, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, challenges the more traditional narrative of Greek warfare as driven by honor and tradition. I assign it every time I teach Greek and Roman Warfare, and every time, the students say that it is their favorite book in the class.
Mary Beard’s book on the Roman Triumph is the most innovative and comprehensive study of the phenomenon. Kathy Gaca’s work on andrapodizing of war captives has identified a phenomenon in ancient warfare that previous scholarship has missed. And one could teach an entire class on Roman military history just using the books of Pat Southern.
To name some examples of younger, rising scholars in the field, Jessica Clark’s book on military defeat in the Roman Republic is a fascinating update to the work of Nathan Rosenstein. Her co-edited collection on the study of defeat in the Ancient Mediterranean, broadly defined, is now out as well. Kathryn Milne and Aislinn Melchior are doing exciting and innovative work on the Roman Republican military as seen respectively in the writings of Livy and Caesar. If you have not read the work of Sarah Bolmarcich on Greek diplomacy, you are perhaps under the mistaken impression that there was no such thing as Greek diplomacy. Last but not least, Sarah Bond, who has spoken out and written extensively on the problematic phenomenon of sometime exclusion of women from military history conference panels and collections, is currently working on a book on walls. Both Sarahs, by the way, are fellow Meyer-ites!
So, what is the harm in leaving women military historians out of conference panels or edited collections? The harm is ultimately to the profession. A collection excluding these scholars’ work can obviously pass peer review and be a solid work of scholarship. But I believe it will be missing the unique perspective that perhaps only women working on military history can provide. And, indeed, the collection that spurred me to write this article is remarkably uninterested in perspectives of war from below the level of generals and centurions, or in the impact of war on civilians, especially women.
Last but not least, one cannot argue with numbers: any collection excluding women scholars would be missing the voices of possibly as many as half of the scholars currently in the field, including some of the most innovative voices in the field. One need merely peruse Sarah Bond’s crowd-sourced list of women in ancient history to see the sheer numbers involved.
A recent editorial here at Eidolon described the potential works of harassed women in academia who have quit the profession as a “lost library.” But there is another lost library — that of works that exist only in female researchers’ minds or on their office computers, but are refused a public outlet by their exclusion from conferences or collections.
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Nadejda Williams is a Classicist, whose main area of teaching and research is Greek and Roman military history. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of West Georgia.
