Twenty-five years at the front line: Gender and War in retrospect

This article provides a retrospective study of Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi’s 1995 edited volume Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century. On the eve of the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, such a study offers an opportunity to recapture some of the vibrancy that attended its publication. Gender and War spoke both to the opportunities for new histories that unfolded with the tools of gender analysis and to the re-energised examination of Australian experiences of war that was then occurring. Well attuned both to the international and local contexts to which the volume was contributing, the contributors to Gender and War grasped a unique opportunity to develop more complex and fruitful insights into the effects of war on Australian society. In so doing, it also furthered the extant project of critiquing the phenomenon so much at the heart of academic inquiry into Australian war history: the Anzac legend. Armed with its new questions and new analytical demands, gender history opened up the study of Australian experiences of war–and the meanings attached to them–in ways that are still playing out productively today.