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Women on War: Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age (Touchstone Book)

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I notice Daniela Gioseffi has edited a new book of women's writiing to come out in 2003. Here is an idea of the excellent writing to expect in her compilation.

I am going to quote the contribution by Olive Schreiner from South Africa.
"There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely a potential child-bearer, who could look down on a battlefield covered with the slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; . . .so many baby mouths drawing life at woman's breasts;-all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed-this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh!"

In a besieged city, it might well happen tht men in the streets might seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings and galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts by the enemy...not valuing them more than if they had been paving stones. But one man could not do this-the sculptor! He, who, though there might be no work of his own chisel among them, yet knew what each of these works of art had cost, knew by experience the long years of struggle and study and the infinitude of toil which had gone to shaping of even one limb, to the carving of even one perfected outline, he could never so use them without thought of care...Men's bodies are our women's works of art. Given to us power to control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds...

War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer.

It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men's bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who not amid the clamour and ardour of battle, but, singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-morning courage, shed blood and face death that the battle-field may have its food, a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is we especially, who in the domain of war,, have our word to say, a word no man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war and to labour there till in the course of generations we have extinguished it."