The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works: Difference between revisions

Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat”{{sfn|Kert|1983|p=297 quote}} (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:

In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military” (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.