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
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In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: “War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=viii}} In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In “The War in Spain” section of ''The Face of War'', Gellhorn specifies: “Thanks to ''Collier''’s I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I | In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: “War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=viii}} In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In “The War in Spain” section of ''The Face of War'', Gellhorn specifies: “Thanks to ''Collier''’s I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I | ||
wanted, when I wanted, and write what I | wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=22}} In a 1945 ''Collier''’s article describing the end of World War II in Europe, “You’re on Your Way Home,” Gellhorn writes that “the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?” (qtd. in Sorel 389). | ||
For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in {{pg|387|388}} fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the “continuous harping on the theme: ‘Will the women be willing to return to the home?’’’ and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: “[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is over” (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 3:214). The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front. | For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in {{pg|387|388}} fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the “continuous harping on the theme: ‘Will the women be willing to return to the home?’’’ and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: “[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is over” (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 3:214). The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front. | ||