Comments on: Abraham in Arms

By: Does warfare ever change over time? : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Tue, 03 May 2011 17:27:28 +0000

[...] I wrote a whole book about this kind of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I kept searching for change over time, extending the end date of my project, but I never found it. Clearly, I could have extended it to the present, because Bin Laden was hardly a man, he was hiding behind a girl when they got’im! And he lived a life of effeminacy and luxury, not manly self-sacrifice or military discipline. I especially liked that touch that “he may have used one of his wives as a shield.” It’s the same objectification of Muslim women’s misery and drudgery that’s always in play in wars with Western powers, with a bonus dig at the manhood of a Muslim man found cowering behind a woman’s skirts before his spectacularly violent death. Behold the power of the narrative: Anglo-American colonists were fond of tsk-tsking about the fate of “squaw drudges,” Indian women who were made to toil endlessly in the fields while their husbands played at sport like fishing and hunting. [...]

By: Guns and gender: “many say” that men don’t know what the hell they’re talking about : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:13:57 +0000

[...] not only are we the inheritors of a legacy of gun ownership that is deeply gendered (see my book if you want the details. It’s true! Girls write about the historical patterns and meaning [...]

By: Honourable Mention! What an honour! : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:42:34 +0000

[...] Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England won an Honourable Mention for the 2008 Albert B. Corey Prize/Prix Corey from the Canadian Historical Association. The prize is awarded every other year jointly with the American Historical Association to the best book in Canadian-American history. Should the winner of the 2008 Corey Prize (Sharon A. Roger Hepburn, for Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada, University of Illinois Press, 2007) be unable to fulfill her duties, I’ll be happy to swing into action. Here’s the flattering and generous citation from the CHA: Abraham in Arms argues that religious ideas about gender and family provided the vital context in which the people of colonial New England, New France, and “Indian Country” understood the cross-cultural warfare between them through the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a richly imaginative and theoretically innovative fusion of religion, gender, family, diplomacy, and war that offers yet another persuasive argument that no study of war can avoid addressing the social role of gender and family life in animating the normative use of violence. It is a book destined to be influential to historians of other times and places. [...]

By: No more photos from Abu Ghraib because of rape scenes? : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:09:37 +0000

[...] was invited to a university to give a talk about Abraham in Arms when it was first published, and a woman in the audience (herself a women’s historian) [...]