LONDON: Not long after I began writing a history of the Opium war — the first conflict between China and Great Britain, fought in the middle of the 19th century — a smart, experienced London publisher advised me to publish it under an initial, not my full first name. Only men read military history, he told me, and men don’t buy books by women.
A glance at Amazon’s history bestseller charts seemed to confirm a gender divide of sorts in this corner of non-fiction publishing. When I last looked, the ratio in the list of general history titles was clearly tipped towards men: Antony Beevor, Peter Ackroyd, Norman Davies, and so on. As for military history bestsellers, beyond a handful of exceptions, the chart was overwhelmingly male-dominated. (The proportions were skewed slightly by the curious inclusion of Caroline and Robin Weir’s Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide.)
Recent kerfuffles in the land of TV historians showed that David Starkey, for one, subscribed to the Niall-Fergusons-are-from-Mars, Alison-Weirs-are-from-Venus thesis. Last year, Starkey accused women of making “historical Mills & Boon”, of turning serious political and diplomatic history into a “bizarre soap opera”, and of exploiting on their book covers the fact that they are “usually quite pretty”. He complained that fascination with Henry VIII’s wives (who “complicated” the story of Henry) had pushed the big man off centre-stage: “If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify.” (“If it wasn’t insulting and degrading to judge historians by their looks,” Lucy Worsley — presenter of If Walls Could Talk: A History of the Home — swiftly retorted, “I would point out that Dr Starkey looks like a cross owl in the pictures on his own book covers.”)
But I’ve often wondered what this publisher was getting at, in suggesting that — decades after gender equality battles in the workplace have been fought and won (except, perhaps, in oil rigs and professional conducting) — military history remains a man’s world. Are women supposed to lack the necessary fascination with boys’ toys and tactics: with flanged maces, Brown Besses and light sabres? Are they meant to be too “empathetic” to cope with the horrors of war?
If so, this represents a narrowly old-fashioned vision of military history that has been transcended by books published over the past few decades. Since the late 1960s, the genre has been overhauled by the rise of “new military history”: a multidisciplinary approach that embeds war in its political, social, cultural and personal contexts. This evolution was exemplified by John Keegan’s innovative The Face of Battle (1976), an empathetic reconstruction of soldiers’ experience “at the point of maximum danger”. And women have played a central role in redefining military history: to name only two, Joanna Bourke (whose 1999 book, An Intimate History of Killing, excavated the emotions that turned ordinary humans into efficient killers) and Amanda Foreman, whose book on the American civil war gives the reader “history-in-the-round” — a three-dimensional portrait of the soldiers, spies, diplomats, journalists and society hostesses swept up in the conflict. —Dawn/Guardian News Service
