Valiant Women in War and Exile: Thirty-Eight True Stories

First published in 1987, this profoundly moving collection of women’s personal stories crosses political and cultural boundaries, and includes every major war from pre-World War I Europe to the jungles of Central America in the 1980s. With her new introduction, Hayton-Keeva connects the book’s poignant testimonies to contemporary issues of war, and describes a voice distinctively different from the traditional experience of men at war: War is not suspended in time, something outside a woman’s experience of life; it is part of life, woven into all the rest. These mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives endured concentration camps, atomic bombs, homeland invasions, terrorism, and guerilla warfare. As nurses, nuns, social workers, soldiers, prisoners, spies, or snipers, they took active command of their lives and did what had to be done. Their accounts convey the lifelong physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of grief, terror, and loss, and reveal that for women, war is not about glory and camaraderie and heroism, but about the quiet valor born of individual suffering and triumph over adversity.