Unpacking coercion in gendered war labor

ABSTRACT

While in recent decades there have been growing bodies of literature on gender and war, on war and military labor, and on various forms and degrees of labor coercion, rarely have these areas – gender, coercion and war labor – been analyzed together as intersecting and interdependent themes. The special issue on Gender, War and Coerced Labor aims to fill this gap, and this introduction to the issue will not only present the five papers but also establish the three intersecting themes uniting these papers. Together the introduction and the papers contribute toward larger debates about the place of coercion, of degrees of exploitation, and of free/unfree continuums in a variety of gendered war work.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• coercion
• war labor
• military labor

Introduction

Coercion has always accompanied labor related to warfare. Throughout history and across territories, participation in war-related tasks have included various degrees and forms of compulsion, whether overt or subtle, from press-ganged recruits and convicts of early modern armies to war brothels and ‘work duty’ in farming or factories in modern total warfare. The use of prisoners of war as industrial labor, or the exploitation of the local economy by a foreign occupier for military purposes, often differs in levels of coercion only by degree or symbolism. Even when military service or other war-related tasks are seemingly entered into voluntarily, they may turn out to be difficult to exit at the time or in the manner of one’s own choosing. War labor is, moreover, enacted in gendered ways, from reinforcing the military masculinity of the soldier to the reinscribing and challenging of feminine norms, the latter for example through women working in armament factories in the world wars.

While in recent decades there have been growing bodies of literature on gender and war, on war and military labor, and on various forms and degrees of labor coercion, rarely have these areas – gender, coercion and war labor – been analyzed together as intersecting and interdependent themes. By emphasizing the role of coercion in war labor, we can expand the scope of our understanding about its interplay with gendered war-related tasks as carried out in different spheres, ranging from the armed forces and auxiliary services to agricultural and industrial production and civil organizations. Additionally, this integrated approach serves to heighten and sharpen the study of gendered acts, experiences, discourses and processes, while simultaneously reinforcing the position of war labor as a unique form of labor.

Before we discuss the three themes and how they are conceived, investigated, and unpacked in the five articles, we begin with a historical example to demonstrate the intersections between them. During the 18^th century, the Habsburg monarchy experienced problems with recruitment and desertion in the imperial army, including men engaging in self-harm to avoid being recruited or to escape service. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), more than 20 percent of soldiers of the imperial army deserted (Duffy, 2003, p. 133). The Habsburgs required around 3000 new recruits per year prior to the Seven Years War and 5000 afterwards (Wilson, 2002, p. 539). The perceived solution to these problems was to allow for the forced recruitment of men as soldiers. While there was a standing army, there had been no general conscription in the Habsburg monarchy.¹ Rather, the estates of the Habsburg Lands (with the exception of Tyrol and Hungary) were expected to deploy soldiers (Landrekrutenstellung) and pay taxes (Kontribution) to finance the army (Hochedlinger, 2000, p. 342). This changed when it became more difficult to find – and keep – men. In 1749, after the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the General War Commission (Generalkriegskommissariat) explicitly allowed the estates to recruit soldiers by force, which had been previously forbidden even though it had existed in practice. During the Seven Years War, efforts to coerce men into military labor increased to the point that travelers were attacked and taken into the army by force, the estates bought Prussian prisoners at auctions to use them as soldiers, and officers surrounded churches to capture young men at the conclusion of the mass (Hochedlinger, 2000, p. 347, 348). These are examples of overt forms of coercion – in fact, the use of brute force – to recruit young reluctant men into the standing army for military work.

These coercive practices were supported by a decree issued by the Empress Maria Theresia in 1758. The Encouragement to serve as a soldier (Aufmunterung zum Soldaten Dienste, 1758)² is interesting not only as an example of non-physical means of coercion (here via a form of shaming), but because it makes visible the integral role of gender in enacting coercive methods and in war work itself. The document begins with a ‘guilt trip’, by detailing the ways the Empress had supported soldiers in the imperial forces – the creation of military academies, education for the sons of officers, lifelong care for disabled and elderly veterans, medals to recognize excellent service. Yet despite all these incentives and attempts ‘to instill an aspiration of honor, desire and love for this position into all young men in Our countries and states’, Maria Theresia (1777, p. 1256) found to her ‘astonishment and displeasure’ that ‘the young menfolk’ have an ‘unbelievable aversion’ to becoming soldiers.

The Decree then turns toward an explanation for this ‘aversion’ by questioning the masculinity and, in turn, loyalty of such men. ‘[D]isgraceful cowardice and timidness’ led potential new recruits to ‘make themselves unfit for military service’ or to flee their towns of birth or home countries. ‘[I]dleness and a lavish life’ caused the gentry and high nobility to despise soldiery and instead to do ‘vile things’ on their estates rather than ‘serving the state and saving their fatherland’. This accusation brings class into the equation, as also in the Empress’ attempt to counter the ‘mistaken’ thought that ‘only licentious and foreign, masterless rabble or young people who don’t want to learn anything or who are unable to learn sciences are good enough for military service’. In other words, those most fit to serve included the so-called ‘best’ of society. The Decree ends on an appeal to ‘feel desire and love to serve based on their natural affection for their fatherland, and to use their God given physical forces and features suitable for being a soldier against Our and their foreign enemies, following the example of their brave ancestors’, and a warning to ‘wipe out the bad reputation of disgraceful timidness and proof themselves as brave patriots instead of becoming the mockery of the whole nation and losing their straight limbs’ (Maria Theresia, 1777, p. 1257). Thus, to be a man, one should be dutiful, act with honor and pride, take action rather than engage in idleness, and show bravery and sacrifice rather than cowardice – all of which could be achieved in the imperial army.

The Habsburg example demonstrates the use of coercion via both physical force and emotional pressure in military recruitment methods, and how this was linked to ideals about preferred masculine behaviors that best served the interests of the state. At one level this is a familiar story about military masculinities, but dig deeper and the intersections between war labor, coercion and gender become more complex. The case raises questions about the role of women as a coercive force, the place of the state in constructing, enforcing or shaping desired masculinities, the levels of voluntarism that existed, and the variety of reactions to coercive recruitment drives, whether done through physical force or emotional persuasion.

The articles in ‘Gender, War and Coerced Labor’ take on this task of nuancing the discussion and asking new questions about the role of coercion in gendered war labor. What are the roles of women under coerced war labor? Are there transitions between different types of coercion at various stages of the labor process, including coerced exits? How blurred are the lines between voluntarism and coercion, and can we imagine an agency-coercion continuum to frame these diverse experiences of gendered war labor? Can the coerced even become the coercer? By exploring these questions and related topics, this issue draws on the aims of the EU-funded COST³ Action networking program ‘Worlds of Related Coercions in Work’ (WORCK), to which this special issue is related. (WORCK , n.d.), seeks to shift the focus toward coercion in war work and ‘link the study of the past with current debates on social inequalities’, and aims to move away ‘from the male-breadwinner model and the free wage laborer or the capitalist mode of production’ toward an understanding of the various coercive mechanisms ‘in all work relations throughout history’. While addressing some of these identified concerns, the issue concurrently adds new insights by entangling coercion with gender in war labor.

The collection of articles in ‘Gender, War and Coerced Labor’ thus engages with labor and war in its many gendered forms, noting that much of this labor is coerced to various degrees. Each of the papers extends, problematizes, and reshapes our knowledge about the forms of coercion gendered war labor can involve: Alexis Henshaw discusses gender, coercion, and agency in the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Gülay Yılmaz explores janissaries in the early modern Ottoman Empire, Karen Agutter and Catherine Kevin analyze displaced mothers and girls in post-Second World War Australia, Deborah Barton examines gender and propaganda on the Eastern Front, and Emily Brooks explores auxiliary police in Second World War New York City.

While the call for papers sought a wide geographical and temporal reach, as well as masculinities, the editors acknowledge that the final selection of articles, while offering some diversity, still privileges Western experiences, the 20^th century and femininities. This does not, however, deflect from the unique contributions each article makes toward the purpose of the issue. Due to the geographic scope of the articles as well as the particular expertise among the guest editors, this introduction also mainly draws on examples from early modern and modern Europe. The gendered and coerced nature of war labor has, however, certainly been a global phenomenon, although in shifting forms and different contexts that we hope future discussions will further explore and compare.

The key themes for this issue and how they are approached in each article will be further elaborated in the sections below. First, we review the centrality of gender to any understanding of war and war labor. This is followed by an overview, definition and exploration of war labor and military labor. The section on the third theme, coercion, acts as both a discrete discussion and the glue that binds the key components together. But what the Habsburg case has already introduced us to is the intersection between the (changing) needs of the state or the group for war labor, the shapes and forms of coercion used to attempt to meet those needs, and the role of gendered discourses in framing coercion, in encouraging expected behaviors, and in constructing the identity of the individual, the military, the group and/or the state within the context of war.

Gender as a central framing device

In this issue, the articles consider gender and coercion as ‘central framing devices’ (Sharoni et al., 2016, p. 26) for understanding war, the organization of war labor, and for associated gendered expectations and roles. In this section, we delve deeper into gender, examining its significance and implications for war labor within the context of current literature. In most historical societies, labor during wartime and for the war effort has been strongly gendered. For instance, the military has been an arena with a distinct and pronounced gendered division of labor, which has been deeply intertwined with cultural values and beliefs. Men have usually been forced to perform the fighting whereas women have often been prevented by cultural norms and taboos from participating in combat, yet there has been no universal, archetypal and clear-cut arrangement of men as active, warlike defenders and women as the passive, peaceful defended. The gendered organization of war labor has been historical, dynamic and shifting. Men have been included in military tasks and armed forces to varying degrees, and cultural notions of masculinity have not always and everywhere been universally linked to military virtues (Goldstein, 2006). In many societies, it has been perfectly honorable and manly for certain groups of men – for example, peasants and burghers in early modern Europe – to have nothing to do with military labor (for example, Frevert, 1996), which speaks to intersections between gender and class. Cultural prohibitions on women participating in fighting have varied in strength and comprehensiveness, with individual women taking part in battle across time and space (e.g. Sjöberg, 2008). Gender is thus central to understandings of both war and work. The discussion below deepens this overview of gender as a lens through which to examine war labor and introduces the place of gender in the articles.

In early modern Europe, soldiering was considered a men-only task, yet we know women were a large and integral part of army campaigns as providers and merchants of goods and services (Hacker, 1981; Sjöberg, 2011), and occasionally enlisted as soldiers while disguised as men (van den Pol & Dekker, 1989). From the end of the eighteenth-century, and as heralded in the Habsburg example above, military labor was increasingly connected to ideas of male honor and male civic service to the state or nation. Gender historians have argued that the increasingly universal military conscription of men during the nineteenth century reinforced and further polarized existing gender concepts, with male soldiers embodying the nation state (Frevert, 1996; Hagemann et al., 2010). But even after soldiering came to be regarded as a male civic duty in many regions in the modern period, women were increasingly mobilized, with various degrees of force, to support war efforts in, for example, the medical services and industries involved in clothing, feeding and arming the troops.

War and armed conflicts tend to have a strong impact on gendered labor relations, but as previous research has shown, this can work both to strengthen and challenge the existing gender order in a society. The most well-known and researched examples are the world wars of the twentieth century. During the First World War, women were called upon to an unprecedented degree to step in and replace men who were drafted, in work tasks across society and in both the civilian and military spheres, a pattern that was repeated during the Second World War. This change caused massive shifts in the perceptions of gender, womanhood and the gendered division of labor, with effects such as the breakthrough for female suffrage in many countries directly after the First World War, but also strong backlash phenomena in the postwar periods. Once the fighting ceased, calls for a return to a perceived pre-war normality re-strengthened many traditional gender arrangements, although the longer-term developments show that upheavals caused by wartime, not least in the labor market, could ultimately not be comprehensively reversed (Higonnet, 1987, Hagemann & Schüler-Springorum, 2002).

Examining war and the military in history through the lens of gender has resulted in the publication of many key texts over the last few decades. Initially, historical gender research focused on making visible women’s experiences as both victims of and participants in warfare. For example, B. C. Hacker’s (1981) study of women camp followers shed new light on military institutions and the organization of campaigns in early modern Europe. Joy Damousi and Lake’s (1995) interrogated and challenged the dominant masculine narrative of war in Australia. Research has expanded to gender men and masculinities in relation to warfare, highlighting such topics as ideals and counterimages of manliness, male citizenship and military comradeship in relation to conscription, military training, patriotic mobilization and warfare (Dawson, 1994; Mosse, 1996; Frevert, 2001; Hagemann, 2002; Dudink, Hagemann & Tosh, 2004). Despite these gains, uniting gender and war research with that on labor and coercion is a continuing project.

All the articles in this issue reveal the gendered division of war labor (including military labour), and the gendered roles and expectations surrounding these activities. In Karen Agutter’s and Catherine Kevin’s study of postwar Australia, teenage refugee boys arriving from war-torn Europe were employed to undertake hard, physical labor, based on notions of masculine strength. The single mothers and teenage girls in the same situation were instead obliged to do ‘female’ work such as domestic labor – regardless of their potential and previous education. These single mothers were stigmatized from the beginning because their position challenged normative ideas of motherhood and the nuclear family. Deborah Barton shows that although the women chosen for active propaganda work in the German armed forces on the Eastern Front in the Second World War entered a space that was considered masculine, they were perceived as having specifically female traits and skills that were useful for propaganda, such as ‘empathy, tact, and charm’ or caring and negotiating skills. Emily Brooks highlights that the ‘coercive patriotism’ which pressured men to join the auxiliary police in New York during the Second World War was connected to notions of military masculinity and male citizenship, while women were primarily supposed to take care of their husbands and families. Alexis Henshaw turns our attention toward the role of women in the FARC in the Colombian civil war that both played on ideas about feminine traits, such as women being purportedly better negotiators than men, but also required the repression of perceived feminine roles, especially motherhood. FARC women could be expected to give up their children while serving in the rebel forces. Gülay Yilmaz investigates the breaking and making of janissary soldiers for the Ottoman military, which was achieved by the destruction of a previous sense of family and identity and rebuilding a new military masculinity that was chivalric, Muslim, and based on notions of collective brotherhood.

Despite these gendered expectations and forms of labor, the articles in this issue also show that gender ideology and gendered reality did not always coincide. The propagandists in Deborah Barton’s case did undertake military labor on the frontlines that crossed gender boundaries. Their work was nonetheless characterized as apolitical and ‘typically’ female. And women did participate in the New York City Patrol Corps, but their work was framed as ‘assisting and enabling the more significant labor of their male colleagues’. Thus, when war labor is done by women, it is often either devalued as a form of assistance to the men who do the ‘real’ work, or seen as what De Vito et al. (2020, p. 644) refer to as ‘unproductive nonwork’. There is little valor associated with women’s war labor. These understandings have influenced gendered agencies in various historical settings.

Gendered stereotypes restricted the agency of both men and women in the context of war. The articles in this issue in many cases show that while men were expected to fulfill male duties and conform to ideas of masculine strength and sacrifice, women were frequently vulnerable to sexual coercion and becoming objects of sexualization. Barton and Agutter and Kevin highlight the sexual vulnerability of women in labor relations in the context of war. The women were sexually exploited both during and after the war, and they were suspected of using their sexuality as a weapon. While these gendered notions already shaped their agency, it was further restricted if gender intersected with race and ethnicity. Thus, during and after the Second World War, Slav women who were considered ‘subhuman’ according to Nazi ideology, or women not of ‘European ethnic origin’ according to the Australian government, had significantly fewer options for labor and/or survival. And in the New York City Patrol, women of color were subjected to racist discrimination and hierarchies. In the Ottoman empire, the devşirme system, which can be said to have constituted the abduction and enslavement of male children by the state, targeted the empire’s Christian minority on ethnic and confessional grounds. These articles thus reaffirm not only the centrality of gender and intersectionality to war and labor but the continued use of gendered discourses to justify exploitation and control of the behavior and actions of others to serve particular war work, whether under an early modern monarch or in a 20^th century democracy.

A broad definition of war labor

Without a definition of war labor, its relationship to gendered ideas and practices and to coercion cannot be easily perceived. We use the term ‘war labor’ in a broad sense to denote any type of work that collectively contributes towards a war effort at any given time, while military labor is a narrower term, referring to various types of work performed within the armed forces. In relation to the latter, no matter the degree of volunteerism or force, various forms of military service have often been legally, culturally and materially constructed not as labor but as national duty, citizenship obligation, punishment or forms of slavery. ‘Gender, War and Coerced Labor’ challenges this view. One reason for this view is the perception of soldiering as an activity outside the economic sphere of production. Within Marxist economic narratives, the military has not received much attention, likely due to the Marxist tendency to ‘overemphasize production’ (De Vito et al., 2020, p. 5). Yet throughout the early modern and modern periods, the military was also viewed as a place for jobs, income and skills development for both men and women, in both tasks perceived to be ‘military’ and ‘auxiliary’ or even ‘military-civilian’.

It is also important to note that war labor extends far beyond wartime itself. The societal impact of warfare begins long before the first shot is fired and does not cease with an armistice. Even during long periods of peace, most societies direct large proportions of their labor force towards preparation for war. In the aftermath of large armed conflicts, the effects on labor and working conditions can be ongoing as infrastructure is rebuilt, veterans – including those with disabilities – are reintegrated into productive work, and women’s tasks are again reassigned within the postwar division of labor. Here the discussion will give a brief overview of the history and historiography of war and military labor and consider how the articles expand ideas about the forms war labor can take.

Traditional military history has focused primarily on the battlefield, the strategies of war and the tasks associated with fighting. Within New Military History and the social history of the military, however, attention has shifted towards the relationships between civilian society and the military sphere, the practices and experiences of violence, and the different roles and occupations of men and women in various historical military and wartime settings. For example, soldiers have been characterized as ‘communities of violence’ throughout history, because they make a living by performing and experiencing violence (Speitkamp, 2013; 2017). In this sense, military labor needs to be understood in relation to different contexts of violence.

There have been recent signs of increasing interest in conscription and military labor more generally amongst labor historians (see, for example, Shesko, 2011; Wise, 2014; ELHN (European Labor History Network) Military Labor History Working Group, 2023). They encourage closer attention to the question of what tasks beyond combat were part of early modern military labor and how military labor was conceptualized in different historical contexts (see, for example, Mansfield, 2016). This expansion can be taken even further when civilian labor is considered as serving the needs of the military – from early modern camp followers and late modern nurses or ammunition factory workers, to translators and interpreters for foreign occupying forces.

In early modern Europe, for example, soldiering was still generally seen as a way for men to make a living and as a form of menial labor (Zürcher, 2013). Mercenary soldiers often worked as craftsmen or peasants before and after the war, or they came home for the harvest for a few months and then went to war again (Hitz, 2015). While military service could be a lifelong professional occupation, many men were poorly trained and equipped and only joined the army for shorter periods of time. Wages were often low and not sufficient to make a living, so that plundering became a way to survive. Therefore, the soldiers’ image was frequently associated with violence, vagrancy, and threats to public order (Burschel, 1994, Batelka et al., 2017). In the eighteenth century, the understanding of soldiers and war started to change significantly in Europe. Cameralist thinkers, according to new ideas of utility, reconceptualized military labor as productive work, serving the needs of the state (Frambach, 2009). As the Habsburg case demonstrates, towards the end of the eighteenth century, wars were increasingly romanticized as a site where men could show their courage and physical strength (Harari, 2008). In the so-called democratic revolutions in America and France, the notion of ‘citizen-soldiers’ in the republican tradition was reinvented, understood as a civilian man for whom military service was no life-long occupational choice, but only a temporary necessity in times of national crisis (Smith-Rosenberg, 2004; Forrest, 2007).

The military was frequently an important job market for younger sons of the aristocracy as well as proletarian men desperate to find provision. It was often one of the few places where a young man from a poor family could get a training or an education free of charge and at least some degree of social advancement through becoming a non-commissioned officer. But early modern armies consisted not only of men: female and male camp followers, such as merchants, prostitutes, craftsmen and craftswomen, and soldiers’ wives, children and companions were an important part of early modern armies and often outnumbered the soldiers (Hacker, 1981). We can compare these armies to cities on the move. Early modern war labor thus needs to be understood as comprising a variety of tasks and occupations for both men and women.

Working with a broad definition of war labor, which is not restricted to the battlefield and includes the times before and after wars, the articles in this issue show the historic variety of its forms. Gülay Yilmaz demonstrates that the training of janissaries for the 16^th century Ottoman military consisted of anything from agricultural labor, to working in urban businesses like bakeries, to actual military training. Deborah Barton analyzes the work of female propagandists on the Eastern Front during the Second World War as coerced war labor which involved distributing information, holding rallies and frontline agitation. Alexis Henshaw shows that war labor should not be limited in our considerations to standing or national armies, but also applied to non-state armed forces, as in her study of FARC. Karen Agutter and Catherine Kevin show that single mothers and teenagers who came to Australia as Displaced Persons (DPs) for resettlement after the war were sent to compulsory employment for two years. Their occupation mostly consisted of gendered tasks such as domestic work – which in this case needs to be situated in the context of war and postwar Australian nation building. Their article also reveals a double layer of war labor, as many of these DPs had previously been forced laborers under Nazi Germany. In Emily Brooks’ article, military labor is also something that happens far away from the battlefields of the Second World War: she analyzes the unpaid, only seemingly voluntary, auxiliary police work of the New York City Patrol Corps.

Far from being excluded from understandings of what constitutes labor, the variety of war work in these articles affirm its place as labor, reflecting the kinds of tasks performed in civilian contexts, such as policing, as well as specific military-oriented roles like soldiering. These different but intersecting work tasks are united by the common and integral purpose to support the needs of military conflict, whether in preparing for it, during the action, or in dealing with the aftermath and postwar rebuilding. Additionally, war labor, as has been shown in the previous section, is inescapably gendered. By expanding our understanding of what can constitute gendered war labor, and when it is performed, the articles in this issue contribute toward further challenging the limitations of existing definitions of war and military labor, and to expanding the space in which to develop new ones. Introducing coercion into this equation can further deepen our understanding of gendered war labor.

Coercion in gendered war labor

The final theme in the issue’s trilogy, and second framing device, is the role of coercion in gendered war labor. Coercion can be a contested term, embedded as it is within debates about ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labor, and here we review both that debate and the role of coercion in the issue’s articles. The classic view has been to present free/unfree as a dichotomy tied to the development of capitalism, with the ‘unfree’ represented by outright slavery and the ‘free’ by wage labor. Such a view has been increasingly seen as simplistic and western-centric, or as Viola Müller (2019, p. 867) puts it, ‘arbitrary’ in its division. Some scholars have expanded understandings of what the ‘unfree’ can include, such as Brass (1999) work on bonded labor, and have shown that rather than a teleological trajectory from unfree to free, ‘[l]abour-power is neither always and everywhere free, nor is it always and everywhere unfree’ (Brass, 2009; Kerr-Ritchie, 2002). Others have recommended overturning the binary altogether, including Steinfeld (2001, p. 8): ‘As vast as these differences undoubtedly were [between slave and ‘free’ labor] they should be understood as establishing the terms of labor along a very broad continuum rather than as binary opposition. Jairus Banaji (2003, pp. 70, 71) talks of ‘fictions of consent’ and of coercion as existing ‘everywhere’, while Jens Lerche (2007, p. 443) refers to ‘degrees of unfreedom, and/or of inequality underlying the labour relations’ and sees the continuum model as better representing what actually exists in different forms of labor. Pesante (2009, p. 320) captures the challenge of ‘tracing clear lines of distinction’ between free and unfree, and further states that ‘it appears that we are dealing with a bit more or a bit less freedom and coercion, with a mix of freedom in certain aspects and coercions in others, but never with a dichotomy or with social formations that as a whole can be defined as either free or unfree labour.’

In this issue, Karen Agutter and Catherine Kevin also advocate for the idea of a continuum. Through their work on the journey of women and teenage girls transported as Displaced Persons (DP) to post-WWII Australia, they reveal the layers of coercion they experienced. This journey varied from forced labor under Nazi Germany to the removal of workplace choice after they arrived in Australia, the latter to fulfill its postwar rebuilding agenda. Further, context can be crucial to understanding acts of coercion. In Australia, there was a long practice of forced removal of children, especially those from Indigenous families, that also framed the treatment of DP women and their children. The authors suggest we need to understand all these experiences as a continuum of exploitation or unfree labor with an eye to context that provides the necessary nuances within the continuum. Other scholars in the literature warn of creating a new problem with the continuum model: while Marcel van der Linden (2016, pp. 315, 319, 321–322) advocates for a ‘more sophisticated typology’ that acknowledges ‘degrees of autonomy’, he also says a ‘caveat should be added here. There might seem to be a continuum or spectrum of forms of labor with differing degrees of autonomy and different statuses merging seamlessly into one another, but such fluidity can be misleading.’ Still others, like De Vito et al. (2020, p. 12), argue for a more interrelational and contextualized approach to the idea of a continuum or spectrum. As part of their proposed strategy for such research, they urge us to ‘explore the complexity of coercive mechanisms behind a specific labor relation in a social formation’ (De Vito et al., 2020, p. 9). Drawing on and expanding van der Linden’s (2016) suggested approach to ‘dissecting coerced labor’, they encourage us to study degrees, sites, moments and modalities of coercion. What degree of autonomy does the worker have? Where does coercion occur? When does coercion occur and how/through what methods and regulations?

War labor provides an excellent case for such studies. One of the most well-known forms of coercion in military and war labor is modern, ‘universal’ male conscription. From the late eighteenth century up until the world wars of the twentieth century, an intense nationalistic and militaristic propaganda surrounded and legitimized universal conscription as a masculine civic duty and a part of the civic education for every fit young man (Damsholt, 2000; Frevert, 2001; Hagemann, 2002). Yet in practice, universal conscription was simultaneously a massive system of gendered and coerced military labor, including extensive peacetime drafts and prolonged military education on an unprecedented scale. Under the pretext of national defense, the state forced especially men from the lower strata of society (since there were often exemptions for the educated and wealthy) to perform, at best, a form of glorified guard duty, at worst heavy forced labor on fortifications and other military infrastructure building sites.

Universal male conscription spread across the Western world over the course of the nineteenth century, taxing a considerable amount of young male labor for prolonged military service periods even in peacetime, at the same time using significant quantities of public finances to employ a large officer corps and maintain garrisons on an industrial scale. Nationalist ideologies camouflaged the role of the military sphere in the labor market as well as its ‘interesting position […] at the crossroads of wage and non-wage labor and free and unfree labor’ (Lucassen & Zürcher, 1998, p. 405). Notions of sacrifice for the state and of male military honor concealed the fact that for the men who served, military labor was often a result of coercion and/or the need to make a living. Under military conscription laws, the recruitment and extraction of military labor has in many countries, up until modern times, been based on force through the threat of physical compulsion and refusal, punished by, for example, fines, a prison sentence, or, at worst, execution. Or, as the Habsburg Empress has shown, through shaming.

The extension of this ambiguous form of military labor, as well as the whole auxiliary and logistical industry that surrounded it, reached a historical maximum during the two world wars of the twentieth century, when not only a record number of men of working age were drafted for various military tasks, but also a great number of women were recruited for the gigantic apparatuses needed to assist, maintain, equip and arm the troops. Under various and complex degrees of coercion and voluntarism, the military employed vast numbers of women as cooks, laundresses, prostitutes, nurses, secretaries, drivers and even technicians, yet only rarely were women granted access to those combat-related tasks considered ‘military’ in a narrower sense.

There are more or less sublime and informal forms of coercion associated with war labor (including, but not limited to, conditional threats to sign up or be conscripted regardless, community pressure to ‘do one’s bit’, and other forms of constrained choice), which call into question understandings of recruitment and/or extraction of war labor as voluntary or compulsory, free or unfree. van der Linden (2016), De Vito et al. (2020) and Müller (2019) all point out the importance of interrogating moments of coercion. Alexis Henshaw, in this issue, teases out different moments of coercion in the war labor process for women in FARC – including at entry, during ‘extraction’ of labor, as van der Linden (2016, p. 306) phrases it, and at the point of exit. Henshaw draws attention to coerced exits, that in this case many women experienced as a rupture to their sense of ‘insurgent feminism’ and to their previous rejection of some feminine norms, which had led them to FARC in the first instance. They feared demobilization would force them back into ‘traditional roles’, also clearly demonstrating the role of gender in the experience of coercion. As well as moments, we need to consider different types of coercion. ‘[F]or a labour relation to be unfree,’ says Lerche (2007, p. 437), ‘it must involve coercion’. Yet, as noted by Brass (1999, p. 17), measuring or quantifying the level of coercion is not methodologically possible. But is that even necessary? By focusing on moments and experiences we can discern even subtle forms of coercion without a need to precisely measure or quantify them. This is done by Emily Brooks in her article on the New York City Patrol Corps during the Second World War. She poses the term ‘coercive patriotism’ to describe the strategies used to convince men to join the Patrol, such as community pressure and appeals to masculinities, citizenship and national duty, while women did not receive similar pressures, again highlighting the importance of gender in levels and types of coercion. Such appeals to masculinity are not unlike those of the Empress Maria Theresia.

Yet coercion can of course also be brutal, as also shown in the Habsburg case. Gülay Yilmaz provides an example in her article from the Ottoman empire in the early modern period, charting the journey of boys and young men in the devşirme system that molded them into janissaries for the elite Ottoman army. The point of recruitment was through sheer physical compulsion, that is the levying of male children of Christians and sending them to work for Turkish families in agricultural labor, thus severing their family bonds. However, Yilmaz’s article does something more: it demonstrates transitions in the shape of coercion over the life of these boys on their way to manhood. After agricultural work, work in urban businesses, military training, conversion to Islam, and the creation of new sense of chivalric masculinity, these taken boys had built a new identity and form of belonging, and even a sense of privilege. This new identity led to a voluntary form of continued participation in the armed forces, and might even be read as a new sense of pride borne out of experiences and discourses of shame. This interesting example aligns with de Vito, Schiel and van Rossum’s (2020, p. 9) observation that coercion can change at different moments of the labor experience: a worker might voluntarily enter a labor relation but encounter coercion during the work process and be prevented from leaving it. Conversely, a worker might be forced into slavery but then achieve considerable autonomy – for example, because of his/her skills or literacy – and ultimately be emancipated.

van der Linden (2016, p. 296) notes of coercive labor relationships:

There is a coercer who attempts to induce a recipient of coercion (the victim) to a complaint response by means of a coercive act … The coercer might be a person, but it could equally be an organization or institution, or even a social structure. The coercive act can take two forms: constrained choice and physical compulsion.

At face value, this assumes that the coercer and recipient of the coercion stay the same in that coercive relationship or that the roles are quite separate. In her article, Deborah Barton shows that a person may be coerced and concurrently become the coercer. Focusing on female propagandists for the Wehrmacht in the Second World War, she complicates not only ideas about collaboration by framing propaganda work as a form of coerced labor (a constrained choice for the women between that and other forms of forced labor, backed by the threat of physical compulsion), but also their role as the coerced. For these women themselves engaged in coercion as ‘they were tasked with recruiting for labour on behalf of the German occupiers’ from the local population. No matter the divisions and typologies we create to describe moments and acts and types of coercion, complexities abound.

As already stated, labor historians have not always given sufficient attention to military work. Conversely, the related concept of war work has received significant attention, albeit with a focus on non-military labor; many labor scholars suggest that we need to look at extra-economic incentives to work – that are not necessarily ‘reducible to physical maltreatment’ (Brass, 1999, p. 15), and van der Linden includes war as one of those incentives. ‘During armed conflicts,’ he says, ‘one often sees major changes in employment systems. The relative autonomy of workers is generally restricted’, a restriction that requires some level of coercion and/or incentivization (van der Linden, 2016, pp. 317–318). Referring to what he calls military labor and we interpret as war labor, David Killingray (1989, pp. 486, 488), notes in his study of war and recruitment in colonial Africa, that coercion ‘increased with the emergency of a war situation’, and that ‘[c]oercion lay at the heart of military labour recruitment. Force was the only way in which the authorities could secure sufficient manpower. Without that labour, the military could not function.’ That last statement is crucial: not only does a military organization require bodies for combat, it has huge logistical requirements that only intensified with the ‘total warfare’ of the 20^th century. ‘[B]ehind that effective fighting power,’ states Stephen Kotkin (2000, p. 182) of the Second World War, ‘stood highly productive economies and armies of skilled and semiskilled laborers. Tens of millions of soldiers fought at the front; scores of millions worked long hours at factories, mines, railroads, and farms.’ This ‘extraordinary’ need for resources, let alone the ongoing replacement of fighters in the field through death and injury, in effect creates a constant labor shortage, thus increasing the need for the use of coercion to maintain those resources (Evans, 1970, p. 864).

Coercion, then, is an integral part of both war and military labor, but this should not be taken for granted and needs to be interrogated. Any discussion of coercion in relation to war labor warrants consideration and contextualization as compared to other types of labor. The degrees and gendered contexts may differ between situations, as explored in this issue, whether the coercive voluntarism of the City Patrol Corps, the constrained choice of women on the Eastern front, or the brute force of the devşirme system in the Ottoman army. Such an interrogation can, in turn, reveal new insights into the use of coercion in labor.

‘Consent, coercion and exploitation,’ says Fudge (2019, p. 114), ‘are contested concepts, and an historical approach enables us to identify the contours of the contestation at particular times and places’. The articles in ‘Gender, War, and Coerced Labor’ not only excel at identifying these historical contours, but the role of coercion here is even greater. Coercion as a theme or framework for the articles acts as an intensifier, magnifying and sharpening the experience of gendered acts, discourses and processes, while amplifying and reifying the place of war labor as a form of labor.

Conclusion

In summary, this special issue on ‘Gender, War and Coerced Labor’ contributes toward larger debates about the place of coercion, of degrees of exploitation, and of free/unfree continuums in a variety of gendered war work. In particular, these articles collectively unsettle notions of coercion by demonstrating that it is not a static or narrowly defined thing, but itself exists as a transformative journey, changing shapes at different stages of the labor process and within different contexts, even for a single individual. In doing so, this unsettling enhances our capacity to develop more nuanced frameworks with which to understand coercion and the ways it intersects with a variety of forms of marginalization and discrimination in different types of labor, in this case gender within the specific context of war. We hope that this special issue inspires new research to investigate the intersections between war labor, gender and coercion in other times and places, which will further contribute toward developing these frameworks.

Acknowledgments

The editors of this special issue and the authors of this introduction would like to express their gratitude to the authors who contributed to this issue and all the scholars who participated in the online workshop in 2022. We would also like to thank Klara Arnberg, Johan Svanberg, Sofie Tornhill, and Carolina Uppenberg for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of the paper, along with the Arts and Sciences Writing Group at The University of Notre Dame Australia for their helpful feedback. Last but not least, we would like to thank Worlds of Related Coercions in Work (WORCK) for providing the platform and network for us to work on this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST) under Grant CA18205; and the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2019-02571.

Notes on contributors

Julia Heinemann

Julia Heinemann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the early modern history of gender, military labour, dis/ability and the body.

Christine de Matos

Christine de Matos is an historian who examines military occupations through the lenses of gender, power and labor. She has published widely on the topic, including her book Imposing Peace and Prosperity: Australia, Social Justice and Labour Reform in Occupied Japan (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008).

Fia Sundevall

Fia Sundevall is an Associate Professor in Economic History. Her main research interests lie within the intersections of labour, gender, and military history. Her latest publication within this field is ‘A Nordic Model of Gender and Military Work?’ in Scandinavian Economic History Review (2022/online first), with Anders Ahlbäck and Johanna Hjertquist).

Anders Ahlbäck

Anders Ahlbäck is Lecturer in History at Stockholm University, Sweden, specialising in the gender history of military conscription and political masculinities in the Nordic countries. His publications include Manhood and the Making of the Military: Conscription, Military Service and Masculinity in Finland, 1917–39 (Routledge, 2014).

Notes

1. See Hochedlinger (2013) for an overview. General military conscription was introduced in 1868.

2. Translated for this introduction by Julia Heinemann.

3. COST = European Cooperation in Science and Technology, a funding organization for research and innovation networks, www.cost.eu