War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 496p. $39.95

Extract

Joshua Goldstein has authored an exhaustive and insightful book on the major ways in which gender and war influence each other. This lengthy, thoroughly researched, and clearly argued work should have broad appeal for scholars of war and international relations, as well as of gender, across several disciplines and theoretical predilections. Why is it, the book asks, that although manifestations of both war and gender show great diversity, there is one constant: Gender roles in the context of war vary almost not at all across cultures and across time. Fighters are almost exclusively men, with the “near-total exclusion” of women from combat.