The Second World War eclipsed all previous wars by its scale of destruction and staggering loss of life. Scholars have deemed the global conflict a “watershed” due to the wartime expansion of state power and the use of violence aimed at civilians of all ages. Home fronts were purposefully targeted with sweeping censorship and propaganda, loss of civil liberties, food deprivation and starvation, air raid attacks, forced internments and deportations, rapes, and mass murder. Historians have also claimed that World War Two was a “watershed for women,” a “turning point in the advancement of gender equality,” given women’s high participation in their nations’ war efforts.

This comparative course uses the lens of World War Two through which to closely examine state policies, gender ideologies, wartime realities, and home front experiences (especially those of women) in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the Third Reich’s ghettos and concentration camps, and the seemingly different home front of the United States. Primary documents, diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as visual sources, offer us illuminating material to better understand how private lives were upended, social norms were rendered inoperative, and traditional constructs of “gender” and “non-combatant” dissolved as mobilized home fronts became raging battle fronts.

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*This video will expire on January 31, 2024