Letter: Involvement of women, men and sailors in the Second World War

From Ms Georgina Natzio

Sir: Rosalind Miles appears, in her essay on masculinity as defined by war ("Frogmarched into manhood", 1 May), to lay the responsibility for warmongering exclusively at the feet of men - but what about women's involvement? Without the support of women, Nazism in Germany could could never have gained the hold on public imagination which it achieved, and even the internal terror inflicted upon Germans would never have reached the levels it did without the tacit and overt support of the majority of German women. Likewise, the British war effort would never have survived without female involvement at every level.

But this is a question which goes far beyond women joining the male military organisations in imitation of, or in surrender to, male perspectives.

The civic responsibility for which our ancestries fought (which in a democratic society must march side by side with human rights and freedom) reaches most subtly into the deepest recesses of a nation's psyche and is shared now by women in as intricate a form as that of men's within the social structure. From this arises the notions of collective guilt, of collective suffering.

But finally, and perhaps most important of all, to deny women's ethical responsibility for the making of war reduces women to the secondary level in male-female perceptions from which they have been trying to escape for so long indeed, even to the level of the infantile.

Yours faithfully,

GEORGINA NATZIO

Thurlton, Norwich

3 May