Gender, Civil War and National Identity: Women Partisans during the Greek Civil War 1946–1949

This paper focuses on the recovery of the experience of partisan women who fought in the lines of the communist-led Greek Democratic Army (GDA) during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). It is an extract from a research project which examines the extent to which the symbolism of Greek women in arms has informed the various waves of feminist discourse which have emerged since the founding of the modern Greek nation state. More specifically this work employs the image of the Greek woman warrior as an analytical category to investigate the relationship between militarism, nationalism and Greek feminist politics in relation to key nation-building conflicts of the modern Greek period. As such it belongs to the realm of scholarship informed by an understanding of 'gender' and 'nation' as constructed and contested relational systems of cultural and social meanings. Together the two systems not only shape the political culture in historically specific ways but also legitimate and limit the access of (groups of) people — women as well as men — to national movements as well as to the resources of the nation-state. This paper concentrates specifically on the heavily mythologised women of the GDA. It pays special attention to the historical association of their rebellion with national citizenship rights in post-war Greece.