Featured Grants
When Janey Comes Marching Home
“When Janey Comes Marching Home:
Portraits of Women Combat Veterans”
Visual Arts Center of Richmond
$9,900 awarded June, 2008
Women have always been among the casualties of war. Some have been killed or wounded while serving in uniform; but until fairly recently, their numbers have been relatively small compared to their male counterparts.
Today, the tens of thousands of women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan still have a “non-combat” status, but the lines are blurred; and their experience of war—and of its life-altering physical and psychological wounds—is often hard, or impossible, to differentiate from that of male soldiers.
Increasingly, their experience of combat is just as personal and direct.
This is a complex subject that raises difficult questions, some with a root system in our national psyche and in debates about war and gender reaching back at least as far as the Revolutionary War, and perhaps beyond.
Today, the composition of our armed forces, the nature of their deployment, changes in the ways wars are fought, and improvements in body armor and battlefield medicine have all contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of women who are returning home profoundly changed as a result of their wartime experience.
American society has only begun to come to terms with this phenomenon and what it means—for the women involved, their families, and their communities—and for society as a whole. Some important first steps are being taken in Virginia, in a photo-documentation and oral history project supported by a grant from the VFH.
Interview With Laura Browder
Laura Browder discusses this project and her book Her Best Shot in Wretched Sisters on With Good Reason Radio.
When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans combines the work of photographer Sacha Pflaeging and author and filmmaker Laura Browder, a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and former VFH Fellow whose book Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) traces the way the female soldier has been seen in American popular culture.
Through a grant to the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VFH has supported the collection of oral history interviews with several dozen women veterans together with photographic portraits of each of these women, leading to an exhibit which is scheduled to open at the Center in May, 2008 and travel to other locations in Virginia subsequently.
This effort is receiving support from the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps: they have helped in making contacts and scheduling interviews with women veterans across a wide spectrum of military rank, personal background, and combat-related experience.
Not surprisingly, the interviews have revealed a wide range of viewpoints among these women with regard to the Iraq war in particular—as well as stories that are by turns moving, funny, thought-provoking, and profound.
Most of the women interviewed thus far are proud of their service, regardless of their position on the war itself; and many have said how important they think it is for Americans to understand the experience of women fighting in Iraq.
The project directors have taken strictly neutral positions on the war and on the sensitive question of women in combat, focusing instead on the complexity of these women’s personal experiences and the underlying issues.
In many cases, they’ve simply listened. And as a result, many of the interviewees have related stories and feelings that are deeply personal: stories about loss and comradeship, pride and frustration, conflict and transcendence, and the problems of re-integrating into civilian life.
The word “groundbreaking” is used at times too loosely. But this project is clearly breaking important new ground. It’s already created some important new partnerships and provided an outlet for women veterans eager to share their experiences.
It’s also laid the foundation for a much broader discussion about the impact of war on women’s lives and on their families, children and spouses especially. In a state with a huge military presence and several of the largest military installations in the country, this seems especially important, and timely; and the potential impact of a project like this is even larger than it might be otherwise.
But one of the reasons VFH decided to support this effort is that it has national, not just statewide significance. The issues being explored and the personal stories that are at the heart of this project are not bound by geography or by local interest alone.
Like its organizers and its other supporters and partners, we hope this project will contribute to a much broader conversation and to a greater understanding of war’s impact on the people—in this case the women—who carry its heaviest burden.
