Stereotypes and counterstereotypes of the role of women in the Great War. Female experiences and their reflection in the cinema

Abstract

The woman has been forgotten by the science of history. For centuries scholars have related the historical events in men key, since were the men who wrote them, producing a strange result, because the world population has always included men and women. As Virginia Woolf said, the non-presence of women in history, produced a story “weird, unreal, uneven” (Ferrus: 2010: 65) and as noted by Lerner (1981: 22):

There are women in history and there are men in history, and one would expect that no any historical approach in a given period could have been written without discussing actions and ideas of both men and women.

In this paper we make a reflection about two realities coinciding with the development of the First World War: first, the sociological change around the role of women in public places and second, the development of a new medium to construct history, cinema.

So, with this article we make an approach to the transformation that occurred in the role of women and their participation in public space from that historical period, and as a film treatment, both contemporary with the great contest as inspired subsequent context, allow us to see the reflection of the changes that served to lay a new female model precursor of modern woman.