Warfare is commonly seen as one of the most gendered arenas of life. This holds true both historically and metaphorically. Joshua Goldstein's survey of female warriors throughout history concludes that women made up approximately one percent of all fighters. Of the soldiers serving in today's standing armies, approximately 97% are male. Even women who serve in the army are frequently deployed in non-combat situations — or in situations that are labeled as non-combat. In light of this asymmetry, one may well surmise that woman's banishment from the front is not a historical accident, but crucial for the smooth functioning of the institution of war. In the absence of female soldiers, idealized concepts of masculinity and heroism can be employed to enable practices of war. Although the reality of war may be apt to erode gender roles — one need only think of Rosie the Riveter, the American cultural icon who stands for the many women who joined the industrial workforce during the Second World War, and the so-called Trümmerfrauen in postwar Germany, who helped rebuild the destroyed cities — ideologies of war tend to uphold them. Men make war, and war makes real men.

Paradoxically, the more women are absent from the context of war, the more warfare is metaphorically associated with gender, sexuality, and procreation. It is not only the metaphorical conflation of fighting and sexuality, evident in the phallic design of many weapons, which suggests an intimate link between war and gender. Since wars take lives and mothers give life, warfare and motherhood are often conceived of as complementary. The association of war and maternity goes back to the foundational war text in the Western tradition, the Iliad, in which the pain Agamemnon suffers because of wounds incurred in battle is compared with labor pangs. Unsurprisingly, the complementary nature of soldier and mother was touted by National Socialist ideologues. In his novel Michael, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's future Minister of Propaganda, compares war and birth: “Ihn — den Krieg — abschaffen wollen, das ist dasselbe, wie wenn man abschaffen wollte, dass Mütter Kinder zur Welt bringen. Auch das ist schrecklich. Alles Lebendige ist schrecklich.” Goebbel's sentiments were shared by the Italian dictator Mussolini, who famously declared that war is to men what motherhood is to women.