In histories of war, women's roles have been understood through a series of familiar images and stereotypes. Most retrospective accounts of the Second World War are by women who remember a time of youth, exuberance and romance, or of a heightened sense of involvement through their ‘input’ in the war effort. In contrast, women remain invisible in narratives of the Korean War, reflecting the fate of that war in collective memory. Different again is the place of women in the Vietnam War which has, for the most part, been understood through the history of the protest and anti-war movements, framed as memories of youth, and to a lesser extent through recollections of female entertainers and nurses.

In contrast to these selective stories of women in wartime, those whose husbands were serving abroad remember war as a time of absence and loss. For women with men at the front, absence was a major theme in their memories of the home-front, although these were often imbued with either a tragic or romantic hue. Histories of women's activism in wartime have focused on women involved in industrial labour, the implication being that this ‘activism’ should be the focus of study over other activities. Women's place in war narratives continues to be understood in terms of their relationship to the public domain, which has been deemed more relevant to the public memory of war than their private experience.