Women Blogging ANZAC Day

When we established The Hand Mirror one of our central aims was to promote NZ women's blogging, whether political or otherwise. In line with that purpose, here is a round-up of all the ANZAC related posts I can find by NZ women, be they mothers, crafters, ex-pats, immigrants, feminists, socialists, National Party supporters, or even all of the above. Hopefully it will provide a bit of a snapshot of what NZ women bloggers were thinking on or around April 25th 2008.

• ANZAC Day - Art and My Life
• ANZAC Day Jelly Wrestle and Clever folk at Google - Lita of Bits on the Side
• Possibly they mean 'Lest We Remember' - Maia of Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty (and The Hand Mirror)
• The market's great big dirty paw grabs Anzac Day - Anne of Elsewoman
• When do we remember the women who died in childbirth? - Deborah at The Hand Mirror
• On whom we remember, and what - Harvest Bird
• Lest we Forget - Jannelle at Heart Felt
• ANZAC Day Atheist - Deborah of In A Strange Land (and The Hand Mirror)
• Anzac Day - Helen of Show Your Workings
• Anzac's Not a Marketing Tool and Other Choice Links - Ana at Spare Room
• anzac day - Anjum Rahman of stargazer
• Anzac biscuits on Anzac Day - Nikki of Tales of the Red Headed Devil Child

If I have missed your post please do add it in comments and I apologise for the omission - it will definitely be cock-up rather than conspiracy!

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My own thoughts on Anzac Day were, as ever, about the horror and futility of war. When I utter "lest we forget" it is a fervent plea for a present and a future without violence. I didn't attend an Anzac service this year but I will take Wriggly to them in the future - with the hope that he too will reflect on the stupidity of war. It disturbs me that there are some who see April 25th as an opportunity to reinvent history, to glorify state-sponsored violence, and to push for more funding for the War Machines of New Zealand and Australia. Wriggly will definitely know, because his parents will tell him, that the original event that inspired Anzac Day involved New Zealanders invading someone else's country, not defending our own.

It strikes me that Anzac Day remembrances are usually very male-dominated. There is much discussion of "our brave boys" and "the men who died for our freedoms". Parades of veterans are, by their very nature, XY-only. There is rarely any discussion of the role of women in any of the wars NZ has sent its citizens to die in (and of course no mention whatsoever of the war on our own soil). Yet even in those conflicts where women have not fought themselves they have served in non-combat positions, and of course hundreds of thousands of women have been victims of the violence of occupying forces. The so-called weaker sex has played a vital role at home when most menfolk were away, and often, as Deborah eloquently puts it "[their] dreams, conventional though they were, of marriage, home and children, were ruined," as a result of war.

To remember the damage war has done to women is not to minimise the harm it does to men. Instead I reckon a more holistic view of the impact of state vs state violence would bring most to the conclusion that war really is good for absolutely nothing.