Gender Roles in the Rear of the War in Donbas: Women’s Engagement in the Care of Wounded Combatants

Ioulia Shukan’s chapter analyzes the contradictory impact of the war in Donbas on Ukrainian women’s life trajectories, as well their social and gendered roles, through the lenses of sociology of commitment, sociology of care and ethnography of citizenship, and on the basis of fieldwork conducted at the military hospital in Kharkiv, with women of the association “Sister of Mercy ATO/Kharkiv”. Those women volunteered in the summer 2014 to care about wounded soldiers; the affective intensity of their doing-together, as well as an overlap it inevitably operates between their sociability, love and family life, everyday volunteering, make it hard for those women to imagine being demobilized as long as the armed conflict continues. On the one hand, the war has greatly contributed to emancipate those women, who previously stayed away from any form of collective action. It has also empowered them as active and concerned citizens, has brought social recognition and visibility to their voluntary mobilization, has contributed to their professional socialization as quasi-professional care-givers. On the other hand, the war locks volunteers in very traditional gendered roles—that are perceived by them as being totally natural and corresponding to their social and affective characteristics—of women careering, at the rear front, about men fighting at the far-front. It also exposes them, in the long run, to an important occupation and financial marginalization.