1937年7月抗戰爆發之際，有大批受過教育的女性離開她們的家庭，投身抗戰救國事業。本文選擇新四軍女兵的戰爭回憶作案例研究，探討她們對政治、軍事、社會和性別經驗的描述及反思。主要論點是，儘管她們選擇性的回憶認同婦女解放必須從屬於民族解放的理論，個人必須服從組織，軍隊是革命大家庭等觀念，並盡量避開個人的內心衝突和政治敏感問題，在改革開放時期大陸對中共歷史的重新研究和詮釋的背景之下，她們回憶錄的問世，具有糾正婦女歷史的邊緣化，開闢中共女性自己聲音的公共出版空間的意義。新四軍女兵的自我書寫再現了新四軍在抗戰時期的另種面目。在各種有關新四軍歷史的政治投射中，女性的聲音提供了性別與戰爭的經驗，是國家聲音之外的另一種聲音。比起「毛時代」塑造的神人化抗戰女英雄，她們筆下的女兵更為真實，塑造了另一類革命女性的形象，更具有改變社會的主動性和自立精神。女兵的書寫採用女性的視角，講述她們作為戰士、妻子和母親的經歷，強調戰爭對女性比對男性更為殘酷的一面。按女權主義的觀點，她們絕大多數在戰爭中所從事的仍然是屬於傳統性別分工的女性工作，但是她們以回憶書寫確認她們的人生價值，強調女兵和男兵一樣做出了貢獻，戰爭從來不只是男人的事業。

After the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japanin July 1937, a large number of educated women left their families to work forthe cause of saving the nation. This essay examinesthe women soldiers of the New Forth Army as a case study, exploring how theydescribed and reflected their political, social, military, and gendered experiences in their reminiscences.I argue that these women soldiers in their selected memories identify with the ideasof national liberation above women's liberation, the self subordinating to the revolutionary collective, and the army as a revolutionary family; they try to avoid politically sensitive issues. However, in the context of reinterpretation of revolutionary history in the post-Mao reform era, their writings and publication are significant in redressing the marginalization of women's history in the Mao era, and in opening up a space for Communist women's own voices. These women's writings present the New Fourth Army through a gendered lens. Among various histories of the New Fourth Army, their voices have offered gendered experience in the war, adding a different perspective to that of the male-dominated narrative. Compared with the stereotyped anti-Japanese super-heroinespublicized in the Mao era, these women's accounts have described more real Communist women, and created different types of revolutionary women, with more self-agency and independence. These women tell their stories as soldiers, wives, and mothers, emphasizing that the war was crueler to women than to men. Although feminist scholars argue that these women soldiers mostly still assumed women's jobs in the war, the women through their own writings try to confirm the meaning of their lives, stressing that they madethe same contribution to the war as male soldiers. To them, the war was never a man's cause.