Abstract
This chapter presents three artifacts from the First World War militarized landscape of the Three Peaks (Tre Cime/Drei Zinnen) that were collected over the course of the "Written in the Landscape" project. What these artifacts have in common is that they invoke or refer to women in different ways. The artifacts, related to both the Italian and Austrian armies, include the use of women’s names for officers’ quarters, a female code name for a powerful searchlight, and a sketch made by a pittore-soldato as part of propaganda efforts that imagined the Three Peaks with three women’s faces. I argue that adopting a gender perspective to interpreting these artifacts fosters a deeper understanding of where and how metaphors of women circulated and the functions these metaphors may have served. Notions of masculinities and femininities embedded in these artifacts may have fed into war-time constructions of traditional gender roles with implications for hierarchies in the post-war gender order and social structures. Further, such metaphors that we ind present in a First World War militarized landscape as well as in cultural heritage practices related to military memory can be linked to persisting gender dynamics of contemporary war and militarism. This research contributes to studies of the cultural history of war in analyzing objects, symbols, and discourses through a gender approach.