This book attempts to capture both the structural and emotional disturbances that affect women and children during times of war. Female headed households in Sri Lanka emerged as a social phenomenon due to two youth uprisings, one in the South among the Sinhalese and the other in the North among the Tamils. Men died in the violent battle field leaving women and children to bear the burden of uncertainty, insecurity and terror. The research presented in this volume is a sociological inquiry into the lives of women and children but it also takes on an inevitable political focus. The role of the state, or rather the complicity of the state in creating coercive patterns of governance, is evident in the process as a side-line. The women’s narratives reveal a subjectivity which determines eventually the core theme of the research.