The male of the species has been fighting ever since and turning his bloody pursuits into art. Centuries of conflict offer a mere handful of women warriors to set alongside the legion of men like Caesar, Wellington or Rommel.

So how to explain why men have called the shots, from Thermopylae to Desert Storm? To some feminists, it is quite simple: male domination has kept women away from the battlefield. Even if it were that elementary, the gaining of that dominion strengthens another more uncomfortable view that men are inherently more violent than women and that the urge to fight is a biological imperative.

Nature or nurture? It is a fundamental question that philosophers and scientists ponder and that parents and educationists confront. It also pervades a small but provocative exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum “Warworks Women, Photography and the Art of War”, and an accompanying book, both the work of photographic historian Val Williams.

Eleven women photo-artists are featured in an exhibition rooted in gender politics. They explore the roots and consequences of conflict and some of the ways modern culture represents war.

While there are exceptions - Lady Butler’s 19th-century painted paeans to battlefield glory for instance - it is only in our century that significant numbers of women artists have made war their theme.

Journalists preceded them. The Holocaust images by Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White, for instance, are some of the Second World War’s most searing visual shrapnel. Vietnam saw female photographers such as Christine Spengler, Catherine Leroy and the late Dicky Chapelle match their male counterparts shot for shot. However those expecting photojournalism in “Warworks” will be disappointed. Williams feels such photography is “voyeuristic” and it has therefore been omitted. Instead, the artists featured cast “a stern eye on men’s deeds”. So what does that gaze reveal?

Well there is no place for glory here, but plenty of pain. Several groups of pictures deal with wounds, for instance, the French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber’s sombre images of wounded flesh. Anonymous and without specific history, they become emblematic. Judith Roy Ross’s studies of grim-faced visitors to Washington’s Vietnam war memorial testify to psychological scarring, and fellow American Deborah Bright has explored the abrasions left on landscapes by war’s tumult. Her panoramas of the now tranquil fields of the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Waterloo invoke the ghosts of slaughter past.

However, for all that this show strives to offer a critique of photojournalism, the most thought-provoking work is the most conventional, such as documentary work by British photographer Anna Fox. She spent months gathering images of weekend paintball wargames for a series called “Friendly Fire”. Here young men skirmish in woodland glades in battle dress, playing at soldiers. Harmless fun? Fox’s images evoke Bosnia or Beirut and invite deeper questions about the roots of aggression.

The show is less successful when it engages with the way our mass media present war. Martha Rosler’s series “Bringing the War Home”, for instance, offers photo montages that relocate battlefield images within American dream homes, inserting a vista of carnage outside the windows, or placing Vietnamese victims on a stairwell. Barbara Alper’s ironic photographs of subtitled television stills of the Gulf War do little more than reflect the obvious, that today, television ensures war anywhere is part of our complex and vivid reality.

Our mass media are already suffused with what will become a flood of programming marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. “Warworks” will serve a useful purpose if it provokes history and media studies students, and the rest of us, to question this torrent, the complex uses made of history, the sources of our narratives and most crucially, the forces that shape our violent world.

“Warworks” is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to March 19.