It is time to recognize that these women, too, were the victims of sexual harassment and assault. It is time to ask why these women paid the price for the sins of men. With little ability to defend themselves - no courts, no juries - the shorn women became the public target of a humiliated nation, a convenient scapegoat to pummel, demean and discard, all in an attempt to wash away the shame of defeat and submission.
Recognizing these women now is an important step in acknowledging the long history of gender inequality. After the war, many of these “comfort women” died as a result of what they had been through, some committed suicide, and many of those who survived hid their trauma for the rest of their lives.
Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of women were used as sexual slaves for the Japanese military in 1993, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary formally acknowledged the “coercive atmosphere” and apologized, but this piece of history remains controversial to this day. Other countries in occupied Europe, including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, witnessed similar acts, albeit on a smaller scale. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. After the Liberation, a witness would later recall, a mob came for her, stripping and shearing her, dragging her through town as her teenage daughter cowered behind.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Their entire conversation took place at the window - he never even entered her house. One day she was working at home next to an open window when a German soldier strolled up and began talking to her. Some had only the briefest contact with their occupiers, as was the case of a funeral wreath maker in Toulouse. Some were the targets of personal revenge, framed and falsely accused. Some of the women had, indeed, slept with Nazi soldiers. The result is my novel, The Lost Vintage, which features a character accused of horizontal collaboration. As I learned more about these women, their stories and images haunted me, compelling me to write about them. In the 74 years since the D-Day landings, the barbarity of the épuration sauvage - its violence against women - has often been overlooked. It begins with a terrible event, then women get blamed, then aggressively attacked and finally the assault is forgotten. The suspicion and punishment of women after World War II is part of a cycle of repression and sexism that began long before D-Day and continues to be seen today, in the conversation around the #MeToo movement. Read more: Robert Capa Reveals an Ugly Side of Liberation in WWII France At least 20,000 French women are known to have been shorn during the wild purge that occurred in waves between 1944 to 1945 - and the historian Anthony Beevor believes the true figure may be higher. Instead, I was surprised to discover that, for thousands of women, the Liberation marked the beginning of a different nightmare. When I first started researching a novel about France during the Second World War, I was expecting to find horrors that took place during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation. Instead, it zeroed in on women accused of consorting with the enemy. About 6,000 people were killed during the épuration sauvage - but the intense, cruel, public ferocity of the movement focused not on serious collaborationist crime. Although some were loyal resistance members, others had themselves dabbled in collaborationist activity and were anxious to cleanse their records before the mob turned on them, too. Just as the punished were almost always women, their punishers were usually men, who acted with no legal mandate or court-given authority. One photograph from the era shows a woman standing in a village as two men forcibly restrain her wrists a third man grabs a hank of her blonde hair, his scissors poised to hack it away.
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