women at war

women at war. ‘The last was a soldier's war. This one is Everybody's’, commented the editor of the British magazine Mother and Home in November 1939. The American ambassador in London, John G. Winant, went further: ‘This war, more than any other war in history, is a woman's war.’ Yet the age-old tradition that warfare was the business of men, not women, which was challenged in the Second World War, was a misleading one. Women had always been involved in wars. They had serviced armies as camp-followers and, since the mid-19th century, served as army nurses. In zones of combat and enemy occupation they had never been immune from injury. In national and revolutionary conflicts, such as the Greek war of independence and the Russian revolutionary war, they had fought with partisan armies. They had supplied armies with uniforms and boots and where, as in the Napoleonic wars, diversion of manpower into the armed forces created labour shortages, they had substituted for men in the civilian workforce. Twentieth-century warfare, engaging the resources of entire societies, employing new and powerful weapons of destruction, waged in an age of mass politics and mass media, merely increased women's involvement and made it more visible. The First World War, remembered as a soldier's war chiefly because of the overwhelming predominance of military over civilian casualties, had drawn women into ‘men's work’ in munitions factories and on the land. They had served in the field as nurses and ambulance drivers and performed military support roles as cooks and orderlies, clerical workers, telephonists, and signallers. In the UK, for example, The first Zeppelin raid on London in April 1915 and the introduction of food rationing in 1918 also foreshadowed developments that would, between 1939 and 1945, bring war and its demands into the home and co-opt house-wives into the war effort.

For women, as for men, the Second World War differed from its predecessors chiefly in its scale and impact on civilian populations, which were targeted systematically by strategic bombing designed to break morale. Women experienced the war differently from men chiefly because more than any previous war it tended to disrupt domestic life and to cast them in unfamiliar gender roles, most conspicuously as uniformed servicewomen. However, patterns both of women's participation in the military and of civilian losses varied in different nations. The UK became in 1941 the first country to conscript women, the Soviet Union in 1942 the first to use them in combat with regular armed forces. Other nations did not follow suit, although all major combatant powers except Japan used uniformed women volunteers as auxiliaries to the military. More British civilians than military personnel died under enemy attack in the first two years of the war, most in the London Blitz of 1940–1: by December 1942 the numbers of UK civilians killed included 20,629 women and 24,203 men. area bombing of German cities by the RAF from 1942 and American raids on Japan's industrial cities in 1943–5 (see strategic air offensives, 1 and 3) equally placed women alongside children and the elderly in the front line, and where conscription had depleted the male population, as in Hamburg in 1943, the dead included more women than men. By contrast, the USA, apart from a few balloon bombs, escaped aerial bombardment, and suffered hardly any civilian war deaths. Elsewhere, civilians became casualties of war in much the same ways as in the past: in war-induced famines in India, Greece, and the Netherlands, in the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol, or as victims of terror and reprisal at the hands of occupying forces in Europe and South-East Asia. Yet the audit of deaths in Europe at the end of the war showed that only countries under German occupation had suffered more civilian than military losses. These victims were predominantly men. In the Soviet Union in 1959 women outnumbered men in the age-range 37–48 by five to three. Where the slaughter of civilians was not indiscriminate, from the air, it was still men who were chiefly identified and killed as potential fighters. In that sense, this remained a soldier's war, a men's war, and soldiers were often confused about the place of women in it.American troops who liberated Auschwitz were surprised, according to a survivor, Vera Laska, to find women in concentration camps, even though their own government had interned as enemy aliens Japanese-Americans of both sexes.

No woman exercised significant influence over the conduct of the war—except, perhaps, the indirect influence wielded by such wives as Clementine Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Madam Chiang Kai-shek—but in most combatant countries women were more actively identified, as citizens, with public policy and national defence than ever before. In the UK and its Dominions, in the USA and in Germany women had the vote. In the Soviet Union in 1941 one in seven party members in the CPSU was a woman and the Komsomol youth organization provided rudimentary military training for members of both sexes. Axis regimes, though more conservative in their emphasis on women's traditional roles in home and family, nevertheless sponsored women's and youth organizations that brought them into public life and engaged in propaganda and voluntary work. The 400,000 women of Italy's Fasci Femminili joined in the campaign against League of Nations's sanctions during the Abyssinian war of 1935–6. Japanese women's ‘patriotic’ organizations, merged in 1942 in a single Dai Nihon Fujinkai (Greater Japan Women's Association), worked under government direction to promote the ‘National Spiritual Awakening’ and when the China incident started in July 1937 they campaigned against extravagance and cared for the wounded and bereaved. Nazi Women's organizations—the Frauenschaft and Frauenwerk—and the Bund Deutscher Mädel (see Hitler Youth) worked to identify women, as transmitters of culture and mothers of the Aryan race, with the values of the regime. In 1938 it became compulsory for single German girls of 17 to 25 to do six months' labour service (increased in 1941 to a year) as farm workers or domestic servants, or a longer period in nursing, welfare, or kindergarten work. In Allied countries, too, before war broke out, women' organizations prepared for the work of national defence and women volunteers did military training. In the UK they served with FANY, the Women's Legion, and the Voluntary Emergency Service, and these organizations provided officers for the British women's auxiliary services, reconstituted in the last year of peace: the ATS in September 1938, the WRNS in February 1939, the WAAF in June 1939. The Women's Voluntary Services for Civil Defence (WVS), organized by Lady Reading in 1938, attracted 300,000 members within a year. Women of all nations also belonged to organizations that performed first-aid and social work on an international basis such as the Red Cross and YWCA.

Feminists had been prominent in the inter-war peace movement, yet many—among them Virginia Woolf, Maude Royden, Helen Keller, and Simone Weil—became converts to the view that war was a lesser evil than Nazism. Feminists are divided in their attitude to women's war service and the significance of women's identification with the war effort is controversial: did it fulfil women's claim to equal citizenship or subject them to the military? Historians are also divided on the consequences of war for women: does it promote or undermine equality between the sexes?

The Second World War did little to clarify these issues. Women's right to serve their country was pressed by such equal-rights feminists as the British MPs Irene Ward, Lady Astor, and Edith Summerskill, who criticized delays in mobilizing woman power in 1940–1. But war service could also be seen as patriotic duty, a response to emergency, without implications for women's conventional peacetime roles. Poland, Catholic and conservative but fearing invasion from both east and west, made military training, including the use of firearms, compulsory for young women in 1937. The enfranchisement of women had been justified in Britain in 1918 by their contribution to the war. In France and Italy, where anti-clerical parties had denied them the vote after the First World War, women's role in the resistance was cited as a reason for enfranchising them in 1944 and 1946 respectively. In the USA, however, women had gained the vote in 1919 partly because of President Woodrow Wilson's conviction that they would use it in the cause of peace. Evidence that American women were indeed less hawkish than their men is provided by an Office of War Information survey conducted two months after Pearl Harbor: 57% of men but only 35% of women favoured all-out war against Japan. The masculine basis of militarism was recognized by General MacArthur, who regarded the enfranchisement of Japanese women, decreed by the occupying authorities in 1945, as ‘the most effective single barrier [against] future jingoism’ and hoped it would ‘bring to Japan a new concept of government directly subservient to the well-being of the home’. Yet the previous decade had shown, if nothing else, that women, though not initiators of war, could be conditioned as citizens and patriots to play their part in it.

Mobilization of women during the war was nowhere more effective than in the UK (despite a slow start) and the Soviet Union. In the UK by September 1943 an estimated 7.75 million women were in paid employment, by comparison with 5.09 million in 1939, and over a million more were in the WVS. More than 470,000 were in the women's services or forces nursing services, 80,000 were in the Women's Land Army, and over 400,000 were employed as full- or part-time civil defence workers or in the Home Guard and Royal Observer Corps (see UK, 6). Munitions industries—engineering and metals, explosives, chemicals, and shipbuilding—employed about two million women, more than four times as many as in 1939. The number of women in civil service or local government white-collar jobs had grown by 500,000. Many women transferred to war work from traditional ‘women's jobs’, in domestic service or industries like textiles and clothing, and the great majority in the forces were volunteers. But from March 1941 women became liable to direction into war work and under the National Service (No. 2) Act of December 1941 single women aged 20–30 became liable to conscription. Between 1942 and 1945 nearly 125,000 recruits were ‘called up’ into the women's auxiliary services—though women, unlike men, were given the choice of serving instead in civil defence, industry, or the Land Army. In 1943 the age for conscription was lowered to 19 and direction of labour, originally restricted to women of 18–40, was extended to ‘grandmothers’ of 40–50. Mothers with a child of under 14 living with them remained exempt, but other exemptions for married women, generous at first, were whittled down from 1943 as the government began to direct them into part-time work and industrial out-work. The acute shortage of manpower that prompted these measures also hit the Soviet Union after the German invasion (see BARBAROSSA). Between June and December 1941 nearly a million Soviet housewives and schoolgirls joined the paid workforce. A decree of February 1942 made all women aged 16–45 liable for war service. By the end of the war women accounted for 55% of the civilian workforce, compared with 30% in 1940, and on the collective farms there were four women workers for every man. About 800,000 women served with the Soviet military and a further 200,000 as partisans in occupied regions.

The USA, with its superior resources and pool of unemployed male workers, faced less severe manpower problems. Yet even there the mobilization of women has been compared favourably with that of Germany and Japan. A sustained propaganda campaign aimed chiefly at housewives increased America's female workforce by six million, or 32% between 1941 and 1945. The great majority worked in industry but women's branches of the services created in 1942–3 included at peak strength nearly 272,000 recruits. In Japan, where the prime minister, General Tōjō, made a virtue of his refusal to conscript women in deference to the family system, a combination of propaganda and inducements increased the female workforce between 1940 and 1944 by only 1.5 million, under 10%. As for Germany, although women accounted for about 1.5 million of the 7 million foreign volunteer or forced labour workers employed in the Reich during the war, the number of German women in employment hardly increased at all. But comparison between Germany and Allied countries is not straightforward. In 1939 women had formed 37.4% of the German workforce, a higher proportion than in the UK in 1943 (36.4%). There was a much smaller pool of unemployed housewives to draw on. As in Japan, many married women worked in agriculture and their labour became more vital—and harder—as male farm workers were conscripted. Within the manufacturing sector, working-class women did move into heavy industry, which in Germany by May 1943 employed 1.5 million women, nearly twice as many as in May 1939. Moreover, in Germany, unlike Japan, the armed forces had, since the First World War, employed women civilians in clerical and manual jobs and from 1940 uniformed women auxiliaries, the Helferinnen, were attached for the first time to all branches of the armed forces.

A widespread tradition has it that the German war effort was greatly handicapped by failure to exploit womanpower, caused by Nazi eugenic policies and belief in restricting women's sphere to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church), and also by the inability of a dictatorship to impose sacrifices on a population that had been led to expect easy victories. There is something in this view, but it has been exaggerated (see Germany, Table 2 and statistics, Table 4). Nazi pronatalism did lead to measures likely to keep women out of the workforce: exceptionally generous allowances for servicemen's wives, exhortations to young Aryan women to have babies, even (to the disgust of respectable Frauenschaft leaders) outside marriage (see also Lebensborn). But Nazi notions of ‘womanly work’ did not exclude productive employment in the cause of the nation. Women were exhorted to make ‘Munitions for their Sons’ and those who did take factory work, though they often worked in grim conditions and under military discipline, were well provided with day nurseries, which cared in 1944 for 1.2 million children—ten times as many as found places in the federally-funded child care centres set up to help working mothers in the USA. But propaganda to recruit women was less sustained than in the USA and advocates of their compulsory mobilization, like Hermann Göring and Albert Speer, were overruled by Hitler. The government acquired the authority to conscript women as early as 1935, but never used it. In 1943 a law was passed requiring women aged 17–45 to register for directed war work, but it was not systematically enforced. As in Japan, middle-class women found it easy to avoid war work and to keep their domestic servants. Nor were they attracted into the civil and armed services by the kind of responsible and interesting jobs that were open to British and American women. But the suggestion, sometimes made, that failure to mobilize women led to Germany's defeat is certainly a myth.

In the regular armed forces of all the combatant powers women remained a small minority. The UK women's services included at peak strength just under one woman to ten servicemen, while Soviet women made up about 8% of total armed forces manpower. In the USA, where the army's chief of staff, General Marshall, had trouble overcoming army resistance to women in the military and the Senate passed the ‘WAAC Bill’ on 14 May 1942 by a mere eleven vote majority, the number of servicewomen never exceed ed 2% of fighting strength. The civilian status of Helferin nen was emphasized by uniforms adapted from that of the Red Cross. British and American servicewomen also began the war as civilians, though the British ATS and WAAF (but not the WRNS) were given military status in 1941, as were the American WAAC, renamed WAC, in 1943, largely in order to check the growing number of deserters. The range of tasks performed by servicewomen was subject to restrictions, varying in different countries, but it was everywhere wider than ever before, reflecting the growth of service bureaucracy and changes in weapons and communications technology. By 1943 the British ATS worked in more than 80 different army trades. Over a quarter served in anti-aircraft batteries where they came under fire and operated searchlights and targeting instruments. They did not, in theory at least, fire guns since a Royal Warrant limited women to non-combatant roles, but Churchill conceded that they should be known as ‘gunners’. In Germany, too, women served as Anti-Aircraft Auxiliaries (Flakwaffenhelferinnen), and, like the UK's WAAFs, they manned radar stations, performed the heavy work of handling air defence barrage balloons, and trained as aircraft mechanics. American servicewomen served in the field in the Pacific, Africa, and Europe, but the general staff abandoned the experiment of using them in anti-aircraft batteries in 1942 for fear of public criticism. Women also performed more traditional roles in the nursing services and as cooks, orderlies, and drivers. ‘Forces Sweethearts’ like Vera Lynn, Marlene Dietrich, Anne Shelton, and Carol Landis toured with ENSA and America's USO, supplying the troops with entertainment. By 1943 women outnumbered men by over four to one on the staff of NAAFI, vastly expanded to provide catering and recreation facilities for British forces at home and overseas.

Only in the Soviet Union, and there only in desperate response to losses inflicted in the German–Soviet war, were servicewomen used in combat roles with regular troops—as snipers, tank drivers, and air force pilots—some serving alongside men and some in separate women's units. Among the latter were three regiments organized by Marina Raskova, the celebrated Russian woman aviator. The 586th Women's Fighter Regiment included the ace pilot Lily Litvak, the ‘White Rose of Stalingrad’, while the 588th Women's Night Bomber Regiment, known to the Germans as the ‘Night Witches’, harassed the enemy so effectively in their ancient biplanes that they were given the title of a Guards Regiment in recognition of outstanding service (see also USSR, 6(e)). Even the Soviet Navy which shared the widespread sailors' belief that women were bad luck on ships, was induced to let a few women serve at sea.

The policy of using women to release men for combat may in part explain the hostility encountered by servicewomen in the English-speaking world. In the UK, the Dominions, and the USA the recruitment of women was hampered by persistent rumours of immorality among servicewomen. In fact, where statistics were available, they showed that rates of illegitimate pregnancy and infection with venereal disease (VD) were lower than for civilian women of the same age group. Official investigations showed that these rumours originated not with enemy fifth columnists but with Allied servicemen, though they were spread by the press and civilians of both sexes. ATS women were known as ‘officers’ groundsheets' and WAAFs as ‘pilots’ cockpits'; in the UK only the WRNS, the smallest and most exclusive of the services, were exempt from such calumnies. Soviet women veterans were similarly abused as ‘campaign wives’ (not, however, as they recall by men who served with them at the front). Deep-rooted anxieties about the place of women in a war machine were present in all societies and gave rise to policies that sometimes seemed perverse. German women auxiliaries were forbidden to use firearms even to defend themselves against capture and, as civilians, they were not entitled to be treated as prisoners-of-war. Those captured by the Soviets sometimes disguised themselves as men for fear of being used as army prostitutes. Outside the Soviet Union no air force accepted women as pilots, yet women aviators did vital and dangerous work in the war. Most renowned among women test pilots of experimental planes was Hanna Reitsch, who flew Germany's V-I before it was adopted as an unmanned bomb (see V-weapons). In the British Air Transport Auxiliary one in eight pilots was a woman and fifteen, Amy Johnson among them, were killed on missions (see also Civil Air Patrol and WASP).

The urge to protect women was less strong than the cultural stereotype that made them bearers, not destroyers, of life. As Sybil Irving, controller of the Australian Women's Army Service, put it, ‘These girls will be the mothers of the children who rebuild Australia. They must not have the death of another mother's son on their hands.’ But the belief that it was not a woman's role to kill did not extend to clandestine and partisan warfare—in which women played an important part—though Pearl Witherington, an SOE agent and one of the few women who led maquis groups in France, did share it.

SOE is known for its departure from the tradition that banned women from combat: it sent 50 women agents to occupied France and trained women in the use of weapons and explosives, evading armed service regulations by enrolling them in the civilian Women's Transport Service or FANY. Partisan armies in eastern and southern Europe—the Home Army in Poland (see Poland, 4), as well as Tito's followers in Yugoslavia and the resistance forces of ELAS in Greece—included a higher proportion of women soldiers than the French maquis, the core of which consisted of men determined to avoid conscription by the Germans. An estimated third of Italian partisans were women; but although even the communists, according to the Italian resistance veteran ‘Elena’ (Carla Capponi), were happy for women to carry bombs, because they were less liable to be challenged by the Germans, they were reluctant to accept them as equal combatants. As in regular armies, women played vital support roles: they acted as nurses, radio operators, and couriers, and smuggled weapons and supplies. Yet in many aspects of resistance work women had special advantages to offer. In escape lines used by Allied servicemen and Jewish or political refugees, safe houses—private homes, hotels, brothels, and convents—were crucial. Women guides were indispensable, since couples were less conspicuous than men travelling alone. Major escape lines in France averaged 40% of women among their members and four were headed by women: the Belgian nurse ‘Dédée’ de Jongh; 60-year-old Marie Louise Dissard of Toulouse; Mary Lindell, comtesse de Milleville, a veteran nurse from the First World War who used the French Red Cross as cover; and Pauline, comtesse de St Venant. Intelligence réseaux (networks) included an estimated 18% of women and individuals played important roles. An American agent, Virginia Hall, posing as a journalist in Vichy France, helped SOE to establish early secret resistance connections in 1941, while British-born Pearl Witherington ran a sabotage network. Women who headed réseaux linked with Britain's MI6 or the American Office of Strategic Services included a publisher's secretary, Marie Madeleine Fourcade (see spies); a nurse, Jeannine Picabia, daughter of the well-known surrealist painter; and an industrialist's wife who worked for the Vichy censorship, Suzanne Bertillon. Women also organized and largely staffed the illicit social service network for prisoners and their families that was initiated by Bertie Albrecht, women's unemployment officer at Lyons. A Dutch housewife, Mrs Kuipers-Rietberg, was co-founder of an organization that gave assistance to the onderduikers (divers), most of them Jews like Anne Frank and her family, who lived in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The production and distribution of the clandestine press (seesubversive warfare) in occupied Europe also relied heavily on women.

Unlike regular armies, which recruited mostly young women—and some of the ‘Night Witches’ were mere teenagers, too small to see out of the windscreens of their planes unless they perched on cushions—resistance groups drew in women of all ages. Post-war books and films told the stories of individual women agents— Odette Sansom, Violette Szabo, Nancy Wake, and Mathilde Carré in France, Christine Granville and Hannah Senesh in central Europe—but clandestine warfare relied on many part-time women workers whose contribution was never recorded. The social conventions that gave them some protection from suspicion and allowed them to operate ‘above ground’ equally discouraged women from claiming credit for resistance work after the war. Yet those who were captured were tortured, imprisoned, and often killed. Of 10,000 French women who were sent to Ravensbrück, 85% of them resistance workers, only 500 survived. Reprisals for resistance activities were sometimes visited on entire communities. The men might be killed outright and women and children sent to concentration camps, as in the Czech village of Lidiče, or hostages be slaughtered regardless of gender or age, as in the case of the massacre at the Ardeatine catacombs in March 1944.

The wartime internment of women, like their military involvement, was not a new phenomenon but in the Second World War it came about in unfamiliar circumstances. In the UK about 500 of the 6,500 conscientious objectors imprisoned between 1940 and 1945 were women who had refused conscription or compulsory fire-watching duties. In the Far East about 20,000 British civilians, men and women, were left stranded after the unexpected fall of Singapore in 1942, together with civilians of other nationalities, mostly Dutch and Australian. In the fifteen main internment camps set up by the Japanese for women, the survivors—teachers, nurses, missionaries, business and service wives—were held for the remainder of the war. Nazi racial policies had led to the internment of women before the war, although political prisoners as well as Jews, gypsies, and prostitutes were consigned to the concentration camp established for women at Moringen in 1933 and the larger, wartime women's camp at Ravensbrück, through which passed about 123,000 victims. The war and the Final Solution brought women also to camps originally set up for men. At one stage there were nearly 100,000 at Auschwitz. Other predominantly male camps, such as Buchenwald, included female labour details employed on munitions work. In contrast to the regime in the Soviet GUlag, where men and women often mixed freely and contracted ‘sub-marriages’, both Germans and Japanese rigidly segregated male and female prisoners. The Germans, unlike the Japanese, made use of women as guards. These SS Helferinnen were often recalled as crueller to women prisoners than the men. Irma Grese of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the ‘Blonde Angel of Hell’ who whipped women to death, was among those hanged in 1945. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the ‘Mare’ of Majdanek, trampled prisoners to death with steel-studded boots: she was among those sentenced to life imprisonment in Dusseldorf in 1981.

Hunger, disease, brutality, extremes of cold in Europe and heat in Asia, sometimes long hours of forced labour—these were the lot of all inmates of Axis camps. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked of women in the GUlag, ‘it seems that things were no harder for them and maybe even easier.’ A third of the women imprisoned in Japanese camps died, but over half the men. German records suggest that women survived starvation for longer periods than male inmates, perhaps because they had better housekeeping skills and strategies for sharing. Children of both sexes were imprisoned with the women and in Japan helped women maintain the rituals of home life more effectively than men. Survivors of Ravensbrück recall that networks of mutual aid, surrogate ‘families’, helped women in the struggle to hold on to life. Women ceased to menstruate not, as was believed in the German camps, because of chemicals in the prison soup, but through malnutrition and stress. European women accustomed to subservience from colonial peoples found particular humiliation in aspects of Japanese camp discipline that reflected their captors' contempt for them, both as women and as prisoners—the deep bow required from prisoners to guards, the blow to the face as punishment for insubordination. In German camps women had their heads and bodies shaved on arrival and often experienced sexual humiliation and abuse: naked parades before guards, forced abortion or sterilization. In both instances they were less liable to be raped by their captors than were the Soviet Union's women zeks (GUlag prisoners).

For the great majority of women, however, the Second World War was spent on the Home Front. Films popular in the UK and USA—Hollywood's Mrs Miniver and the British Ministry of Information-backed In Which We Serve for example—portrayed women as wives and mothers bravely supporting the military and sustaining morale. Propaganda slogans aimed at attracting women into war industry often used similar imagery: ‘ “The Girl He Left Behind” is Still Behind Him’. In wartime women's domestic roles became more, not less, important. As Good Housekeeping pointed out, ‘If those who keep house went on strike, the war would be lost in a week.’ Women played a key role in adapting economies to war, promoting war loans and salvage drives, and coping with reduced levels of consumption. Recurring themes in women's memories of the war are the disruption of everyday living and the traditional ‘woman's sphere’. In areas subject to bombardment there was blackout, nights were spent in air-raid shelters, and children were evacuated with or without their mothers. In country areas other women received evacuees and refugees, not always hospitably, into their homes. Bereavement and separation, hunger and homelessness, struck unevenly but with similar effect. Women from the cities scoured the countryside on bicycles for food and fuel, families were fed on black bread or turnips, soap was scarce, Italians learned to cook without oil, Japanese without rice, Parisians kept rabbits on their balconies, British and Canadian women grew vegetables in ‘Victory Gardens’. In Germany by 1945 over half the houses in big cities were in ruins and rations at starvation level. Even in the USA there were shortages of food, clothing, and domestic equipment, and the number of households with domestic servants fell by 50%—it was not just conservatism that led seven out of eight Americans surveyed in 1946 to see home-making as a full-time activity. British austerity regulations included a ban on the manufacture of shoes with heels over two inches high. Japan banned perms and required even geisha girls to wear the unbecoming peasant mompe (baggy trousers). Women in trousers, though denounced by the Vatican, became for the first time a common sight in the west. On the other hand make-up, a compensating symbol of femininity, became more socially acceptable and Tampax was promoted with the slogan ‘Women are winning the War—of Freedom’.

Some increase in sexual freedom for women resulted from a war that saw unprecedented movement of armies around the world and relaxation of the disciplines of family life. British and American divorce rates rose and it has been estimated that in the decade after 1942 nearly a million American servicemen married foreign ‘war brides’, three-quarters of whom eventually joined them in the USA. But in both countries moral panics caused by rising illegitimacy and VD rates (see medicine) reinforced the ‘double standard’, as purity movements blamed v-girls or ‘good-time girls’. Black propaganda used by both sides in subversive warfare played on servicemen's fears of infidelity by wives and sweethearts at home. For many women these years were far from liberating. The estimated 42,000 part- or full-time prostitutes found by the Americans in Naples in 1944 were often providing for starving families. At the end of the war Soviet women who had served as ‘German bedstraw’ were sent to the GUlag. The ‘horizontal collaborators’ of Vichy France had their heads shaved in public (see p. 247). The conflicting pressures of war on sexual norms were reflected in the inconsistent policy of the western Allies towards official brothels for serving troops—sanctioned in the earlier stages of the war in the hope of containing VD but later banned—and ‘fraternization’ with conquered populations, encouraged by MacArthur in Japan but (somewhat ineffectively) banned in Germany. Germany criminalized its own prostitutes and within Japan almost all brothels were closed down, yet both powers used official or supervised brothels for troops in the field (see comfort women).

In the UK and the USA women who wanted employment did find that the war eased their path. The Paramount comedy Rosie the Riveter ( 1944), inspired by Norman Rockwell's cartoon of a muscular, overalled housewife working in the shipyards, was more popular with female than male filmgoers. But under government pressure industrialists became less reluctant to employ older women and women from ethnic minorities. Roosevelt insisted in 1944 that the American services should recruit black women (see also African Americans at war). Some trade unions which had excluded women, such as the British Amalgamated Engineering Union, now accepted them as members. The proportion of married women in the workforce rose, partly reflecting a wartime increase in the marriage rate, partly the increased availability of part-time work. The marriage bar in teaching was lifted on both sides of the Atlantic. More middle-class women found clerical or responsible administrative or management jobs, more working-class women undertook ‘men's work’ in industry. Land girls also did ‘men's work’ such as ploughing. Equal pay was conceded in industry where a woman took over a ‘man's job’ without modification, but trade unions ensured, as in the First World War, that this rarely happened: changes in the production process were used to create new categories of ‘women's work’, paid at a lower rate. In the UK, though not in the USA, equal pay was denied to government employees, civilian and military, and it became an issue. An all-party caucus of women MPs secured in 1943 equal compensation for women for war injuries; in 1944 they carried an amendment to Butler's Education Act to give equal pay to teachers, although that vote was reversed when Churchill made it an issue of confidence. Public nurseries were provided in the UK for only a quarter of the under-fives whose mothers were in employment. The spread of part-time working, and the concession by employers of ‘shopping-time’ to women who worked the standard wartime 57–60-hour week, though welcomed at the time, underlined the assumption that housekeeping was a woman's job. The end of the war brought efforts to persuade women that they really wanted to withdraw from employment: there is conflicting evidence about how far this was true.

Feminist historians now tend to see the mid-20th-century cult of domesticity and femininity as a reaction against deprivations endured in a war that had confused rather than undermined traditional gender roles. In the distribution of decorations for bravery women were everywhere less likely to gain recognition than men. The UK's highest honour, the Victoria Cross, was reserved for military combatants and even SOE heroines were ineligible for it. Some Italian resistance groups excluded women from their post-war parades. America's Veterans of Foreign Wars organization banned women from membership. In the Memorial National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu it is the timeless suffering of bereaved mothers that is commemorated in an inscription quoting Lincoln's tribute to a mother who lost five sons in the American Civil War: ‘The solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom’. Women who had served with the military sometimes found it wisest to conceal the fact (even in the Soviet Union the reputation of veterans for roughness and immorality did not improve their chances of marriage) and the urge to protect children from knowledge of the horrors of wartime caused memories to be repressed. Only in recent years have women veterans, prisoners, war wives, and widows, and those who suffered internment been encouraged to recall the more positive side of their experiences—the unfamiliar sense of independence and personal autonomy, the unexpected discovery of women's strengths and capacity for collective action. Four decades passed before the publication of words written by a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, Nonna Alexan drovna Smirnova: You must tell your children, Putting modesty aside, That without us, without women, There would've been no spring In 1945.

Janet Howarth

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