TIME MAGAZINE: ALLIED TROOPS STORM THE BEACHES AT NORMANDY, GET SHOT TO HELL, WOMEN SUFFER MOST: On the 74th anniversary of D-Day, a Time Magazine article entitled This Picture Tells a Tragic Story of What Happened to Women After D-Day reminds us that it’s all about women.
The headline is referring to the women who had their heads shaved (and sometimes much worse) during the épuration sauvage (or the wild purge). Over the course of the second half of 1944 and early 1945, women and men who were alleged to be collaborators were punished by gangs of vigilantes. For the women, this typically meant they were being accused, rightly or wrongly, of sleeping with the enemy.
The Time article (by Ann Mah) described it this way:
The victims were among the most vulnerable members of the community: Women. Accused of “horizontal collaboration” — sleeping with the enemy — they were targeted by vigilantes and publicly humiliated. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped half-naked, smeared with tar, paraded through towns and taunted, stoned, kicked, beaten, spat upon and sometimes even killed.
The épuration sauvage was as savage as it sounds. It has been estimated that 6000 individuals accused of collaboration were killed. Many of the perpetrators were resistance members or ex-collaborators who wished to hold themselves out as resistance members.
The Time article doesn’t mention it, but underlying the purge was a political struggle between communists and non-communists; the vigilantes were very disproportionately communists. It also fails to mention that the source it cited for the 6000 death toll also states that, of those, only about a third were women. Instead, the Time article claims (evidently incorrectly) that “the punished were almost always women.” It further states:
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. It begins with a terrible event, then women get blamed, then aggressively attacked and finally the assault is forgotten.
What bothers me most is that Time ran the piece on June 6. Can’t we have a day to mourn the D-Day dead, who were overwhelmingly men, before we have to go back to the “World Ends Tonight, Women and Minorities to Suffer Most” routine? Isn’t the anniversary of D-Day the wrong time to argue that women are always “the most vulnerable members of the community”?