Women victims of War #

Aeschylus famously wrote that the first victim of war is truth. If that is true, then subsequent victims are innocent women and helpless civilians.

The Silence of the Girls - by Pat Barker

In the Iliad, Briseis isn’t described as “silent.” She doesn’t need to be. Although we see her in Book 1, she doesn’t speak until Book 19. It is not until then, in her mourning speech for Achilles’s beloved friend Patroclus, that we are told anything about her other than that she has beautiful cheeks and that she leaves unwillingly to be transferred to Agamemnon.

It is not until then, in her mourning speech for Achilles’s beloved friend Patroclus, that we are told anything about her other than that she has beautiful cheeks and that she leaves unwillingly to be transferred to Agamemnon.

Agamemnon swears that I never laid hand on the girl Briseis, I never made love to her, and that during her stay in my huts she was left untouched.

BK XIX:282-337 ACHILLES GRIEVES FOR PATROCLUS

Then Briseis, beautiful as golden Aphrodite, saw the corpse of Patroclus mangled by the bronze blades, she flung herself on the body, shrieking loudly, and tore with her hands at her breasts, her tender neck, and lovely face. And the goddess-like woman wailed in her lament:

‘Patroclus, dear to my heart, when I left this hut you were alive, and now alas I return, prince among men, to find you a corpse. So, evil dogs my steps. I saw the husband, to whom my royal parents married me, lie there, dead, by our city wall, mangled by the cruel bronze, and saw my three beloved brothers meet a like fate. But you dried my tears, when fleet-footed Achilles killed my husband, and sacked King Mynes’ city, saying you would see me wed to Achilles, that he would take me in his ship to Phthia and grant me a marriage-feast among the Myrmidons. You were always gentle with me, now I will mourn you forever.’

So Briseis grieved, and the other women took up her lament; mourning Patroclus, it is true, but also their own sorrows.

At last, we learn that she is the prize of the man who killed her husband, her father, and her brothers—and yet her only hope for safety for herself and any children she might have is what Patroclus once promised her: marriage to Achilles. Barker skilfully shows us what active political strategies the women construct in their captivity, protecting one another, sharing useful rumours, shrewdly assessing the men’s characters.

World War II diary #

A Woman in Berlin, the anonymous account by a German woman of the Russian army’s mass rapes at the end of the war. She describes how safety lay in forming an exclusive relationship, so as to be less vulnerable to gang rape. In Barker’s scene of Chryseis’s departure, some of the captive women fantasize about taking her place: “To be Agamemnon’s prize…It didn’t come more comfortable than that.”

Bean Pole evocatively dramatises the trauma dealt with by two young women drafted into the Russian Army to act as “comfort women” ……

Rape #

Partly retribution, but largely as an incentive to soldiers, the abasement of women became a hallmark of all war booty. From barbaric raids by hordes of Vikings, Mongolians, to Christian attacks on each other, or on Muslims, or Muslims on Christian, or Hindus on Muslims, rape has become an integral reward for risking your life in conquest. Mary Jo Anderson writes: By 800, Christians had been backed into the northernmost region of Spain by the Moors and a humiliating tribute of a 100 virgins per year was demanded of local governors.

War sanctions man’s bloody sadistic brutality. Women usually bore the brunt of men’s violence. Soldiers were repeatedly rewarded with promises of booty and sexual conquest, by the Pope.

When the Roman Crusaders were welcomed into Constantinople, they betrayed their hosts by raping and killing Greek Orthodox Nuns in the Cathedral of Haigia Sophia.

When Russian troops began their advance into Hitler’s Germany, Officers stood leisurely by as their troops took turns raping any German women they came across.

Recurring motifs of the debasement of women first - stripped naked to parade in victory marches, and as sexual slaves to lust filled and sex starved soldiers.

Oliver Cromwell “had a savage streak in his nature” and that he “enjoyed inflicting death, injury or humiliation on those against whom he had taken.”

At Naseby he allowed the foot soldiers of the New Model Army to commit hideous atrocities against the enemy’s female camp-followers, killing over a hundred and disfiguring others by cutting noses and slicing cheeks.

In the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, in Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets and raped by a Sikh mob.

In most wars, women become victims, as victorious troops exact revenge by stripping and raping them. Stripping is generally a mark of humiliation and indignity to emphasise dominance.

Masha Gessen, of The New Yorker, comments on a report, published by the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, which concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, had been part of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. It raise the issue of the weaponization of sexual violence.

Rape is a shocking and sadly predictable feature of war. But the nature of the crime makes it difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.

Catch -22 #

A man’s world by Jamie Q. Roberts, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Sydney writing for The Conversation, January 17, 2025.

Then there is the sex. Numerous bleak sexual relationships between men and women occur in Rome – often in brothels – but also on the military base, for example between Yossarian and Nurse Duckett.

At best, the women in Catch-22 are opportunistic. Nurse Duckett breaks off her relationship with Yossarian because she prefers the financial stability of a doctor. Doc Daneeka’s wife seems a little too ready to move on after he is wrongly reported dead and she receives a substantial payout.

But much of the time the women – often prostitutes – seem numb about what is happening to them. We read descriptions like this one, when a prostitute is rejected by several men:

She seemed more fatigued than disappointed. Now she sat resting in vacuous indolence, watching the card game with dull curiosity as she gathered her recalcitrant energies for the tedious chore of donning the rest of her clothing and going back to work.

I said that as I approached the end of the novel I was racing through the pages, searching for anything redeeming. It is easy to identify with everyman Yossarian. He has been traumatised by the war. He speaks plainly when few do. He shows great humanity, particularly when he tries to save Snowden. Ultimately, he refuses to lie, even though doing so will give him a way out of the war.

Yet he, like the other soldiers, is a user and abuser of women.

Towards the end, after Nurse Duckett has broken it off with him, Yossarian travels to Rome, desperately seeking women he has known before.

He has sex with two prostitutes. On one savage page we read, among other horrors: “He banged a thin streetwalker with a wet cough […] but that was no fun at all.” And directly after:

He woke up disappointed and banged a sassy, short, chubby girl he found in the apartment […] but that was only a little better, and he chased her away when he’d finished.

We can say that Yossarian’s treatment of women is a symptom of the war. But my sense is that the novel is also making the deeper point that in our insane society men’s treatment of women doesn’t figure in our assessment of their character. Yossarian himself, in the climactic chapter The Eternal City, reflects: “It was a man’s world.” To strengthen my point: at the time of writing, the Wikipedia entry for Catch-22, which is strong in most respects, says nothing about the relationships between men and women in the novel.

Catch-22 also drives home a more unspeakable point. Yossarian reflects on why a particular prostitute likes a particular officer. He says the officer, “treats her like dirt” and reflects: “Anyone can get a girl that way.” As Annie Lennox sings: “Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.” Nice guys finish last. Yet there is a glimmer of redemption. At the end of the novel, Yossarian is committed to rescuing a young girl: the sister of “Nately’s whore”, a prostitute his naive friend Nately is in love with.

Significantly, after she is told of Nately’s death on a mission, Nately’s whore blames Yossarian and spends the remainder of the novel trying to kill him. The last lines of the novel are

Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off. Her wordless and implacable rage feels like the return of the repressed for all the women in the novel. It is a fury that cannot be articulated, because the truth is too dark – but it can nonetheless be embodied.

The phrase “catch-22” has entered common usage to describe a situation where someone is trapped by contradictory rules. Many subsequent movies and shows are thematically and tonally similar to Heller’s novel – for example, Stanley Kubrick’s satirical Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). And while movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are not humorous, we can see in them similar critiques of the violence of war, the treatment of women, and the wartime bureaucracy that makes it all possible. As Captain Willard says in Apocalypse Now: “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it.”

The bullshit depicted in Catch-22 is legion. As it is, alas, in our own institutions and organisations today.

Religious Justifications #

The church has filled women with feelings of inadequacy by quoting the Bible to declare that menstruation produces a state of uncleanliness. Does anyone think that reflects science? One unspoken argument to prevent women from being ordained in various churches was that menstruation made women a potentially polluting presence in holy places, which is why the European cathedral tradition of Western Christianity had choirs limited to men and boys. This institution even informed the world that the ideal woman was a “virgin mother”. Since it is impossible for anyone to be a virgin mother, no woman could ever live up to this ideal. With the ideal not possible, this church then told women they could be virgins who joined the nunneries or they could be mothers.

When they chose marriage and motherhood, they were taught that the only redeeming purpose for sex was procreation, so birth-control practices that minimised the possibility of pregnancy were mortal sins. In an overpopulated world, is not the absence of effective family planning itself immoral?

In the Catholic Church, this visceral negativity against birth control went so far as to proclaim to its African adherents that the use of condoms was not morally acceptable - even inside one’s marriage to protect a wife from becoming infected by her HIV-positive husband. ……..

Torture #

The French Inqusition introduced a variety of devices to maim and torure victims before they were executed.

The Breast Ripper Torturers seemed to reserve special horrors for women. Surprisingly, few torturers had­ any reservations about torturing women – in fact, women-only tortures often seemed especially cruel and were designed to destroy specific aspects of femininity. In medieval England, differing torture practices were virtually codified: male criminals were hanged, while women faced the “drowning pits” [source: Parry].

The practice of torturing women sexually extends back to Roman times (and surely even before then). Female victims were given to soldiers to be raped, or sent to brothels. They might be tied up or paraded through public streets naked. These public humiliations were sometimes followed by bizarre sexual mutilations.

Torturers had a strange fixation on breasts, which were burned, branded or simply amputated. Worst of all was a device known as the Breast Ripper. It was a metal claw that pierced the flesh of the breast. The victim was tied to a wall, and then the claw pulled forcibly away, shredding the breast to pieces [source: Medieval Times & Castles]. It was used as both a method of punishment and interrogation – to mark the breasts of unmarried mothers and mutilate women convicted of heresy, adultery and a host of other crimes.

Women Poets #

It is the women poets who often write pungently of separation and the trauma of losing a son or husband, brother or just the sheer wastage of lives cut down in their prime.

Poet Wolla Meranda pithily summed up in 1916 the reality of many homes:

“They will never come back our stalwart men.”

Whereas Mary Gilmore in her poem Gallipoli echoed the particular pain of mothers:

When the world called him he went;
When the world called him, there he bent.
Now he is dead.