Including Women’s Wartime Stories Changes How We Understand Warfare

by Jeffrey H. Jackson

Jeffrey H. Jackson is professor of history at Rhodes College and author of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris as well as the recently released Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Fall 2020).

On a high-profile visit to Bletchley Park in 2019, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, celebrated Britain’s World War II “codebreakers” who deciphered Nazi radio signals. The duchess honored one codebreaker in particular, her grandmother, who was among thousands of women — the intelligence world’s “hidden figures” — helping to turn the tide in the Allies’ favor.

In recent years, the Bletchley Park women have become famous for their crucial wartime work cracking secret German messages. But by calling attention to them, Catherine also unwittingly highlighted how few other women’s wartime stories we still really know. For everyone at Bletchley Park, the labors of thousands of other women have not yet become part of our collective historical memory of World War II. There were many more hidden figures during those years than we realize. Turning our attention away from traditional battlefields to these other kinds of combat widens our understanding of wartime and allows us to see the crucial work done by women.

The story of two unlikely anti-Nazi resisters named Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe is instructive. These two French women, a lesbian couple who pushed against the values of their day, had already lived remarkable lives before the war began. Daughters of wealth and privilege born in southern France, they became friends with Pablo Picasso and the surrealists after moving to Paris in the 1920s as young women. Their groundbreaking photography and art, created under their gender-ambiguous pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, have today become well known in art circles and hangs in some of the world’s most prestigious museums.

When both were in their late 40s and still largely marginal figures in the Paris art scene, these creative women decided to flee the continent as they anxiously watched Adolf Hitler’s growing power. Their fear was personal because of Schwob’s Jewish heritage. She remembered how, as a schoolgirl, several classmates had once assaulted her for being Jewish. Schwob’s family had also been caught up in the Dreyfus affair, one of the most traumatic antisemitic political scandals of the turn of the century. Now in the 1930s, Schwob and Malherbe watched as fascist groups marched through Parisian streets clashing with police and left-wing activists.

In search of a quiet life outside the political fray, in 1937, the couple relocated to Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. But in 1940, when the German army occupied these strategically valuable sites just off the French coast — the only British territory the Germans conquered — the women decided to take action.

Editor's Note: Read Jeffrey H. Jackson on Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe on HNN.

Read entire article at Made By History at the Washington Post