By Lotus Chen
(The picture above depicts a scence in the film "The Flowers of War")
In my opinion, women at war are victims and fighters. Women are eternal victims of wars both in victory and in defeat.
Eternal victims
The immediate picture I draw of women in War is that women are either spies and underground workers or prostitutes and comfort women. For example, during the anti-Japanese war (World War Two), Chinese women worked for intelligence services as underground workers. My view comes from films and movies, TV series and history books. I seldom read ordinary women’s stories in the history textbooks in China, except one or two female role models who fought with Japanese and died, such as Liu Hulan and Sister Jiang. Those ordinary women who also fought with enemies as underground workers are underestimated by men, who glorified an exclusively military and male vision of the fighting against enemies. Maybe also because women did not try to include their names in the history of liberation.
When men are leaving home to fight enemies, it is primarily women who are assigned and assume, responsibility for sustaining families, households, kinship networks, and even neighborhoods. A global increase in female-headed households exacerbates the pressures on women, especially when unemployment increases, public services decline, and/or war destroys basic infrastructure and traditional labor patterns. Women become “the muses of Christian civilization”. For instance, in the 1930s in Paris, French Vicky the government gave a public speech to French mothers:
French mothers, yours is the hardest, but also the most beautiful task, you are, before the state dispensers of education, you alone can teach everyone, the love for work, the senses of discipline, modesty and respect, that make men healthy and peoples strong. You are the muses of our Christian civilization.
Mothers make big sacrifices. They even have to send away their children for their safety and at risk of losing touch with their children, during World War II in Paris and Dunkirk Evacuation in the UK.
Even after the war was over, wives and husbands have to figure out how they can re-trust each other and rebuild the family and how they could understand the suffering each had endured. Many couples divorced.
Moral pressure
Moreover, women are under great moral pressure while men are fighting outside. Sometimes，Women treat women unfriendly and badly.
I would like to tell a story about a bunch of prostitutes---so called"13 Flowers of Nanking" when Nanking is occupied by Japanese during the 1937 Nanking Massacre. The prostitutes are hidden in a Christian church in neutral zone and try to survive the plight and persecution. Later a group of schoolgirls also find sanctuary in this church. Schoolgirls dislike those prostitutes very much and call them “men killer” and “family destroyer”.In the end, Japanese soldiers find out schoolgirls and force them to attend their “party”. The prostitutes decide to protect the schoolgirls by disguising themselves and taking their place. The next day, the truck driven by an American priest with real schoolgirls hidden inside is seen heading west, away from the advancing Japanese army. The fate of the “13 Flowers” remains unknown, apparently martyring themselves for the students' freedom.
Adapted to a film, this story ignites a controversial discussion. Many doubt that whether it is moral or worthy to save schoolgirls’ lives at the cost of prostitutes’ lives. However, the American priest is the eternal white saver, no one criticize him.
Besides, after the war, people punish those who collaborate with enemies, women became the scapegoats of the indispensable popular revenge headed by men. It is unfair to humiliate with extreme violence to women in the lowest status. Those who expressed their political position or collaborate with enemies are spared. In those public humiliation occasions, it is a woman that humiliates and slaps another woman who is said to be the enemy’s lover. I think women are eternal victims of war both in victory and in defeat.
I personally has never gone through any military war, but I have gone through invisible wars that are fabricated of harsh and unfair social norms and rules towards women. As a feminist, sometimes I feel in a man-dominant society, women are much harsher to women. Sometimes, women are the accomplice of the patriarchal society. For instance, mothers encourage their daughters to follow the rules made by men, gain social status by pleasing men.
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