Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Resources: Web Resources & Digital Collections

This digital exhibit examines bodily rhetoric and the complexity of femininity during World War II.

In the United States, those in power used femininity as a recruitment tool for the United States armed forces while simultaneously using it as a tool for restraint. In Nazi Germany, the SS weaponized the concept and attempted to strip women of their femininity in concentration camps. Even still, some women used their femininity as a means to spy on the enemy or become resistance fighters.

Officially, American women began an organized fight for the right to vote in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention convened by abolitionists Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. While the movement experienced ebbs and flows, fractious in-fighting, and splintered competing organizations, after 72 years of consistent political activism the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920:

AMENDMENT XIX

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“In war, the body is a richly communicative means for making out winners and losers” (Achter, 48). War creates “bodies that are unruly and at odds with common sense notions of proper, whole bodies, conceived psychologically, physically, and otherwise” (Achter, 49). During World War II, concentration camps were used to destroy the bodies and rhetoric of over six million Jewish people. But they were not the only targets.
Women who were political enemies, “asocials” (which included Roma women), Jehovah’s Witnesses, foreign resisters, “criminals,” “work-shy” (sex workers), “race defilers,” and the sick and disabled were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. These populations represented “embodied otherness in opposition to the Aryan body” (Simpson, et al.). The bodies of the women in the camp, emaciated with shaven heads and bodies, gassed, shot, disabled from unethical medical experiments are speaking subjects who bear witness to the atrocities they endured.