“Girls were seen crying when soldiers departed.” Belgian and French women and German soldiers: transgressive relationships under the gaze of the occupied population

Debruyne, Emmanuel

doi:10.1080/19475020.2019.1651213

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…3 Gender imbalance led to intimate encounters between the occupying soldiers and local women, also in territories of Belgium and France occupied by German Army. 4 In the European countries embroiled in the war, women who became involved in such relationships were publicly castigated, sexual relations being condemned as a misconception of patriotic duty. 5 French women were accused of sexual collaboration with the enemy in German-occupied France.…”

Section: Wartime Realities: Historical and Demographic Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The attitude of the population could be ascertained by the research of diaries, as the historian Emmanuel Debruyne has shown. 33 He has studied Belgian and French attitudes towards women who engaged in intimate relations with occupying soldiers through 110 diaries. So far, I have only had examined two diaries-one by Mı̄lbergs and one by Anna Brigadere, the famous Latvian writer.…”

Section: Family Planning: Marriagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Marriage, Family Planning, and Birth Control Discourses in Latvia during the Wars, 1914–1920

Lipša

2023

Journal of Family History

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In the territories of the Russian Empire populated by the Latvians, the years of the First World War (1914–1918) and the ensuing Latvian War of Independence (1918–1920) witnessed a significant transformation in the discourse on family planning and birth control. Because men were mobilized, there was a marked fall in the number of registered marriages, which meant that women had only a slim chance of marrying and planning a family. The nation's ideologues faced a challenge: how to restrain Latvian women from marriages and casual relationships with soldiers of the multi-ethnic Russian army and the occupying German army, who had been stationed in the Latvian-populated provinces since 1915, these having been separated by the battlefront. Women's demographic behavior was changing, with sexual life beginning before marriage, giving rise to a phenomenon of casual liaisons. Latvian nationalists, seeking to prevent such casual relationships in the name of the future they imagined for their people, promoted sexual restraint, which became at this time one of the strategies of the nation-building process. This article examines the wartime possibilities for marriage and the family planning associated with it and investigates the discourse of the propaganda of sexual restraint that was maintained and developed by Latvian nationalists, looking at their assessment of the situation and the principles they formulated for the appropriate (non-) use of sexuality, which in that context acted as a birth control instrument. The article looks at the role of abortion as a traditional means of birth control, and how the wartime conditions affected the number of children born outside of marriage. The research is based mainly on analyses of press materials, statistical data, and archival documents.

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Section: Wartime Realities: Historical and Demographic Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Family Planning: Marriagementioning

confidence: 99%