Women, be silent because your trauma makes people uncomfortable.

Interesting.

Reflecting: there are many books, drama series and films that draw on and sympathetically explore the tragedy and duration of the psychological injury to men during wars, either as the focal character or minor characters. They're very positive; it's done a great deal in raising awareness and understanding. But I can't off the top of my head think of any about women.

And yet some of the leaps in key child psychology development that took place in New York after WW2 came from toddlers and young children of immigrant European parents who were survivors of concentration camps, where the psychologists began to recognise the trauma of the mother was an integral part of understanding the needs of the child.

That’s very powerful and moving. And yes, there are so many ways in which women’s experiences of war (as of life in general) are ignored, erased, denied a voice. Made taboo to even mention. I didn’t even know about the “Rape of Berlin” till a few years ago, for example; and the brutal reality of rape as a commonplace war crime has only recently begun to be more widely acknowledged.

Of course acknowledging the trauma that men inflict on women makes men uncomfortable, of course it’s awkward for them to recognise the full extent of the harm they, as a class, do to us, as a class. It makes them look bad, after all. No wonder they deliberately leave our voices out of the narrative as much as they can. No wonder those men who directly benefit from oppressing us still do all they can to silence our voices.

Thanks for sharing this, OP.

What a brilliant article. It seems almost unbelievable and unbearable what those young women and so many others had to endure.

Thank you for sharing that.