The Maids of World War II:

 The Maids of World War II:

When we look at women’s traditional roles we tend to find only a few ways they were commonly perceived by societies: as the innocent damsel in distress, maiden or maid, as the mother tending hearth, home, and children, or as the monster* who is either cruel and sinister and who in some way breaks with “normal” society.

Maids were numerous during World War II, sometimes they were tragic victims like little girls in Malaysia who jumped into hiding when Japanese planes soared overhead shooting anyone in their sights, or mixed-race children in the Rhineland as young as six who Hitler’s forces sterilized because they were deemed genetically inferior. There were many Jewish girls forced into hiding like Anne Frank (and many more forced into hiding without their family nearby), and Roma (“gypsy”) girls who were sent to the gas chambers for simply being other than Aryan. They were our own American girls of Japanese descent who were denied their rights as citizens and interned at special camps in USA. Maids also included young women in the Pacific region who were captured and, starting at age seventeen, systematically brutalized to provide sexual “comfort” to occupying soldiers.

Sometimes maids were safer and the majority of their innocence was maintained due in part to geography. They lived in places out of the immediate war zone like the United States and helped gather materials for the war effort (everything from grease for glycerin to rubber, newspaper, and scrap metal was needed).

That's no idle whim of Uncle Sam's- those empty tubesFDR

A little girl gathers recyclables at home for the war effort. From the FDR Presidential Library.

Sometimes those maids helped mothers with budgeting, rationing, and cooking–in preparation for being mothers themselves some day.

Other maids became welders and ship-builders and fought for their right to help the war movement even when their ability to help America succeed was doubted more due to their race than their gender. These were maids, who entered a workforce that wasn’t always supportive of their efforts, even though their work was very much needed.

And there were maids who heard the call of destiny and struck out to make the biggest difference they could–young women like Sophie Scholl of Germany who helped with the White Rose resistance movement, girls during their college education who learned of Hitler’s betrayal of their Soviet brothers and picked up guns to become snipers like Roza Shanina, or young munitions-worker-turned-sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, or Soviet girls who took to the air in outdated crop-dusters to become part of the exclusively female night bombing force the Germans called “Night Witches”.

*In the case of Maid, Mother, Monster the monster is not simply a misunderstood crone, not an older wise-woman lurking on the edge of society–but rather a woman who has allowed darkness to twist her and is generally found in a court of law to have been guilty of either war crimes or crimes against humanity. In short, the monster in cases here is the opposition to the light and gentleness found in the maid.