Response

Iwould like to begin by thanking Sabine Frühstück, Elizabeth Heineman, Sarah Kovner, and Joanne Meyerowitz for their thoughtful reviews of my book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. By way of response, I will address their comments and concerns as well as reflect on the popular reception of the book. As Elizabeth Heineman has suggested, the latter can teach us a great deal about what happens when feminist scholarship attracts a mainstream American audience.

I agree with the reviewers that not all historical experiences are equally represented in What Soldiers Do. The book pays most attention to heterosexual relations between the GIs and French women. The voice of prostitutes and rape victims are few and far between. While I admit coming up short in these areas, I would like the reviewers to know that I pro-actively searched for homosexual cases. Among the hundreds of French police reports I read, only one (in the Marne) concerned sexual contact between a GI and a French male. This dearth of police cases results, in part, from the French rule of discretion in sexual relations. French culture has traditionally permitted a wide latitude of sexual expression, including same-sex love, as long as it is kept firmly out of the public eye. In other words, sex is not, for the most part, “policed” in France, except in cases of sexual assault. (My one case concerned consensual sex between two men in public.) In the U.S. Army Board of Review, I found a dozen cases against GIs court martialed for homosexual activity. But because these cases concerned, without exception, sexual relations between two Americans soldiers, they fell outside of the purview of my analysis.¹ As for the personal literature, helpful to me was only Robert Peters’s memoir of his deeply-closeted experience in France.²

There is no doubt in my mind that same sex relations occurred in France, most probably in large cities like Paris. But given the rabidly homophobic nature of the U.S. army, finding traces of such activity remains a formidable challenge. In this regard, comparison with the current sexual assault scandal in the military is instructive. Of the 26,000 estimated sexual assaults claimed by those serving in the military last year, fifty-three percent involved attacks on men, mostly by other men. Because women are still more likely to be sexually assaulted in the military than men, it is appropriate that the debate has centered mostly on women victims. The stunning silence concerning male victims of sexual assault—in the media as well as in the official literature—nevertheless speaks to the challenges we face as historians of sexuality. These male victims represent a majority, and yet we rarely hear their voices in our national debate about sex in the military. Whether such silence results from the men who, overwhelmed with shame, refuse to report the assault, or from the high brass who prefer to ignore it out of existence, it leaves the historian with little trail to follow.³ In Normandy, I encountered just such a disappearing path.

Historians who work on prostitution encounter similar dead ends. In this regard, Memoirs of a Prostitute by Marie-Thérèse proved to be a happy exception.⁴ This memoir of a female sex worker during the war years literally cracked open the world of French prostitution for me. Originally published in French, it was introduced to English-speaking audiences by Simone de Beauvoir in 1965. Marie-Thérèse’s memoir reminds us of the bounty bequeathed by second-wave feminists in search of obscure women’s voices. We owe them a great deal.

In the Normandy rape cases, the first-hand experiences of those involved—poor rural women and black soldiers—remained stubbornly lost. Indeed, the greatest silence in What Soldiers Do is that of African American voices. Black soldiers...