It begins with a terrible event, then women get blamed, then aggressively attacked and finally the assault is forgotten. The suspicion and punishment of women after World War II is part of a cycle of repression and sexism that began long before D-Day and continues to be seen today, in the conversation around the #MeToo movement. At least 20,000 French women are known to have been shorn during the wild purge that occurred in waves between 1944 to 1945 - and the historian Anthony Beevor believes the true figure may be higher. Instead, I was surprised to discover that, for thousands of women, the Liberation marked the beginning of a different nightmare. When I first started researching a novel about France during the Second World War, I was expecting to find horrors that took place during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation. Instead, it zeroed in on women accused of consorting with the enemy. About 6,000 people were killed during the épuration sauvage - but the intense, cruel, public ferocity of the movement focused not on serious collaborationist crime. Although some were loyal resistance members, others had themselves dabbled in collaborationist activity and were anxious to cleanse their records before the mob turned on them, too. Just as the punished were almost always women, their punishers were usually men, who acted with no legal mandate or court-given authority. One photograph from the era shows a woman standing in a village as two men forcibly restrain her wrists a third man grabs a hank of her blonde hair, his scissors poised to hack it away.
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