Treatment Of Women In Ww2 Essay

While the main conflicts, battles and alliances of World War II are thoroughly examined, the treatment of women both overseas and the United States becomes overlooked. In late 1941 and 1942, Jews in the Soviet Union were slaughtered and savagely murdered. Jewish females took the brunt of this slaughter as they “posed the greatest danger because of their capacity to reproduce their people.”1 Women were less privileged than men during the Holocaust; if a woman was pregnant, she would be automatically sent to the gas chambers in order to prevent the repopulation of the people the Nazis despised. Less women were selected for slave labor as the Nazis prioritized on the killing of females. With all factors combined, “some scholars believe that

It becomes difficult to read of the horrifying acts the women were succumbed to. Women in the United States were not without their share of gender discrimination. The military relied on women’s bodies for services in the war effort and “military medical officials confirmed the soliders’ need for female companionship and…encouraged servicemen to seek sexual adventures with ‘good,’ ‘clean’ women to keep up morale and the fighting spirit.”3 At this same time, women were looked down upon and seen as sexually deviant whose only purpose was to serve men in the army. Only their bodies were deemed useful and only when it became convenient for the good of man. A study by Marilyn E. Hegarty found that “women of various backgrounds and occupations found their ‘bodies nationalized and their sexuality militarized.’”4 Seeing this information had truly been eye opening. Why were women so brutally targeted and victimized during the war? Why did men feel as if they had the right to dominate and rule over a woman? Why are women’s struggles during the war nearly nonexistent in textbooks? Jewish women and women from the United States both went through completely different ordeals; however, gender discrimination placed them on the bottom of society and were