Hell Hath No Fury (20 page)

TENEPAL, MALINALLI

“The Mexican Eve,”
Aide to Cortés,
b. 1498, d. 1529

The most celebrated woman to have taken part in the Spanish conquest of Central America, Malinalli, known as
La Malinche,
was an Indian of noble birth who became the mistress of Spanish commander Hernán Cortés. Her contemporary fame as a native conquistadora was later obscured by the contempt in which she was held in nineteenth-century Mexico, which earned her the derisory nicknames of
La Vendida,
“she who sells out,”
La Chingada,
“she who gets fucked,” and “the Great Whore.”

Malinalli was given away as a child, having been born under an ominous sign portending disaster. The merchants to whom she was handed over sold her into slavery with the Mayan Indians of Tabasco. After Cortés defeated the
cacique
(headman) of Tabasco in 1518, he was presented with twenty young women to serve his soldiers and cook for them. One of them was Malinalli, who was baptized and renamed Marina.

Marina advanced quickly in Cortés's service. She was a gifted linguist and soon became his interpreter, providing him with vital information about the mind-set and military tactics of the region's peoples. She was said to have been at Cortés's side in many battles but never to have taken an active part in the fighting, possibly an acknowledgment of the role of women in ancient Indian warfare, in which females often accompanied their menfolk into the thick of battle but only to advise and encourage them. Because Marina was invariably in the company of Cortés, and always spoke for him, the Indians dubbed Cortés “Marina's captain.”

She also bore him a son, Martín, who was much loved by Cortés and became his legitimate heir by papal decree. Cortés never married any of his Indian lovers, but in Marina's case he made her substantial land grants, and around 1524 arranged for her to marry the captain of a merchant ship. Having deprived himself of his trusted military and diplomatic adviser, Cortés then embarked on a disastrous expedition to Honduras. In all probability Marina died in one of the epidemics that followed in the wake of the Spanish invaders and which, during the next century, killed some 98 percent of the native population. In 1542, in a dispute over the land granted to Marina, seven of Cortés's lieutenants testified to the governors of New Spain about the important role she had played in the Spanish conquest of Central America. However, that conquest had proved an unmitigated disaster for the region's native peoples, and in the nineteenth century the nationalist custodians of Mexico's past attempted either to vilify Marina or to write her out of history.

Reference: In her 2006 novel,
Malinche,
Laura Esquivel has made a spirited attempt to rehabilitate Tenepal, portraying her as a freedom fighter against the Aztecs and the architect of a rich, mixed heritage.

TRAVERS, SUSAN

British Socialite, World War II Nurse, and French Foreign Legionary, b. 1909, d. 2003

A prewar member of Europe's gilded youth, Susan Travers became the only woman to have joined the French Foreign Legion in World War II and played an important role in the 1942 breakout from the fortress of Bir Hacheim in North Africa.

She was the daughter of a British naval officer who in 1921 had moved his family to Cannes, on the French Côte d'Azur. Small and striking, she excelled as a tennis player and spent the 1930s in a vapid whirl of travel, skiing, and tennis parties, where she was the object of much male attention. This was brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of World War II. In 1939 Travers joined the French Red Cross. Blood made her queasy, a less-than-ideal qualification for a nurse, but she qualified as an ambulance driver and in 1940 accompanied the French expeditionary force dispatched to help the Finns in their “Winter War” against the Soviet Union (see
Lotta Svärd,
Chapter 6).

In May 1940, after the fall of France, Travers made her way to London to offer her services as a nurse to the Free French Brigade. She was attached to a unit of the Foreign Legion (about half of which had remained loyal to the Free French) and in September 1940 embarked on the abortive Franco-British expedition to capture the naval base at Dakar, in French West Africa, where the garrison had remained loyal to the pro-German Vichy government.

After serving as a driver in the Allied campaign in East Africa, where she was dubbed “La Miss” by the legionnaires, Travers was posted to Beirut as the driver of Colonel Marie-Pierre Koenig, who in November 1940 had captured Libreville, in French Equatorial Africa. Travers and the dashing Koenig became secret lovers.

In the spring of 1942 Koenig, now promoted to the rank of brigadier-general commanding the First Free French Brigade, was sent to hold Bir Hacheim, a fortified box in Libya at the southern end of the British Eighth Army's Gazala Line. Travers went with him and remained in Bir Hacheim after May 17 when it came under attack by German and Italian units of the Afrika Korps. They had assured their commander, General Erwin Rommel, that the fortress would fall in a matter of minutes. However, the Allied force at Bir Hacheim held out until the night of 10 June when, with water and ammunition exhausted, Koenig ordered a breakout.

Travers drove both her commanding officer and another Legion colleague, the White Russian prince Colonel Dmitri Amilakvari, who had been one of her lovers before her encounter with Koenig. Under heavy fire, Travers burst through the enemy lines, at one point careering through a laager of parked German armored vehicles. By the end of the night, some 2,500 of Bir Hacheim's 3,700 defenders, including 650 legionnaires, had reached the safety of the British lines. Travers was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Ordre du Corps d'Armée for her gallantry in the breakout.

Her affair with Koenig ended shortly afterward, but she remained loyal to the Legion, serving in Italy and France until the end of the war. In May 1945 she applied to join the Legion officially, omitting her sex from the application form, and was appointed an officer in its logistics division, making her the only woman to serve in the Legion in World War II.

Travers later served in French Indochina but in 1947 resigned her commission to bring up her children by her husband, Nicholas Schegelmilch, a sergeant in the Legion. In 1956 she was awarded the Medaille Militaire. Poignantly, the medal was pinned on her by Koenig, who by then had become France's minister of defense. In 1996 she received the Légion d'Honneur in recognition of her unique role in the Legion's history. Four years later the French government decided as a matter of general policy to allow women to join the Foreign Legion.

Reference: Susan Travers,
Tomorrow to Be Brave: A Memoir of the Only Woman Ever to Serve in the French Foreign Legion,
2000.

VIVANDIÈRES

Women Who Sold Food and Drink to the Troops, Seventeenth-Century France–Early Modern Times

The term
vivandières
was originally associated with women, often the wives and daughters of soldiers, who sold food and drink to the troops. Its origins lie in the French army of the seventeenth century, possibly deriving from
viande,
the French word for “meat,” or the Latin root
vivenda,
“food.”

From the 1650s, the
vivandières
supplied the French troops with food and other necessities and were regulated by the army. Unlike the
cantinières,
who performed a similar function and went on campaign, they were usually confined to barracks or outposts and by the early nineteenth century had adopted a trademark wooden keg filled with brandy and frequently painted red, white, and blue.

In 1854 the term
vivandière
officially replaced the term
cantinière
in the French army. The clothing of the vivandières was standardized to echo the uniforms of the formations to which they were attached. The Zouaves of Napoléon III's day, in the 1860s, were followed by
vivandières,
who wore matching uniforms, often with a turban and a short sword. These women were wholly assimilated into the French army, received regular pay, and were entitled to decorations. A regulation of 1865 established the number of
vivandières
at one for every infantry battalion, two for a battalion of light infantry, two for each cavalry squadron, and four for engineer and artillery regiments. The
vivandières
were often exposed to danger. During the French intervention in Mexico (1862–67), some captured
vivandières
were shot and their bodies mutilated.

Until the humiliation of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the American armed forces were heavily influenced by French military doctrine, not least in the tradition of
vivandières.
During the Crimean War of 1853-56, General George B. McClellan had served as an observer with the British and French, and when the American Civil War broke out in 1861, the experience of the Crimea was still uppermost in the minds of many regular senior officers, both Union and Confederate.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the formation, at the beginning of the war, of Union and Confederate volunteer regiments that adopted French nomenclature and resplendent uniforms, for example, Zouaves or chasseurs. These imitations of French military tradition had their own
vivandière
(the term became interchangeable with
cantinière
), who were often known as the “daughters of the regiment.” Their outfits were reminiscent of those worn in the Crimea. A photograph of Coppens's Louisiana Zouaves, taken in May 1861, shows a
vivandière
wearing Zouave trousers, a short but full skirt, a short jacket, plumed hat, and apron. However, many of these brightly caparisoned
vivandières
were more regimental mascot than any effective link in the formation's logistical chain, and they played no part in the campaigning.

There were exceptions. The Thirty-ninth New York Regiment, popularly known as the Garibaldi Guard, set off for war with six
vivandières
wearing “feathered hats, jaunty red jackets and blue gowns.” One of the most notable
vivandières,
Marie Tepe (“French Mary”), who served with Collis's Zouaves, the 114th Pennsylvania Regiment, was wounded at Fredericksburg(1862) and decorated with the Kearny Cross after Chancellorsville(1863). At the Battle of New Bern (1862),
vivandière
Kady Brownell, of the Fifth Rhode Island Regiment, carried the regimental colors into the thick of the battle to prevent the Rhode Islanders coming under fire from their own side. Some
vivandières,
however, were not selfless heroines like Marie Tepe but little more than prostitutes.

The activities of the
vivandières
were limited after September 1864, when General Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union forces, banned women from all military camps in his theater of operations. The number of
vivandières
who served in the field in the American Civil War was relatively small and subsequently became the source of many myths about the role women played. Nevertheless, the contributions of the
vivandières
in the volunteer regiments of the period, which marked the beginning of the era of modern warfare, was an early indication of what women were capable of.

6

INTO UNIFORM

Women Mobilized to Support the War Effort

I hate wars and violence, but if they come I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.

—Nancy Wake, New Zealand Resistance fighter, World War II

W
HEN MEN MAKE WAR
, women's lives are changed forever, though they may never see action or hear a shot fired. From the days of the
camp followers
(see Chapter 5), women's labor was vital to their countries' war efforts, and by the twentieth century it was no longer voluntary. “Without women, victory will tarry,” declared the British prime minister David Lloyd George in 1915, addressing a rally organized by suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst on the theme of “Women's Right to Serve,” “and the victory which tarries means a victory whose footprints are footprints of blood.”

Less than thirty years later in Britain, America, and the Soviet Union, women volunteered or were conscripted and mobilized in their millions as part of a political program to win World War II. Whether they were “called up” into the armed forces or directed into civilian work, they saw years of service, which had a decisive effect on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile Nazi Germany, true to its ideology of keeping women pregnant and in the kitchen, paid a heavy price for fighting with only half its population. Only in 1943, when it became clear that Germany was facing defeat, did the Nazis attempt full mobilization of its females.

For the British, the Americans, and the Soviet Union, the contribution of women was a vital factor in securing victory over Germany and Japan. However, during World War II the Japanese, like the Germans, showed a notable reluctance to mobilize their female workforce or to put them into uniform. British and American military authorities also remained cautious about the appropriate deployment of women, insisting that their war effort consist of working in the fields and factories to replace the men who had joined the forces, or taking on previously male civilian jobs like servicing engines and driving trams. As women filled the gaps left by men in a wide variety of jobs, it was noted by Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited Britain on a fact-finding mission that they paid the women far less than the men for doing the same job.

But as women worked away behind the lines, all too often the war came to them. In twentieth-century warfare, the development of military aviation meant the extension of hostilities into a new dimension, and the populations of Europe's great cities found themselves propelled into the front line. With many of the men away fighting the war, women bridged the gap. During World War II, when the Luftwaffe arrived in force over London in September 1940 at the beginning of the Blitz on the United Kingdom's major cities, women played a major role in the nation's
civil defense
(see Chapter 6). At the height of the Blitz, one air-raid warden in every six was a woman. Women also worked in the previously all-male preserve of Britain's shipyards and built the bombers England needed to fight back in the strategic bombing offensive against the Third Reich.

The women of America had been spared their own Blitz, as the United States was too large and too far away from its Axis enemies to come under threat from the air. Nor had the female workforce of America been subject to conscription like its British counterpart. Nevertheless, American women played an equally important role in the wartime production of munitions, tanks, and aircraft. They also helped to build the so-called Liberty Ships, which were America's mass-production answer to the heavy loss of merchantmen in the Battle of the Atlantic. Between 1941 and 1945, US shipyards built some 2,770 Liberty Ships, preserving Britain's Atlantic lifeline and giving birth to the enduring legend of
“Rosie the Riveter”
(see Chapter 6).

Life was immeasurably tougher for the
Soviet women in war industries
(see Chapter 6), and the female Soviet agricultural workforce endured grim conditions that were worlds away from the privations suffered on the British and American home fronts. On collective farms starved of machinery, Soviet women workers had to substitute their own muscle power for much-needed tractors, which were in desperately short supply. Punishments for being absent without leave from factory or farm were draconian, including heavy prison sentences.

In Britain the conscription of women was introduced in December 1941. The first conscripts, aged twenty to twenty-one, received their “call-up” papers in March 1942. They were given a choice between serving in the auxiliary services—the WRNS (
Women's Royal Naval Service,
see Chapter 6), the ATS (
Auxiliary Territorial Service,
see Chapter 6), and the WAAF (
Women's Auxiliary Air Force,
see Chapter 6)—civil defense or industry. By the summer of 1944 some 467,000 women had chosen the auxiliary services. Like their American equivalents, they became a crucial element in the war effort. By the end of 1943, for example, 80 percent of army driving in Britain was performed by the ATS. However, in common with their US sisters, who were not subject to conscription, they could not fire weapons, serve on warships, or fly aircraft in combat. No such prohibitions applied to Soviet women, who were to see action in the skies over their homeland; they also maintained and fired the guns in antiaircraft batteries and drove tanks all the way to Berlin.

The Western Allies did not use female aircrew in combat. But among their population were many women who had qualified as pilots, and they carved out a pioneering role in the British Air Transport Auxiliary and the American Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASP, see
Cochran, Jacqueline,
Chapter 7). Inevitably there were obstacles for the pioneers. The 1,074 women of the WASP flew more than sixty million miles across the United States in every type of aircraft known to the US Air Force and also towed targets in gunnery schools. The daring WASPs were the first women to be trained to fly American military aircraft, and they paved the way for the United States Air Force of the twenty-first century, in which women now make up 19 percent of the force and work in 99 percent of all US Air Force career fields. But they were not acknowledged as military pilots until more than thirty years later, when Congress declared in 1977 that they were veterans of World War II.

Yet for a number of these women, war opened many doors. For American and British women in particular, wartime service in industry or in the forces introduced them to a range of possibilities that had been unthinkable in the 1930s. For the first time, they could enjoy the release from child care and domestic servitude that men took for granted, and experience the camaraderie of colleagues, the relaxation of a quick beer at the end of a shift, and above all, the sense of direct involvement in matters of importance to the world.

When the war was over, the great majority of women returned to domesticity on the urging of their governments. Women who had been building bombers, ships, and tanks found that almost overnight, bed-making and newfound domestic arts like “table-scaping” (designing a dining table to resemble a landscape) had become the order of the day. A similar fate awaited British women, too. The banked-down international resentment this caused came to a head in 1963, when the mother of modern feminism, Betty Friedan, cast a cold eye over women's restricted lives in
The Feminine Mystique
and demanded, “Is this all?” The subsequent explosion of feminist protest paved the way for the entry of women to the armed forces from the 1970s onward.

AIR TRANSPORT AUXILIARY

ATA, United Kingdom, World War II

In the summer of 1939, the Royal Air Force agreed to the formation of a unit, eventually administered by British Overseas Airways, to undertake noncombat flying duties. From the first, the decision was also made to widen the intake to include female personnel.

Initially the Air Transport Auxiliary's purview included flying mail and performing ambulance duties, and its pilots were qualified aviators ineligible for service in the Royal Air Force (RAF). From early 1940, the scope of the ATA's duties widened to include the ferrying of aircraft from manufacturer to air base or between air stations. A women's section was formed under the leadership of Pauline Gower, a pilot with some two thousand hours of flying experience. Eventually, 166 women served with the ATA, helping to deliver many of the 308,567 aircraft that passed through its hands during World War II. In addition to flying duties, nine hundred of the two thousand personnel employed by the ATA as office staff, trainers, and maintenance workers were women.

The female pilots were highly accomplished aviators. Issued only with “pilots' notes,” a simple set of instructions, they had no radio on board and navigated by following the terrain below, often flying along railway lines. Using these methods, Lettice Curtis, who before joining the ATA had worked as a pilot for a survey company, delivered no fewer than four hundred four-engine bombers.

She also loved to ferry Spitfires, observing:

In the air the Spitfire was forgiving and without vice, and I never heard of anyone who did not enjoy flying it. It had a personality uniquely its own. The Hurricane [the RAF's most numerous fighter in the Battle of Britain] was dogged and masculine and its undercarriage folded upwards in a tidy, businesslike manner. The Spit, calling for more sensitive handling, was altogether more feminine, had more glamour and threw its wheels outward in an abandoned, extrovert way. From the ground there was a special beauty about it.

The pilots of the ATA never flew operationally and after D-Day were initially prevented from delivering aircraft to airfields in northwest Europe. However, as the Allied armies advanced, the ferry trips to forward airfields grew longer and, with the onset of winter, more hazardous. In the winter of 1944, ATA pilots, including women, flew through atrocious weather to deliver their aircraft to advanced airfields in northwest France. Navigation was immensely difficult, as snowfall blotted out all landmarks except forests, rivers were rendered invisible by ice and snow, roads and railways were indistinguishable, and airfields were often hidden beneath a treacherous haze. In all, 129 ATA pilots died in service, including the celebrated prewar aviatrix Amy Johnson.

In addition to flying to liberated Europe, the ATA operated an ambulance service, using specially converted Westland Rapides and Avro Ansons to ferry casualties from across the United Kingdom to the Canadian hospital at Taplow in Berkshire. Members of the ATA sometimes referred to themselves as “the Ancient and Tattered Airmen and Women.” (See also
Jacqueline Cochran,
Chapter 7.)

Reference: Lettice Curtis,
Forgotten Pilots,
1994.

AUXILIARY TERRITORIAL SERVICE

ATS, United Kingdom, United States, Commonwealth, and Worldwide, World War II

The origins of the British all-female Auxiliary Territorial Service can be traced back to the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) of World War I. The WAAC had been formed in 1917 to provide women for employment with the British army at home and on the Western Front. It had been divided into four sections: cooking, mechanical, clerical, and miscellaneous.

In September 1938, in the shadow of another war, the ATS came into being to meet the manpower demands that would inevitably flow from any future conflict. Its first director was Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, who fought long and hard for the ATS to be accepted as part of the armed forces of the Crown. Initially, however, the ATS was placed under the umbrella of the all-male Territorial Army (volunteer reserve), and the women recruits received two-thirds of soldiers' pay. A number of ATS companies were formed to serve with the Royal Air Force, but on the formation of the
Women's Auxiliary Air Force
(WAAF, see Chapter 6) in the summer of 1939, the War Department washed its hands of them.

On September 4, 1939, seventeen thousand women enrolled voluntarily in the ATS, undertaking to serve their country in whatever place and capacity the authorities required, many clearly making a break for freedom from the rigid confines of prewar British life. In April 1941, with the introduction of the Defense (Women's Forces) Regulations, the drive and determination of Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was rewarded when the ATS became an integral part of the armed forces of the Crown.

It was placed under the command of a chief controller with the equivalent rank of a major general, a post held from June 26, 1941, by Jean Knox. Female personnel from the age of seventeen to forty-three could sign up, but women who had served in World War I were accepted up to age fifty. Once enrolled, the “ATs,” as they were known, had three weeks' paid leave a year with free travel warrants, free medical attention, and lodging, not a bad deal in the days of wartime deprivation. Pay for the lower ranks was two shillings a day, the same as that enjoyed by their male counterparts.