What Armies Do: Women Under Occupation

Abstract

The title of Mary Louise Roberts’s new book, What Soldiers Do, says it all: sexual abuses are not the product of aberrant, badly disciplined soldiers, but of soldiering itself. And behind the title is an implied correlate: What Armies Do. Carefully, keeping her anger in check, and with wit, deep research, and telling vignettes, Mary Louise Roberts has given us a masterful study of sexual transactions between American GIs and French women in the Second World War. It is a case study of the violence practiced, but censored, by all militaries: the sexual abuse of women. Now that the United States has massive “peacetime” armed forces that include women, the abuse is often directed at other soldiers.