Jessie Lennox, one of the last "Nightingales"

Concluding my blog posts about the women of the Zambezi Expedition on my companion Digging the Dust blog is this about Jessie Lennox, who lived to the great age of 102 and was a lifelong friend of Florence Nightingale. Click here to read about her.

Christina Broom, Photographer

A great exhibition currently on at the Museum of London for those lucky enough to live in London or are able to get there!

Read about Christina Broom, the UK's first female press photographer, at the London Historians blog and do watch the video on the Museum's own webpage to learn more about her work.

Elizabeth ("Emily") Mary Burrup (nee Tudway, later Levick)

Another woman who was involved in the Zambezi Expedition was Elizabeth Mary Burrup (nee Tudway, later Levick). Her interesting story can be read here on my other history blog as part of the project covering the lesser-known individuals connected with David Livingstone in his controversial and failed expedition of the Zambezi River.

Women of the Zambezi Expedition

Stories about the women who were part of David Livingstone's Zambezi Expedition have been posted to my other more general history blog, Digging the Dust.

Click here for the story of Anne Mackenzie, sister of Bishop Charles Mackenzie.

Look out for the Bomb Girls!

A Canadian historical television series that deserves a wider audience is Bomb Girls. It was only by accident that I discovered a DVD of the first series in my local library because it certainly has never been shown or promoted here in Australia to my knowledge and I am sure it would find a lot of fans Down-Under.

As soon as I watched the first couple of episodes I was hooked and I'm currently watching the second series. Although the producers, Global TV have a website on which subscribers can watch episodes, it is probably not accessible to viewers in other countries. 

Set in a Canadian factory that employs many women on its production line of munitions for World War II, the series has its fair share of dramas and personal conflicts, but is never predictable and is handled beautifully by the excellent cast of actors – all of whom are most convincing in the roles they inhabit. 

What is particularly good is that the series tackles the era and the real history taking place in the background in an accurate fashion, the dialogue doesn't jar with too many modernisms and the women have real bodies under the authentic 1940s fashions. 

Apparently the series was canned in Canada and fans started a website to Save the Bomb Girls and it seems a new movie length version is in the pipeline.

Do catch it if you can!

Women at Waterloo

With the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo upon us, historical novelist David Ebsworth has written an excellent blog about cantinières and vivandières, the women who supported the Napoleonic army. Click here.

It makes one wonder how many other stories are still waiting to be discovered about females on battlefields of past wars. Unfortunately, the English terminology often used for these women is "camp followers", which has gained a somewhat less attractive connotation and doesn't always acknowledge their bravery.

Here is another blog original from Military History magazine about women at Waterloo and also a story about the mystery "twins of Waterloo" can be read on my other blog here.

History written by the losers

They say that history is usually written by the winners, but if the losers become powerful there is also the good chance they can re-write it to suit themselves.

Following on from an earlier blog about what really happened during the Rape of Nanking, this article by author Isobel Wolff recently appeared in BBC magazine online about the female prisoners of war in the Far East who never get the coverage that their male counterparts do in literature.  The article also drew attention to the fact that British politician Nick Clegg's mother suffered imprisonment as a child. Daily Mail article here.

Several years ago, there was the excellent TV series Tenko and also the Australian film Paradise Road which was inspired by extraordinary women like Margaret Dryburgh and Betty Jeffrey which didn't receive the recognition it deserved, partly because distributors were cagey about offending Japan. See this 1997 article from the Los Angeles Times for comments about the film.

So, is it fine to keep alive the memories of some event like the Holocaust, but less politic to remember other outrages against humanity because of causing offence as a result of changing diplomatic alliances, trade and economics?

A Russian childhood friend of my mother, whom she last saw in Surabaya in 1941, disappeared into a Japanese POW camp somewhere in Java and was never heard of again. Maybe by some miracle she did survive the ordeal, but does what she suffer matter less than what happened to the survivors of Auschwitz or other similar camps in Europe?

There has been the occasional flurry of petitions and media reports into the "comfort women" of the Japanese, but these stories soon seem to disappear from the front pages. Why? One might go so far as to detect some sort of racism at play here because the majority of victims were Asian women and perhaps if a lot more Western women other than the Dutch had suffered, the international campaign for justice might have been more vigorously pursued. Read here about Jan Ruff O'Herne.  There are various Youtube videos available about her, such as this one.

Just yesterday, this article appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun regarding "errors" in an American history text book that "dishonor" Japan in which it is stated:

' ... References to comfort women in the textbook read: “The Japanese army forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as two hundred thousand women age fourteen to twenty ...” and “The army presented the women to the troops as a gift from the emperor ...” These descriptions disregard historical facts.

The recruitment of comfort women took place mainly through private-sector business operators. Investigations by the Japanese government have discovered no document that proves women were forcibly taken away by the wartime army to serve as comfort women. ...'

Sadly, there is no justice forthcoming for those very elderly women, most of them in Korea, Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere, still hoping for a genuine apology and compensation from Japan. 

It seems the "historical facts" of the Japanese nation remain different from those of their victims. Once the first-hand accounts are no more, will these women then be written out of history altogether?

For anyone interested in this topic, Google searches will find many articles and some confronting images on the controversies surrounding comfort women. 

It is difficult to find a really good list of books about women who were imprisoned by the Japanese or forced into being comfort women, but here are a few:

Surviving Tenko, the Story of Margaret Turner

The Real Tenko

A Woman's War

On Radji Beach (about the massacre of Australian nurses, with only one survivor, Vivian Bullwinkel whose biography is Bullwinkel)

White Coolies

Song of Survival

The Comfort Women

Comfort Woman