Freydis Sharland was a 21-year-old spitfire pilot ferrying planes between factories and the front lines. Emma Smith was a barge worker, moving cargo, who went on to write a best-selling memoir about her work. Margaret Pawley was a spy decoding German messages in Italy.

All of them, profiled at greater length in this article, had remarkable, bittersweet experiences that would have been unthinkable outside of war-time. We've had the advantage of growing up with mothers and grandmothers whose experiences were shaped by the War. It's sobering to realize that it's a generation that is dying, and their remarkable stories with them. We're a culture that, even as it increasingly values the contributions of women - and seems to have an unwavering interest in dramatic representations of World War II - is less engaged by the individual story when it's not packaged in costumes or given the importance of a PBS caption. And while not everyone, certainly in America, has stories of comparable drama, everyone does have stories. Let's hear them.

WW2: The Role Of Women In The Second World War [Telegraph]

In a terrific review on the Daily Beast, writer Megan Hustad draws a contrast between the recent rash of "bad-girl" tell-alls - stories of substance abuse and regrettable relationships and youthful misdemeanors - and Carlene Bauer's new Not That Kind of Girl, which upends the formula. Whereas most of these stories are tales of redemption, Bauer's is of someone who's found herself and needs to hang onto it. She's not a zealot or a prisoner of a narrow upbringing; she's an intellectual who happens to be a practicing Christian from a conservative home. As Hustad puts it,

She aspires not only to be truly hip, she also wants to be taken seriously in New York's snobbish literary scene. And she seeks to accomplish both of these goals while hanging on to her fervent faith in Jesus Christ. If life maneuvers received scores for technical difficulty, Bauer would be competing for gold.

While the romance of childhood repression - be it the mysteries of Catholicism, the strictures of evangelism or the tangles neuroses of the Jewish home - have always been literary gold, there's nothing quite so romantic about, well, a measure of contentment. Says Bauer, "Neither class anxiety nor Christianity were considered real, or fashionable, torments." And the memoir draws a sharp contrast between theoretically open-minded sophistication on the one hand, and the literary milieu's shock and disbelief when she admits to being a virgin.

Of course, this is nothing new. With the exceptions of those intellectual movements defined by their "moral seriousness" (think Transcendentalists, here) literary scenes from the Enlightenment through Bloomsbury have been characterized by a blithe scorn for the earnest - even as they dealt in the currency of emotion. While pre-Vatican II Catholicism actually became highly fashionable in British literary circles of the 20th Century, Americans - perhaps burdened by a need to throw off recent puritan antecedents? - tend to need a certain level of defiance to justify modern faith. Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor were conscious - not to say proud - Catholic writers, but in O'Connor's case this led to an uneasy relationship to much of the New York intelligentsia. (Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own is great on this.)

This is not to say that, person by person, there aren't all kinds of "literary types." Any world is made up of a myriad of individuals, and doubtless the New York "scene" has always seemed more frustratingly hermetic than in fact it is. We've heard horror stories - and as this memoir shows, the milieu's as prey to provincialism as any other - but at the end of the day, Bauer concludes, people are kind. That Bauer's story has a happy ending - she is, by any standard, a gifted and accomplished writer - is a testament, ultimately, to the power of talent. Bauer evolves, of course, in the memoir - but it's not the reflexive abandonment of a narrow girlhood that we've become used to. And no one who reads Bauer's book can doubt that it's variety of experience and, yes, worldview that makes for true vibrancy in writing as in life.

Girl Gone Mild [Daily Beast]
* I drew on The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters in this post.

The legacy of World War II was a painful one for much of France, and those women who'd become involved with German occupiers were treated with particular contempt. Those who'd fought the Germans bore resentment; those perhaps less proud of their own collaboration were eager to condemn them as scapegoats. Approximately 20,000 women's heads were publicly shaved as a proof of their perfidy - but this was less galling than the enduring proof provided by the children of these liasions.

As a result, as a piece in the Times tells us, many of these "children of the Huns" - it's estimated there were about 200,000 - were put in orphanages or given up at an early age for adoption. The motivations must have been varied; while such a child certainly made the mother's life harder, it's also true that growing up in the knowledge of their parenthood was not easy for the children, who faced mockery and shunning. But as a result, many of them, now in their 60s, have very little knowledge of their heritage, and are eager to discover it while there's still a chance that their fathers are alive. In recent years, a number of them have formed groups and obtained cooperation from the French and German governments in tracking down records. The French goverment has finally acknowledged this population, offering an oblique apology, while the German government has declared that they will be eligible for German citizenship.

That, however, depends on whether they can prove their paternity, and given the lack of records and the culture of secrecy - to say nothing of the fathers' probable ignorance of many of these offspring - concrete details are thin on the ground. While the New York Times profiles a few enfants de Boches eager to find out about their fathers, one can't help but wonder if some prefer to let the past lie, or have inherited a sense of shame about their antecedents. Some of those children who were adopted at an early age doubtless have no idea of their paternity, and as their mothers' generation dies off, the facts of their birth will become even murkier. We hope that those who wish them, get answers, and that their histories can at some point come to be seen as personal, rather than always overshadowed by cultural shame.

Tracing Roots Fostered By War, Severed By Shame [NY Times]