Journal of Lesbian Studies, 13:431–441, 2009

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1089-4160 print / 1540-3548 online
DOI: 10.1080/10894160903048163

Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices:

Disciplining Lesbianism in the WAAF and the
ATS during the Second World War

EMMA VICKERS
Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

During the Second World War the two largest women’s services, the
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Auxiliary Territorial
Service (ATS), responded pragmatically to the presence of lesbians
in their ranks. Such disinterest arguably stemmed from the need to
retain valuable personnel in a time of great instability. This article
seeks to illuminate the responses of both services within the context
of wider understandings of lesbianism in Britain during the inter-
war period and during the Second World War. It argues that the
responses of senior officials were rooted in received understandings
of lesbianism as both an acquired vice and as an innate psycho-
pathic infirmity. Overwhelmingly, however, classification fell in the
former category, underpinned as it was by notions of middle-class
boarding school desire.

KEYWORDS lesbianism, Second World War, women, Britain,

Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Auxiliary Territorial Service, psy-
chology, auxiliary services, discipline

In 1941, and as the Second World War continued to rage, another battle was
commencing in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Two airwomen
stationed at RAF Upwood were described by the first director of the service,
Dame Katherine Trefusis-Forbes (1899–1971), as being in a “highly temper-
amental and peculiar state of mind.”1 The WAAFs in question were neither
mentally nor physically ill but were deemed to be lesbians, or as Trefusis-
Forbes put it, “misfits.” After much consideration, it was decided that the

The author acknowledges constructive comments on this article from Felix R. Schulz,
Helen Glew, Stephen Constantine, and Corinna Peniston-Bird.
Address correspondence to Emma Vickers, Department of History, Lancaster University,
Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK. E-mail: e.vickers@lancaster.ac.uk

431
432 E. Vickers

women would be separated through reposting. Two years later, in 1943,

Letitia Fairfield, who had retired as Chief Medical Officer of the Auxiliary
Territorial Service (ATS) a year earlier, was asked to produce a policy docu-
ment for her former employer. Its contents were to be kept secret and only
disseminated to officers should they request it lest it “creat[ed] a problem
by drawing attention to it.”2 In the memo, Fairfield advised officers to act
on “definite evidence,” a caveat that served to delineate acceptable and un-
acceptable interactions between women. The war, and its heavy demands
on labour, necessitated a high level of pragmatism and women suspected of
being lesbians were, by and large, retained by the services. Indeed, looking
back on the period, A. P. Doran, a Squadron Leader in the WAAF who served
during the 1970s, commented that the organization decided to “turn a blind
eye to lesbianism [during the Second World War], because it was expedient
to do so, in the interests of maintaining maximum womanpower.”3 By the
1970s, however, Doran was working in a rather more punitive environment.
The leniency that had dominated the policies of the WAAF during the Sec-
ond World War was forgotten in favor of a forceful policy of surveillance
and expulsion.
However, this active willingness to ignore lesbian activity between 1939
and 1945 typified the approach pursued by the WAAF and the ATS. Unlike
in the male services, same-sex activity did not contravene military law but
was instead acknowledged as having “disciplinary implications” (Cowper
1949, 227). This article is concerned with exploring these “implications” and
highlighting the complex and often contradictory ways that the WAAF and
the ATS responded to women whom they suspected of lesbianism. While
officials within both services left a written record of their attempts to deal
with suspected lesbians, the same cannot be said of the Women’s Royal
Naval Service (WRNS). For this reason the WRNS will not be discussed here.

CODIFYING LESBIANISM

Up until the second half of the twentieth century, lesbians continued to live
in the shadows of the public psyche. Neither illegal nor acceptable, their
desires were submerged within a rigid social framework that emphasized
women’s interdependence with men as wives and mothers rather than as
autonomous sexual beings. In 1921 a proposed amendment to the Criminal
Law Amendment Act of 1885 was brought to the House of Lords to be
ratified. The amendment, euphemistically known as “acts of indecency by
females,” would have made sexual acts between women punishable under
the same terms as homosexual acts committed by men. The champion of
the clause, the Earl of Malmesbury, believed that lesbianism was “disgusting
and polluting” and had increased “partly owing to the nervous conditions
following the war.” Despite the Earl’s impassioned plea, the clause was
 Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices 433

defeated. One opponent of the clause was the Lord Chancellor, Lord
Birkenhead, who famously concluded that “of every thousand women,
999 have never heard a whisper of these practices.”4 Evidently, ignorance
was preferable to a public proclamation that might, in the opinion of Lord
Birkenhead, encourage experimentation. As we shall see, this censorious
attitude continued to dominate discussions of lesbian desire well into the
middle of the twentieth century.
By 1939, and despite the apparent clarion call to lesbian butch and
femme typologies provided by the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall in 1928,
same-sex love and desire between women continued to lack an intelligible
discourse, not least in the public domain (Oram 2007; Doan 2001). Under-
standings of lesbianism were still confined to medical and legal circles, some-
thing that perpetuated a pervasive culture of silence within British society.
However, the advent of the Second World War brought the issue of lesbian-
ism back into the spotlight. In Sex Problems in Wartime (1940) George Ryley
Scott, the author of an extensive back catalogue that included The Common
Sense of Nudism (1934) and Phallic Worship (1941) attributed lesbianism to
“the sexual emancipation” engendered by the war, the “comparative lack
of men,” “the fear of heterosexual alliances resulting from pregnancy,” and
the “masculinization of feminine fashions” (Ryley Scott 1940, 76). Although it
would be easy to dismiss Ryley Scott’s musings as the result of an over-active
imagination, his words tune into very real fears about the mobilization of
women, including their release from the strictures of the parental home and
the promise of personal and financial autonomy. Indeed, the onset of the
Second World War in 1939 saw an explosion of women into the uniformed
auxiliary services. Between 1939 and 1945, 612,000 women donned khaki,
navy, and airforce blue in support of the allied cause (Mellor 1972). Despite
the fact that for most recruits, familial authority was replaced with military
authority when they entered the services, many revelled in the opportunity
to escape the gaze of their parents and relatives and pursue wartime careers
in fields hitherto unavailable to them. For lesbian women too, the advent
of war represented a welcome opportunity to seek out women with similar
desires. Vick Robson joined the WAAF when she was 19. After serving at
Long Benton, a barrage balloon station, she decided to train as an electrician
and was sent to Ullsworth. “I got in with some girls stationed there, and they
said ‘Are you like us?’ So it started off again and I thought ‘Oh, I’m back on
Cloud Nine again’“ (Neild and Pearson 1992, 52).
Mary Allen also flourished during the war. She described the onset of the
conflict as a “God-send” because it meant that she could escape her home
and a stifling network of boyfriends for whom she felt very little. While
serving in the ATS, Allen discovered that her unit contained a small contin-
gent of lesbians. Emboldened, she experienced her first lesbian relationship
with an older woman, something that helped her to recognize and label her
sexuality.5 In this way, the onset of war and the subsequent mobilization of
women into the auxiliary services played a critical role in allowing countless
434 E. Vickers

numbers of women to explore the parameters of their sexuality. Although

there is little evidence to suggest that lesbianism in the women’s auxiliary
services was a widespread issue, officials in the WAAF and the ATS were
nonetheless forced to confront the issue head on.

POLICING DESIRE

As in civilian society, the stigma of same-sex desire also generated a pervasive

culture of silence in the services. Sex education for servicewomen focused
on the two issues that were deemed to be the most disruptive to efficiency,
namely venereal disease and pregnancy. Arguably, such a focus worked
to obscure the issue of lesbianism. In lectures, any discussion of same-sex
desire was strictly prohibited lest it occasioned “too much talk.”6 Such an
attitude reveals a veiled allusion to the notion of lesbianism as an infectious
epidemic that would sweep through barrack huts and units and produce
legions of lesbian servicewomen. This was certainly an idea advocated by
Marie Stopes (1880–1958) a prolific writer of advice manuals and a passionate
advocate of birth control. In Enduring Passion, Stopes put forward the idea
that the opinion that lesbianism was a “corruption” derived from “laziness
and curiosity” that “spreads as an underground fire spreads in the peaty soil
of a dry moorland” (Stopes 1931, 38). The mere suggestion of any discussion
about lesbianism was therefore deemed to be entirely inappropriate. Indeed,
the issue was effectively ignored until 1943 when Letitia Fairfield was asked
to produce her confidential memo, “A Special Problem.”
At the most basic level, policies of exclusion in the ATS and the WAAF
were built around the need for absolute proof, that is, the positive identifi-
cation of women whose activity was too self-evident to be ignored. In the
ATS, for instance, officers were advised by Fairfield to act only on “definite
evidence.”7 In practice, however, this “evidence” often proved difficult to
obtain. Fairfield herself was astute enough to warn officers in the ATS that
lesbian sartorial styles and forms of self-presentation were more nuanced
than they were popularly constructed. In her opinion, neither a “mascu-
line physique [n]or the adoption of male clothing or pursuits” constituted
evidence that a woman was a lesbian.8 Likewise, officers were warned that
even women sharing beds “may be doing so for warmth and because they
have slept with their sisters all their lives” and, moreover, that women demon-
strating their affection for one another “may be following the normal cus-
toms of factory life.”9 Fairfield also displayed a remarkable unwillingness to
link lesbian desire to its physical expression. “Even consciously homosexual
friendships between women are usually kept entirely on a mental plane.
Perverted physical practices . . . are fortunately rare. Where this occurs it is
usually among women of a depraved type or among the self conscious intel-
ligentsia, who are probably more actuated by craving for excitement than any
 Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices 435

real desire.”10 In this way, physical and sexual intimacy between women was
framed as the furthest pinnacle of lesbian deviancy rather than as a simple
manifestation of desire. It was also deemed to belong to intelligent women
and certainly not those from the working classes, whose bed-sharing was
rooted in poverty rather than perversion.
Fairfield’s willingness to deny “physical practices” and, moreover, ex-
plain behavior that might otherwise have been taken as confirmation of
lesbianism, gave officers a very limited and ultimately prescriptive definition
of “definite proof” that in all likelihood required women to be caught in the
act on a number of occasions. However, in never making this explicit and
moreover, in suggesting to officers what did not constitute “definite proof”
rather than what did, Fairfield effectively sidled away from the issue, her
criteria of identification offering numerous loopholes but little else. While
this ensured that only those against whom there was unflinching evidence
were disciplined, it also meant that most women would probably have been
given the benefit of the doubt.
The one issue that dominated the discussions of officials attempting to
define the contours of disciplinary action was efficiency. In both the WAAF
and the ATS it became a fundamental benchmark in the identification of, and
action against, lesbian servicewomen. In the WAAF, for instance, Trefusis-
Forbes believed that only lesbians who were disrupting their own work and
that of other servicewomen should be dealt with.

In approaching an airwoman or officer who we are fairly convinced is a

Lesbian, or in approaching one whose behaviour is such as to suggest she
is, we should point out to her that her behaviour is that of a schoolgirl
and that these sentimental attachments are not what we expect from
airwomen who must necessarily always set a good example to others.
That unless she can behave herself as a sensible adult we consider that
she will have a detrimental effect on discipline generally [and] we would
have to dispense with her services.11

This extract alone reveals just how pragmatic Trefusis-Forbes was prepared
to be. According to the memo, an airwoman would only be approached if
her behavior was sufficiently “convincing” and if there was ample evidence
that it was adversely affecting the discipline of others. As a scribbled note
by Trefusis-Forbes on the bottom of the memo attests, such women were
classed as “misfits,” that is, recruits who did not fit into life in the WAAF.
This emphasis on efficiency was drawn on fairly consistently by Trefusis-
Forbes. In one instance, she became involved in the case of two women at
RAF Upwood who had been accused of being lesbians after some of their
correspondence was discovered by their commanding officer.

In view of the fact that the writers of both letters are obviously in a highly
temperamental and peculiar state of mind and are miserable if parted for
436 E. Vickers

a few hours at a time leads me to suppose that their work is unlikely

to be as efficient as it would otherwise be. Since these two airwomen
appear to be unable to behave like grown-up people who belong to a
fine service and that their childish conduct cannot be overlooked any
longer, they must be separated.12

Once again, the root of the issue was not the mere presence of the women
but their inefficiency and the detrimental impact of their behavior on the
“fine” reputation of the WAAF. In positioning efficiency as the foremost con-
sideration, Trefusis-Forbes suggested that it was not the presence of lesbians
or suspected lesbians that was the problem. All women regardless of their
sexual preferences would be retained by the service and their unit if they
were sufficiently mature and competent. If they were not, however, they
would be separated, not excluded. In the ATS, Letitia Fairfield also under-
scored efficiency and discipline as the guiding principles when it came to
dealing with suspected lesbians. Women “sharing an excessive attachment”
were separated by reposting only if they could not be “diverted by other in-
terests.” Moreover the exigencies of war meant that only more serious cases
of “perverted practices or [women who] attempted [to] corrupt other women
by talk or example” were considered for discharge.13
Crucially, both Fairfield and Trefusis-Forbes encouraged disciplinary ac-
tion only when the work of a servicewoman was thought to be impaired
or if there was evidence to suggest that a suspected lesbian was “corrupting
others.” These were stipulations that worked in the favor of women who be-
came involved in relationships with others. In effect, lesbian servicewomen
would be ignored on the condition that their conduct was neither deemed to
be affecting their ability to work nor viewed as detrimental to discipline and
the reputation of their respective service. Anecdotal evidence gleaned from
oral testimony substantiates this approach. A former member of the WAAF,
Elizabeth Reid Simpson, was told by a fellow recruit to ignore a lesbian cou-
ple in the bunk above her on the grounds that “they don’t fancy you” and
were therefore not a threatening presence.14
Such recollections also attest to the role of peers in ignoring or in some
cases, policing, the behavior of their co-workers. Joan Wyndham served as
an officer in the WAAF and was forced to report the activities of a sergeant
and a fellow WAAF following a report by Wyndham’s “busybody” non-
commissioned officer (NCO) that the two women were sleeping together.
Wyndham was reluctant to register the complaint not least because she felt
intimidated by the sergeant who she described as “big and tough with an
Eton crop” (Wyndham 1987, 103). She was, however, forced to report the
couple (who were subsequently disciplined) because her NCO had displayed
less willingness to ignore their activity than Wyndham herself, something
made evident by Wyndham’s reference to the NCO being a “busybody” who
unnecessarily meddled in other people’s business.
 Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices 437

DISCIPLINING DESIRE

In the WAAF and the ATS, the “judicious posting” of an individual as a

means of separating a couple was one of the primary disciplinary techniques
invoked against suspected lesbians (Winner 1947; Summerfield and Crockett
1992, 446). Sometimes this was preceded by a period of covert observation
and an imposed separation during which time a couple would be forced to
work in separate locations or on separate shifts.15
On the whole, Trefusis-Forbes was keen to give suspected lesbians “the
chance to pull [themselves] together after a talk or two” before she would
consider separating them. Similarly, Fairfield encouraged officers to separate
a couple only if “they cannot be diverted by other interests.”16 Such refer-
ences to the remedial value of talks and diversionary interests attest to a
common cultural discourse or what Oram terms “a loose Freudian typology”
that viewed lesbianism as an emotional throwback and something which,
consistent with prevalent ideas about same-sex boarding-school environ-
ments, adolescents usually grew out of (Oram 2007, 141). This was the line
taken by the sexologist Havelock Ellis whose study of lesbianism through the
lens of boarding-school friendships and in particular, relationships between
older and younger women, dominated popular and sexological typologies
of lesbian relationships well into the 1950s (Ellis 1942; Vicinus 2004). For
instance, the sex advisor Rennie MacAndrew believed that public schools
created particularly favorable conditions for the spread of homosexuality,
a “habit” that he deemed to be both “innocent and passing.” (MacAndrew
1941, 331).
Given these fairly consistent understandings, it is not surprising that
Fairfield described lesbianism as “essentially the persistence of an immature
mental and emotional phase.”17 Trefusis-Forbes followed Fairfield’s lead and
interpreted lesbianism as a “silly ‘schoolgirl craze.’” Essentially, such women
were viewed as immature anomalies who in failing to progress into adult-
hood, had become permanently trapped in a phase of adolescent infatuation.

It may be argued that nothing more is involved than a highly developed

‘schoolgirl craze’ between two foolish and ill-balanced young women . . .
grown-up women do not usually indulge in these silly ‘schoolgirl crazes’
which are only indulged in by young girls and which most people learn
to despise as they grow older and more sensible.18

As Rebecca Jennings highlights, such attachments were “both deviant and

normative” in that they were considered to be part and parcel of adoles-
cence (Jennings 2007, 17). Indeed, as Jennings goes on to discuss, the phe-
nomenon of the schoolgirl crush or “pash” had provoked considerable de-
bate among educational commentators, doctors, and youth workers since
the nineteenth century. It was also a popular and established theme in
438 E. Vickers

adolescent fiction up until 1928 (Jennings 2007, 21; Oram and Turnbull 2001,
130).
Arguably, the prevalence of this discourse of “boarding school desire”
offered a degree of license for the expression of same-sex desire. Indeed,
it is perhaps not surprising that some women who were caught in the act
invoked the very same discourse to affect a degree of sympathy. When Stevie
Rouse discovered two women in the same bed using a dildo, the couple’s
first line of defense was the claim that it was the first time they had used it,
and the first time that they had acted on their feelings.19
In general, officials in the WAAF were keen to re-post a recruit, and
continue to re-post them at regular intervals (to make it harder for them
to form new relationships), only if “there is no clear proof of perversion
and where the woman is efficient at her WAAF trade.”20 Discharge from the
service would only occur in the event that a woman was deemed to be a
corrupting influence on others or what Lieutenant-Colonel Albertine Win-
ner, consultant to the women’s services, called “a promiscuous psychopath”
(Winner 1947). Winner maintained, however, that only “some half-dozen
women had to be discharged [from the auxiliary services] on these grounds
. . . it was not due to ignorance of the possibilities, though there certainly
was a very sensible awareness of when action was and was not required”
(Winner 1947). This “sensible awareness” offered a degree of protection
to those who were astute enough to mask their behavior. If “promiscuity”
and “psychopathic” behavior were used as benchmarks to identify serious
cases, it was not hard to beat the system, characterized as it was by a de-
gree of uninterest and a willingness to ignore all but the most obvious and
disruptive.
There was one, rather more final, disciplinary avenue that could be
pursued by the services. Women considered to be irredeemable – Winner’s
so-called “promiscuous psychopaths”– could be discharged silently through
medical channels as “services no longer required,” otherwise known by
the acronym SNLR. This catch-all term was sometimes used to discharge
lesbian recruits because unlike formal discharges, SNLR was classed as an
administrative discharge, which meant that it did not leave a paper trail. It was
also sufficiency vague to mask a multitude of reasons for a recruit’s expulsion.
In the auxiliary services, discharge was the final and most serious action that
could be taken against a suspected lesbian. Accordingly, discharges under
SLNR were a valuable deterrent. Trefusis-Forbes was convinced that periodic
discharges of known lesbians under “services no longer required” would
“undoubtedly act as a warning on the Station that she [a suspected lesbian]
came from.”21 However, SNLR discharges were not quite as neutral as they
appeared to be. Indeed, if such a discharge followed a good service record,
it was often more desirable, in the WAAF at least, to give a “fictitious cause”
because the implicit message of a SNLR discharge to a future employer was
that a particular woman was not worthy of retention.22
 Infantile Desires and Perverted Practices 439

There is no known record of how many women were discharged from

the services because they were rightly or wrongly labelled as lesbian. There
is, however, evidence here to suggest that the fiercer end of the disciplinary
spectrum was invoked only rarely and usually following repeated, obvious,
and, crucially, disruptive behavior between women and only following man-
ifold attempts to discourage such activity.

CONCLUSION

This study of the ATS and the WAAF has illuminated the longevity of cultural
constructions that depicted lesbians as either “promiscuous psychopaths” or
adolescent girls who were merely affected by the conditions engendered
by the war. However, both Fairfield’s memo and the opinions offered by
Trefusis-Forbes are a curious symbiosis of progressive and archaic. Both doc-
uments resonate with received understandings about lesbianism that domi-
nated popular and scientific typologies between 1930 and 1950 while also
displaying a relatively enlightened awareness of lesbian sartorial style and
female masculinity. It is clear that both services were attempting to grapple
with the issue of how to define and deal with lesbians. It is not surprising,
however, that the contours of this process were dictated by the demands
of the war. For the duration of the conflict, women suspected of being les-
bians would largely be ignored unless their behavior contravened implicit
and explicit codes of morality and behavior.
These policies would stay in place until the middle of the 1950s when
the WAAF led the way in tightening up policy directives on the treatment
of lesbians, invoking a system of searches and surveillance on women who
were deemed to love other women. The service also made lesbianism an
offense under Air Force law, specifically section 66 of the Air Force Act
of 1955.23 Until then, however, lesbians serving in the WAAF and the ATS
undoubtedly benefited from the loopholes provided by the pragmatic and
overwhelmingly disinterested policies of Fairfield and Trefusis-Forbes who
preferred to ignore their existence rather than confirm it.

NOTES

1. RAF Museum, AC 72/17 Box 8, letter from DWAAF to D.P.S., re a case of lesbianism 2 December
1941.
2. National Archives (hereafter NA) DEFE 70/96 Discipline; homosexuality 11 January 1955–18
July 1968, Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offenders and Prostitution, Memorandum by the
War Office to the Wolfenden Committee, n.d.
3. NA AIR 2/10673, RAF and WRAF—Homosexual offences and abnormal sexual tendencies
1950–68 “Lesbianism in the WRAF,” loose minutes from A.P. Doran, Squadron Leader, 13 October 1971.
4. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, vol. 46, cols. 567–577, 15 August 1921.
440 E. Vickers

5. Brighton OurStory Archive, S. Allen (pseudo.) interviewed by Linda and Tom, Part 2, tape 49,
29 November 1990.
6. London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA) PH/GEN/3/19: Papers of Letitia Fairfield, Ho-
mosexuality, 1947–61, “A Special Problem—Written during the War by Dr Letitia Fairfield for the guidance
of the Officers in the Women’s Services,” 1943.
7. LMA PH/GEN/3/19: Fairfield, “A Special Problem,” 1943.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. RAF Museum, AC 72/17 Box 5, memo on lesbianism from DWAAF to DDWAAF, P and MS, 8
October 1941.
12. RAF Museum, AC 72/17 Box 8, letter from DWAAF to D.P.S., re a case of lesbianism 2 December
1941.
13. LMA PH/GEN/3/19: Fairfield, “A Special Problem,” 1943.
14. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive 18201, E. Reid Simpson.
15. Letter from M. Lane to Emma Vickers, 30 April 2006.
16. LMA PH/GEN/3/19: Fairfield, “A Special Problem,” 1943.
17. Ibid.
18. RAF Museum, AC 72/17 Box 8, letter from DWAAF to D.P.S., re a case of lesbianism 2 December
1941.
19. Stevie Rouse interviewed by Emma Vickers, 17 June 2006.
20. NA AIR 2/13859 WRAF, Treatment of immorality, memo to AMP from D.P.S., 8 September
1942.
21. NA AIR 2/13859 WRAF, Treatment of immorality, memo from DWAAF, 2 February 1940.
22. NA AIR 2/13859 WRAF, Treatment of immorality, reply to DWRAF’s memo by DG.M8, 6 March
1940. Not until 1971 did the Air Ministry consider dropping “SNLR,” because it was preventing women
discharged for being lesbians from gaining further employment and therefore penalizing the women
in civil life for activities not illegal but an offense in the eyes of the military. See NA AIR 2/18644,
Moral Welfare, unnatural friendships 1970–1973, loose minute “Lesbianism in the WRAF,” A.P. Doran, 13
October 1971.
23. NA 2/13859-WRAF-Treatment for immorality Squadron Officer O. Cook’s lecture to WRAF
OCTU, “Unnatural Relationships Between Women,” n.d.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Emma Vickers (Ph.D.) is an Honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster Uni-

versity. Her research interests include the history of sexuality, gender and
war, commemoration, and oral testimony. Her article in this collection is
related to her Ph.D. thesis Homosexuality and Military Law in the British
Armed Forces, 1939–1945 (Lancaster, 2008) which will be published as a
monograph with Manchester University Press. She has published in Dagmar
Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth
Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and is currently working on her
first book.