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Eva Krutein (Eva's War, 1990) observes that there is a new class of women as a result of the second world war: '"the rubble women' as they were called. Because of the lack of male workers who, nine months after the war, were still in captivity, women were hired by the Military Government to clean up the towns" (240).
A woman's work, so it would seem, was and is never done (so Susan Strasser tells us in Never Done: A History of American Housework). Women always clean up - they clean up the messes of men, the messes of nations at war. Women, like soldiers, are associated with food, dirt, and shit, Jean Elshtain (1987:223) tells us. She continues: "war experience is concrete, dirty, filled with pollution and fluids, loss of control over one's body, experiences of keen vulnerability and absence of privacy" (Elshtain 1987: 223). And E. B. Sledge's (1981) description of "the most ghastly corner of hell" in With the Old Breed, one of the most graphic presentations of a trashed war front, supports Elshtain's observation: "the place was choked with the putrefaction of death, decay, and destruction" (Sledge 1981: 252). He continues (260):
A large number of Japanese all over the ridge had been killed during the early counterattacks. They had been covered with soil as soon as possible. And Japanese were still being killed out front. Infiltrators also were being killed all along the ridge at night. Our men could only spade mud over them.
The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost pile.
War is about dirt and about cleaning it up. It is about devourers and the devoured; about trashers and those who are trashed; about tyrants and victims. An examination of both the fiction and the nonfiction literature written by women during and after the second world war offers a meta-text of the clean-up problem of World War II: garbage, debris, human and other. Their accounts problematize an extremely obnoxious infrastructure of the war: waste.
Waste
Waste: refuse, remains, left-overs, trash. It can be...