Mary Louise Roberts

The Leroy Henry Case: Sexual Violence and Allied Relations in Great Britain, 1944

A r o u n d m i d n i g h t o n 5 m A y 1944 on the outskirts of Bath, England, a married couple was awoken by a tapping on their bedroom window. Looking out, they saw a black American soldier at their front door. His name was Leroy Henry, and he was a thirty-year-old truck driver from St. Louis, Missouri. Like millions of other GIs at the time, Henry was stationed in England awaiting the invasion in France. That night, he claimed to be lost and asked the couple if they could help guide him back to camp. The wife, Irene Maude Lilley, answered the door, then accompanied the soldier down the road, supposedly to show him the way. When she did not return, her husband went out in search of her and found her in a ditch by the side of the road. She claimed to have been sexually violated. The couple went to the police, who took them in a car to a doctor. On the way, the car came across Henry walking on the road. Lilley identified him, and Henry was arrested. Three weeks later, Henry was found guilty of rape by a US courtmartial and was condemned to death by hanging. Before the case against Leroy Henry was resolved in an acquittal on 17 June 1944, it became an international cause célèbre. Historian Graham Smith describes the case as “arguably the most widely publicized and discussed single incident during the whole American presence in Britain.” Commander in chief Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to pay attention to the case in the first days of June despite a looming Normandy invasion. The British press first brought the case to light, expressing outrage at the hastiness and severity of Henry’s conviction. British civilians then took

The Past and Present of European Women's and Gender History: A Transatlantic Conversation

Ida Blom, Mineke Bosch, Antoinette Burton a.o., Facilitated and edited by Birgitte Soland and Mary Jo Maynes,

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.