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Women's Barracks
Originally published in 1950, this account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone and many more millions worldwide.
The novel is based on the real-life experiences of the author, Tereska Torres, who escaped from occupied France. She arrived as a refugee in London and joined other exiles enlisting in Charles de Gaulle’s army, then stationed in Britain awaiting an invasion of their homeland by Allied forces. But Women’s Barracks is no ordinary war story.
As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop and hearts are won and lost. Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states. It was also denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy.” But in spite of such efforts—or perhaps, in part, because of them—the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.
From the obituary in the New York Times:
Tereska Torrès, 92, Writer Of Lesbian Fiction, Dies
Tereska Torrès, a convent-educated French writer who quite by accident wrote America’s first lesbian pulp novel, died on Thursday at her home in Paris. She was 92…
…It was not homophobia that caused Ms. Torrès to find her book’s canonical status peculiar. Quite the contrary, she said: because affairs with barracks mates were so much a part of ordinary wartime experience the hoopla seemed simply prurient.
“The book spoke very delicately about the few matters of sexual encounters,” Ms. Torrès told Salon.com in 2005. “But so what? I hadn’t invented anything — that’s the way women lived during the war in London.”
She added: “I thought I had written a very innocent book. I thought, these Americans, they are easily shocked.”
Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.
The novel is based on the real-life experiences of the author, Tereska Torres, who escaped from occupied France. She arrived as a refugee in London and joined other exiles enlisting in Charles de Gaulle’s army, then stationed in Britain awaiting an invasion of their homeland by Allied forces. But Women’s Barracks is no ordinary war story.
As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop and hearts are won and lost. Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states. It was also denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy.” But in spite of such efforts—or perhaps, in part, because of them—the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.
From the obituary in the New York Times:
Tereska Torrès, 92, Writer Of Lesbian Fiction, Dies
Tereska Torrès, a convent-educated French writer who quite by accident wrote America’s first lesbian pulp novel, died on Thursday at her home in Paris. She was 92…
…It was not homophobia that caused Ms. Torrès to find her book’s canonical status peculiar. Quite the contrary, she said: because affairs with barracks mates were so much a part of ordinary wartime experience the hoopla seemed simply prurient.
“The book spoke very delicately about the few matters of sexual encounters,” Ms. Torrès told Salon.com in 2005. “But so what? I hadn’t invented anything — that’s the way women lived during the war in London.”
She added: “I thought I had written a very innocent book. I thought, these Americans, they are easily shocked.”
Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.
182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
43 people are currently reading
1432 people want to read
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August 23, 2024
“These were the days of the V-1, Hitler’s ‘secret weapon.’ First one heard something like the rattling of a plane, but with a difference. The first time we heard it we leaned out of the windows at Down Street, looking at the sky. In the distance we saw a small black point, coming rapidly forward. It passed overhead, and everyone thought, if the noise stops, it will fall on us. But the noise continued, and the fatal little machine went on its way. Farther on we saw it suddenly halt and the noise stopped, and the V-1 plunged toward the ground. We heard a distant explosion…Panic was great in London. After the blitz, after four years of war, people’s nerves were not in very good condition. They grew wild with fear. As soon as an alarm sounded, one could see the crowds running in the street, people plunging into the subways, into shelters, mothers seizing their children in their arms. Even the dogs howled. At the zoo, as soon as the noise of an approaching V-1 was heard, the monkeys screamed in terror and jumped around in their cages…”
- Tereska Torres, Women’s Baracks
There are few things that make me want to read a book more than the fact it has been banned at some time or another. This trait is not unique to me, but speaks to the human desire to have what is forbidden. Many of the world’s most controversial works of literature have also ended among the ranks of the most famous and bestselling. We’re talking about titles that include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye.
Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks does not have that kind of name recognition. Indeed, I’d never heard of it before, right up until the moment I was sucked into one of the internet’s ubiquitous listicles, which I am constitutionally unable to resist. This particular listicle concerned itself with “cult classics,” and as soon as I learned of Women’s Barracks’s Second World War setting and then-notorious content, my book-ordering finger started to twitch. Then I saw its pulpy, 1950s-era cover, sighed at my own weakness, and purchased it at once.
***
Summarizing the plot of Women’s Barracks is pretty easy for a couple reasons. First, it’s very short, more novella than novel. Second, there is no plot. Instead, this is a series of character portraits and vignettes spanning the Fall of France to the end of World War II. The characters include Claude, an aging beauty with fluid sexuality; Ursula, young, naïve, and under Claude’s spell; Jacqueline, the archetypally entitled aristocrat; Mickey, who is spirited and friendly; and Ann, a helpful and competent companion who also happens to be gay.
Most of the action takes place in the titular barracks, which is set in London, or in the surrounding pubs. The women involved are all French, serving the Free French and Allied cause doing a variety of war work that – in the military calculus of the day – enabled more men to be sent into combat. While the world’s greatest conflict always simmers in the background, the concerns of Torres’s women are more local. They get their drink on, fall in and out of love, and live like the future is only an uncertain possibility.
***
Women’s Barracks is a book that can comfortably be read in one sitting, which is not surprising since it manages to go from 1940 to 1945 in approximately 130 pages. It seldom settles long in one place. For instance, just two pages are needed for one character to escape from France, get to Spain, and then travel to England. Though entire years can pass in a sentence, Torres does stop from time to provide to present a more detailed scene. By the end, the accumulation of moments manages to be rather affecting, and the characters – who are at first pretty superficial – more fully dimensioned.
I would be lying if I said I thought there was even the slightest chance that I would remember and treasure this work forever. But I was engaged in the moments that I spent with it.
***
Women’s Barracks is a semi-autobiographical novel. During the Second World War, Torres worked as a liaison between the Office of War Information and the headquarters of General Charles De Gaulle. After the war, she wrote the book in French, based on her wartime diaries. Her husband – the writer Meyer Levin – translated her effort into English.
Torres herself is the first-person narrator, though we learn precious little about her. Instead, she keeps the focus on her companions. Most of the time, Torres is not even present for the situations she describes, claiming to have learned everything later. This makes her a classic unreliable narrator, but it’s a conceit that’s not too hard to swallow.
***
Women’s Barracks was published in 1950, and received immediate backlash due to its sexual content, including its depiction of same-sex relationships. This outrage – of course – is not surprising. For much of the past two-thousand years, efforts to depict one of the most fundamentally important aspects of humanity have consistently been suppressed on the supposed grounds of decency.
This reality does not make the moral handwringing any less perplexing. The world had just passed through six years of hellfire in which some 75 million people died. Huge armies had grappled to the death. Soldiers had died on the ground, in the air, on the sea, and below it. Men and women and children in the thousands had been herded into gas chambers; others had been executed at the edge of pits, or burned in their houses. Millions more were forced to leave their homes. Entire cities had been flattened by bombs. Terror went from a byproduct of warfare to a goal. The veneer of civilization had been worn away by systematized slaughter, mass sexual assaults, manmade famines, and – at the end – by the splitting of the atom.
Yet, after all this, some still managed to be shocked by two women kissing.
***
The controversy surrounding Women’s Barracks was expected. So too the result: It became a bestseller.
By today’s standards, the sexual encounters depicted here are rather tame. What is surprising is the frankness. For the most part, Torres’s depiction of the various sexual relationships of her characters is straightforward and judgment free. As a result, this has a feel of truth that helps ground some of the overly dramatic passages.
At the time this came out, homosexuality was criminalized in many parts of the world. That includes England, where Torres’s story unfolds. Just two years after Women’s Barracks came out, mathematician Alan Turing – who’d helped crack Germany’s Enigma code – was thanked with a conviction of “gross indecency” for his sexual relationship with another man. In this context, Torres comes across as pretty progressive in her views.
Unfortunately, there is an exception, and that is in Torres’s treatment of Ann. In a passage that can only be described as bizarre, Torres turns on Ann – who she had heretofore treated respectfully – and opines that because she was attracted only to women, she lived an “unnatural” and sad life. This tonally jolting section has clouded the legacy of Women’s Barracks as a classic work of gay fiction.
According to later interviews with Torres, this bit of lecturing was imposed upon her by the publisher, who apparently thought it was okay to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships, as long as it included some level of disapprobation. This sounds like an honest explanation, but does not change the fact that this U-turn on Tenor Road detracts from the overall quality.
***
The world as inhabited by humans, and the world as represented in books and films, have always been two very different things. Women’s Barracks tries to bridge that gap. It is not really a masterpiece. It is, in fact, a bit silly and over-the-top at times. Most of the characters are quite young, and with that youth comes extreme emotional lability, in which the only choices are “love” or “death.” The importance of this work is in its willingness to show the world as it is, in all its chaos and complexity; a world where the heart wants what it wants, and is not going to be stopped by anything, be it law or war or social condemnation.
- Tereska Torres, Women’s Baracks
There are few things that make me want to read a book more than the fact it has been banned at some time or another. This trait is not unique to me, but speaks to the human desire to have what is forbidden. Many of the world’s most controversial works of literature have also ended among the ranks of the most famous and bestselling. We’re talking about titles that include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye.
Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks does not have that kind of name recognition. Indeed, I’d never heard of it before, right up until the moment I was sucked into one of the internet’s ubiquitous listicles, which I am constitutionally unable to resist. This particular listicle concerned itself with “cult classics,” and as soon as I learned of Women’s Barracks’s Second World War setting and then-notorious content, my book-ordering finger started to twitch. Then I saw its pulpy, 1950s-era cover, sighed at my own weakness, and purchased it at once.
***
Summarizing the plot of Women’s Barracks is pretty easy for a couple reasons. First, it’s very short, more novella than novel. Second, there is no plot. Instead, this is a series of character portraits and vignettes spanning the Fall of France to the end of World War II. The characters include Claude, an aging beauty with fluid sexuality; Ursula, young, naïve, and under Claude’s spell; Jacqueline, the archetypally entitled aristocrat; Mickey, who is spirited and friendly; and Ann, a helpful and competent companion who also happens to be gay.
Most of the action takes place in the titular barracks, which is set in London, or in the surrounding pubs. The women involved are all French, serving the Free French and Allied cause doing a variety of war work that – in the military calculus of the day – enabled more men to be sent into combat. While the world’s greatest conflict always simmers in the background, the concerns of Torres’s women are more local. They get their drink on, fall in and out of love, and live like the future is only an uncertain possibility.
***
Women’s Barracks is a book that can comfortably be read in one sitting, which is not surprising since it manages to go from 1940 to 1945 in approximately 130 pages. It seldom settles long in one place. For instance, just two pages are needed for one character to escape from France, get to Spain, and then travel to England. Though entire years can pass in a sentence, Torres does stop from time to provide to present a more detailed scene. By the end, the accumulation of moments manages to be rather affecting, and the characters – who are at first pretty superficial – more fully dimensioned.
I would be lying if I said I thought there was even the slightest chance that I would remember and treasure this work forever. But I was engaged in the moments that I spent with it.
***
Women’s Barracks is a semi-autobiographical novel. During the Second World War, Torres worked as a liaison between the Office of War Information and the headquarters of General Charles De Gaulle. After the war, she wrote the book in French, based on her wartime diaries. Her husband – the writer Meyer Levin – translated her effort into English.
Torres herself is the first-person narrator, though we learn precious little about her. Instead, she keeps the focus on her companions. Most of the time, Torres is not even present for the situations she describes, claiming to have learned everything later. This makes her a classic unreliable narrator, but it’s a conceit that’s not too hard to swallow.
***
Women’s Barracks was published in 1950, and received immediate backlash due to its sexual content, including its depiction of same-sex relationships. This outrage – of course – is not surprising. For much of the past two-thousand years, efforts to depict one of the most fundamentally important aspects of humanity have consistently been suppressed on the supposed grounds of decency.
This reality does not make the moral handwringing any less perplexing. The world had just passed through six years of hellfire in which some 75 million people died. Huge armies had grappled to the death. Soldiers had died on the ground, in the air, on the sea, and below it. Men and women and children in the thousands had been herded into gas chambers; others had been executed at the edge of pits, or burned in their houses. Millions more were forced to leave their homes. Entire cities had been flattened by bombs. Terror went from a byproduct of warfare to a goal. The veneer of civilization had been worn away by systematized slaughter, mass sexual assaults, manmade famines, and – at the end – by the splitting of the atom.
Yet, after all this, some still managed to be shocked by two women kissing.
***
The controversy surrounding Women’s Barracks was expected. So too the result: It became a bestseller.
By today’s standards, the sexual encounters depicted here are rather tame. What is surprising is the frankness. For the most part, Torres’s depiction of the various sexual relationships of her characters is straightforward and judgment free. As a result, this has a feel of truth that helps ground some of the overly dramatic passages.
At the time this came out, homosexuality was criminalized in many parts of the world. That includes England, where Torres’s story unfolds. Just two years after Women’s Barracks came out, mathematician Alan Turing – who’d helped crack Germany’s Enigma code – was thanked with a conviction of “gross indecency” for his sexual relationship with another man. In this context, Torres comes across as pretty progressive in her views.
Unfortunately, there is an exception, and that is in Torres’s treatment of Ann. In a passage that can only be described as bizarre, Torres turns on Ann – who she had heretofore treated respectfully – and opines that because she was attracted only to women, she lived an “unnatural” and sad life. This tonally jolting section has clouded the legacy of Women’s Barracks as a classic work of gay fiction.
According to later interviews with Torres, this bit of lecturing was imposed upon her by the publisher, who apparently thought it was okay to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships, as long as it included some level of disapprobation. This sounds like an honest explanation, but does not change the fact that this U-turn on Tenor Road detracts from the overall quality.
***
The world as inhabited by humans, and the world as represented in books and films, have always been two very different things. Women’s Barracks tries to bridge that gap. It is not really a masterpiece. It is, in fact, a bit silly and over-the-top at times. Most of the characters are quite young, and with that youth comes extreme emotional lability, in which the only choices are “love” or “death.” The importance of this work is in its willingness to show the world as it is, in all its chaos and complexity; a world where the heart wants what it wants, and is not going to be stopped by anything, be it law or war or social condemnation.
January 2, 2019
Women's Barracks is the story of 5 young women who have escaped occupied France to join the Free French Army in London. Author Tereska Torrès gives a personal account of the daily lives of this diverse group of women as they live in the barracks on Down Street.
It is very much a product of its time and when it was published in the early 50ies it became quite the sensation. The modern reader will not bat an eye at what then was considered ‘shocking and immoral’, so don’t read it hoping for explicit scenes.
What I liked about it was the historical setting. How the French refugee women coped with life in war time London. The style of the book is heavy on the tell part. Maybe it’s because Torrès kept a diary (although she said she didn’t need it for reference because if was still fresh in her mind when she wrote it) but the narration felt somewhat disconnected. When I say it was a product of its time I meant that lesbian women were still seen as unnatural freaks and to be pitied. I felt that the (straight) author sounded somewhat preachy at times.
But in the back of the book was an interview from 2004 where it becomes apparent that the only way Torrès could get her book published at that time was if her narrative was changed up a bit.
”They were extremely worried about lawsuits over immorality and they felt it would make the book more “serious” if a girl soldier would have a sort of look at what goes on in a more moral vein. She would say, “Oh, I’m sorry. This is so bad. And this is so sad.” And, of course, I didn’t approve of this but Meyer wrote to me from New York to ask if I would mind if he added some narrative lines here and there to satisfy the publisher. And since he told me exactly how he would do it and since it really did not change the story, I said he could go ahead with it.”
She feels uncomfortable with the changes.
” I didn’t moralize at all. Today, I think the narrator is so untrue. She is supposed to be me and even her biography is not mine. She says she comes from a very bourgeois background; my family was a family of Polish Jewish artists who converted to Catholicism before I was born. And I was not allowed to tell my Jewish grandparents in Poland that I was a Catholic.”
Also her original manuscript was written in French and her husband (Meyer) wrote the English translation and started shopping it around in America while she was living in Paris. Even though the translation is literal and still true to the story I feel it suffered because of it.
f/f, m/f
Themes: World War II, London, the Blitz, French refugees, The Gaulle’s Army, boredom, sexual affairs, pregnancy, lesbian pulp.
4 stars
It is very much a product of its time and when it was published in the early 50ies it became quite the sensation. The modern reader will not bat an eye at what then was considered ‘shocking and immoral’, so don’t read it hoping for explicit scenes.
What I liked about it was the historical setting. How the French refugee women coped with life in war time London. The style of the book is heavy on the tell part. Maybe it’s because Torrès kept a diary (although she said she didn’t need it for reference because if was still fresh in her mind when she wrote it) but the narration felt somewhat disconnected. When I say it was a product of its time I meant that lesbian women were still seen as unnatural freaks and to be pitied. I felt that the (straight) author sounded somewhat preachy at times.
But in the back of the book was an interview from 2004 where it becomes apparent that the only way Torrès could get her book published at that time was if her narrative was changed up a bit.
”They were extremely worried about lawsuits over immorality and they felt it would make the book more “serious” if a girl soldier would have a sort of look at what goes on in a more moral vein. She would say, “Oh, I’m sorry. This is so bad. And this is so sad.” And, of course, I didn’t approve of this but Meyer wrote to me from New York to ask if I would mind if he added some narrative lines here and there to satisfy the publisher. And since he told me exactly how he would do it and since it really did not change the story, I said he could go ahead with it.”
She feels uncomfortable with the changes.
” I didn’t moralize at all. Today, I think the narrator is so untrue. She is supposed to be me and even her biography is not mine. She says she comes from a very bourgeois background; my family was a family of Polish Jewish artists who converted to Catholicism before I was born. And I was not allowed to tell my Jewish grandparents in Poland that I was a Catholic.”
Also her original manuscript was written in French and her husband (Meyer) wrote the English translation and started shopping it around in America while she was living in Paris. Even though the translation is literal and still true to the story I feel it suffered because of it.
f/f, m/f
Themes: World War II, London, the Blitz, French refugees, The Gaulle’s Army, boredom, sexual affairs, pregnancy, lesbian pulp.
4 stars
March 22, 2017
This was a difficult book to read. And not because of writing style or writing ability. Nor because it was among the first lesbian books put out. A "based on true events" one at that.
No, the problem was both the distanced nature of the narration, and the subject matter. As in, the book was narrated from the point of view of the writer. Who was both a character in the book, and someone who knew what ultimately happened to everyone. As a character, she was off to the edge, mostly, reporting on the actions of the others. And the subject matter problem? Well . . . one of the early attacks on homosexual activity involves trying to link it to pedophiles. And that, pedophiles, plays a rather large role in the book. Much more so than lesbianism.
War erupts. Many French women escape to England, but wish to help, so they join the army, or whatever the military organization was called. A woman of 34, one of the French woman exiles, uses her advanced experience and alluring nature to attract a 16 old girl into her bed. And molests her. The girl doesn't particularly like it but kept repeating to herself "I adore her." Two other bits of evidence later emerges. Claude, the woman of 34, in the past, had also done the same thing with a young boy. And Claude's attraction to Ursula (the 16 year old) abruptly ends when she realizes that Ursula is no longer a little girl but is now a woman.
Hmm. I was writing this off of notes I had made. Later I call Claude the 40 year old pedophile. Ok, so the older woman is somewhere between 34 and 40.
As I said at the beginning, a difficult book for me to read, mostly read because of its place in the history of lesbian books. I should probably note, I suppose, that the author/narrator was not a lesbian herself. Which may have clouded her judgement of the activities she was witnessing. There were lesbians in the book, and the narrator had a more narrow-minded view of them, despite those lesbians actually involving adult women in adult relationships.
No, the problem was both the distanced nature of the narration, and the subject matter. As in, the book was narrated from the point of view of the writer. Who was both a character in the book, and someone who knew what ultimately happened to everyone. As a character, she was off to the edge, mostly, reporting on the actions of the others. And the subject matter problem? Well . . . one of the early attacks on homosexual activity involves trying to link it to pedophiles. And that, pedophiles, plays a rather large role in the book. Much more so than lesbianism.
War erupts. Many French women escape to England, but wish to help, so they join the army, or whatever the military organization was called. A woman of 34, one of the French woman exiles, uses her advanced experience and alluring nature to attract a 16 old girl into her bed. And molests her. The girl doesn't particularly like it but kept repeating to herself "I adore her." Two other bits of evidence later emerges. Claude, the woman of 34, in the past, had also done the same thing with a young boy. And Claude's attraction to Ursula (the 16 year old) abruptly ends when she realizes that Ursula is no longer a little girl but is now a woman.
Hmm. I was writing this off of notes I had made. Later I call Claude the 40 year old pedophile. Ok, so the older woman is somewhere between 34 and 40.
As I said at the beginning, a difficult book for me to read, mostly read because of its place in the history of lesbian books. I should probably note, I suppose, that the author/narrator was not a lesbian herself. Which may have clouded her judgement of the activities she was witnessing. There were lesbians in the book, and the narrator had a more narrow-minded view of them, despite those lesbians actually involving adult women in adult relationships.
May 23, 2024
BANGER!!!! literally insane that this is a sexy lesbian pulp classic when most of it is about [checks notes] war, however, i do get it. this is a roughly fictionalized publication of tereska torres' real war diaries recounting the women she served alongside & it seems to be fictionalized solely in that she changed the names & some occupations & also snipped herself out altogether lmao
i found this a clear-eyed and unexpectedly tender, precise set of portraits of a bunch of women Going Through It, and it was honestly lovely to be in tereska's head like, observing the people around her and making little theories about them, particularly the lesbians-- it was very touching for me to read someone who was not a lesbian herself like, observing them with such close fondness!-- simply out here trying to understand & hold onto all the people around her during a famously shitty time.
if ur going to read this read the edition with the epilogue interview 50+ later bcs that is truly what made the book for me, not only her arch laughing old woman voice but the reVEALS-- tereska, the woman u were!!!!! call me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i found this a clear-eyed and unexpectedly tender, precise set of portraits of a bunch of women Going Through It, and it was honestly lovely to be in tereska's head like, observing the people around her and making little theories about them, particularly the lesbians-- it was very touching for me to read someone who was not a lesbian herself like, observing them with such close fondness!-- simply out here trying to understand & hold onto all the people around her during a famously shitty time.
if ur going to read this read the edition with the epilogue interview 50+ later bcs that is truly what made the book for me, not only her arch laughing old woman voice but the reVEALS-- tereska, the woman u were!!!!! call me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 17, 2021
This is clearly NOT just a sleazy 1950 piece of soft porn about lesbians in the service, but, rather, a very heartbreaking memoir of French women hoping for a free France. The book delves deeply into the complicated relationships between the various members of the barracks, as they wait four tortured years for the Nazis' stranglehold on their beloved homeland to loosen. The ending of this book is emotionally shattering... it was clearly marketed all wrong in the USA. Loved it!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 12, 2025
I went in expecting a pulp lesbian novel and came away with a fairly candid depictions of sexuality in a homosocial environment. I actually wish that Torrès just committed to writing a memoir instead of exclusively highlighting the sexual and romantic relationships of the women.
I can see why Torrès was upset about this considered a lesbian novel because it's not - not really. We have a few lesbians, but the prominent same-gender encounters featured are among bi women. (And they're bi women who, according to our narrator and the lesbians in the story, aren't 'really' doomed in the same way lesbians are.) The rest of the book focuses on abortion, suicide, loneliness, depression, and the horrors of war.
I'll come back and write a longer review later, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this.
I can see why Torrès was upset about this considered a lesbian novel because it's not - not really. We have a few lesbians, but the prominent same-gender encounters featured are among bi women. (And they're bi women who, according to our narrator and the lesbians in the story, aren't 'really' doomed in the same way lesbians are.) The rest of the book focuses on abortion, suicide, loneliness, depression, and the horrors of war.
I'll come back and write a longer review later, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this.
November 1, 2025
The horniness and horrors of war
August 12, 2022
I enjoyed this, but couldn’t help feeling a little ripped off as it’s far less trashy and far more heteronormative than one might expect. It’s still an enjoyable read though, interesting in its different take on WW2 and quite wistful at times.
December 29, 2021
Torres writes in a "tell rather than show" style that becomes tiring quickly. It's like reading a 200 page news editorial.
December 22, 2022
4.5. Really sad.
November 23, 2012
This book was hailed as the "first lesbian pulp" published in 1950 and selling over 4 million copies, but it is so much more than that. The other "lesbian pulps" I've read have all been by American lesbian authors. This was much more of a continuation of the French literary tradition of just writing about women and their relationships, regardless of gender. The book followed the lives of five French women serving in the armed forces in London during WWII. It was an amazing story. The contrast between the bombs dropping, being in a foreign country, the feeling of the hopelessness of war and the way that affected their relationships and friendships was just fascinating. The women were straight, bi-sexual and lesbians. Despite (at the instance of the American publishers the inclusion of how sad it was to be a lesbian) it was just a wonderfully honest look at the different types of women, all seemed accepted and you just had this feeling that this is how women were. It was simply wonderful. Unlike the later American pulps, none of the lesbians (or bi women) died, went insane or turned straight! It was an interesting and honest look at relationships. The lesbians weren't judged over their need for relationships with women anymore than the straight women were over their need for relationships with men. It reminded me a lot of Collette, and I wasn't surprised to see that the author had been reading Collette just before writing this and that she later went on to write her own novel about Collette and her romances with women. (Which has been translated into English and I shall definitely have to find a copy). It was a lovely book. Character driven and tragic. The parts towards the end when they all get filled with the hope for the future after the end of the war were particularly sad. This is really what I wanted Night watch to be and it wasn't. I can’t stop babbling about how much I loved this I really do want to find other things by this author, and to read her diaries that were published in French. (Oh to have my French just a little better!) Definitely one I'd recommend.
August 27, 2017
I just finished this wonderfully odd book, but it was only after reading the reviews on this page that I learned it was some kind of lesbian genre fiction. I wont challenge that designation but it does feel like publisher marketing grafted onto a novel that defies generalized characterization. The book doesn't convey the impression that Tereska Torres set out to write a piece of genre fiction.
The story follows its characters through extraordinary circumstances. The war has placed them together, at different points in their lives, but largely in search of the same thing. Indeed they seek the answer to life, the universe and the meaning of everything, but they also seek love and companionship. Safety. Physical and mental comfort. They seek to fill their needs with and from each other. The relationship develop naturally, in way simultaneously novel yet easily understood. At times it takes on a pulpy air, but for every instance of seeming male, or lesbian wish fulfillment (with descriptions of perky breasts) there are passages of biting, visceral critique, reminiscent of Trumbo or Elie Wiesel. It is a book almost wholly void of political discourse, yet the consequence of those machinations, existing just off the page, are felt, perhaps just as they were felt by Torres, in the barracks. The war was fought and the war was won, but the cost is indeed terrible.
It is an imperfect book, but it's easy to understand why it continues to be read into the second decade of the twenty first century. It is a book that contains insight and truth about war, human sexuality and the unchanging needs of people. There is depth and ambiguity. And there is honesty. A book such as this will always have have worth.
The story follows its characters through extraordinary circumstances. The war has placed them together, at different points in their lives, but largely in search of the same thing. Indeed they seek the answer to life, the universe and the meaning of everything, but they also seek love and companionship. Safety. Physical and mental comfort. They seek to fill their needs with and from each other. The relationship develop naturally, in way simultaneously novel yet easily understood. At times it takes on a pulpy air, but for every instance of seeming male, or lesbian wish fulfillment (with descriptions of perky breasts) there are passages of biting, visceral critique, reminiscent of Trumbo or Elie Wiesel. It is a book almost wholly void of political discourse, yet the consequence of those machinations, existing just off the page, are felt, perhaps just as they were felt by Torres, in the barracks. The war was fought and the war was won, but the cost is indeed terrible.
It is an imperfect book, but it's easy to understand why it continues to be read into the second decade of the twenty first century. It is a book that contains insight and truth about war, human sexuality and the unchanging needs of people. There is depth and ambiguity. And there is honesty. A book such as this will always have have worth.
October 12, 2016
I read this as a literary novelty...a book so scandalous for its day that it was banned in several states as being pornographic. And one of the the first examples of "lesbian pulp." It is the story of several women in the Free French Army in London during WWII and their mostly amorous adventures--gay, bisexual and straight. I wouldn't call it a riveting read, or in any way shocking by today's standards, but it turned out to be an interesting look at these women's lives. I appreciated the inclusion of the interview at the end, in which the author stated that she didn't intend the book to have such a judgmental overtone; that was something added in the translation to try to appease the censors. By the way, that cover is priceless! If only the book had lived up to it....
November 25, 2012
This book was way better than I expected (mainly because, you know, it has a cheesy cover with salacious promises of lesbian pulp fiction), but it actually was a very heart wrenching book about a group of women stuck together and how they get together and fall apart.
I loved the characters, I felt for them, specially Ursula, and her lowest moments brought tears to my eyes. It's like a little window into the past.
I loved the characters, I felt for them, specially Ursula, and her lowest moments brought tears to my eyes. It's like a little window into the past.
June 26, 2014
I'm impressed by this book from the historical standpoint-- it depicts an unguarded portrayal of the women in the French Freedom movement in World War 2. Although it mostly focuses on their love affairs and not the war, it gives interesting insight to morality of the time period (particularly when you read about changes made to the manuscript for American audiences.)
April 13, 2020
Women's Barracks was written in 1950 and is a diary of sorts by French author, Tereska Torrès, describing the lives of French women who escaped to England on the German invasion of France and who joined the Free French forces. The group lived in a barracks in London. The story describes their lives and relationships of the women, including love affairs, lesbian relationships, etc. Now having provided this brief synopsis, I have to say that the stories are gently told and not at all graphic or titillating.
Torres was one of the girls who formed part of the group and she talks about the others' lives. It covers the period from the invasion of France until the D-Day invasion when the group was basically disbanded and many returned to France to continue to help the war effort.
It's an interesting story. The women cover the gamut, from young inexperienced girls to older, more experienced (both in life and sexually) women. We follow a number of them as the experience the war; young, inexperienced Ursula who falls under the influence of more experienced, worldly Claude, a women who moves from man to woman all the while still in love with her husband. There is Ann, a tough, independent individual, who quickly advances up the rank. There is glamorous Jacqueline who suffers from a back injury and falls for a French Captain who loves her but wants to remain faithful to his wife back in France. It's a varied, interesting group of women that Torres grows close to during the war.
War is always in the background; the bombing of London, the troops waiting for an invasion and biding their time in London and around England. It's a rich, interesting story. Torres is credited with writing the first pulp dealing with lesbian issues. The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials identified it as an example of books promoting moral degeneracy but I didn't find that at all. It's a book about relationships and worth checking out. (4 stars)
Torres was one of the girls who formed part of the group and she talks about the others' lives. It covers the period from the invasion of France until the D-Day invasion when the group was basically disbanded and many returned to France to continue to help the war effort.
It's an interesting story. The women cover the gamut, from young inexperienced girls to older, more experienced (both in life and sexually) women. We follow a number of them as the experience the war; young, inexperienced Ursula who falls under the influence of more experienced, worldly Claude, a women who moves from man to woman all the while still in love with her husband. There is Ann, a tough, independent individual, who quickly advances up the rank. There is glamorous Jacqueline who suffers from a back injury and falls for a French Captain who loves her but wants to remain faithful to his wife back in France. It's a varied, interesting group of women that Torres grows close to during the war.
War is always in the background; the bombing of London, the troops waiting for an invasion and biding their time in London and around England. It's a rich, interesting story. Torres is credited with writing the first pulp dealing with lesbian issues. The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials identified it as an example of books promoting moral degeneracy but I didn't find that at all. It's a book about relationships and worth checking out. (4 stars)
January 6, 2020
Credited as the book that launched the lesbian pulp-fiction genre in America, this is a fictionalized account of the author’s time in the Free French Forces in London in WW2. It’s a bit soap opera-ish for my taste, and the "pornographic" sex scenes are of course pretty tame by modern standards. Still, it’s more evidence that “pulp” doesn’t mean “bad writing”, and that even in 1950, you could find a book where lesbians were portrayed as human beings with emotions rather than psychotic man-hating sex fiends.
November 13, 2012
Women's Barracks... yeah, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I read this and honestly, I was embarrassed to check it out of the library because of the lurid, cheesy cover. I was curious because I like to study lesbian history and I read this kind of stuff with an analytic and evaluating mind. This books is a reprint of 1950's pulp fiction, and in this case, it's an actual true story french novel. I knew that back in the 50's LGBT people had to live deeply in the closet and so if you were gay or lesbian, it was difficult to even know if there were others like you. Lesbianism wasn't talked or written about openly, and apparently the only sources telling of its existence at that time were these kind of cheap pulp fiction novels. I was curious what they were like, and wondered if they had any literary value besides cheap entertainment. In retrospect, this book probably appealed to the prurient interest, or at least the readers' prurient fantasies, though it isn't even on a soft porn level. But in the 50's, it was probably shocking.
So this book is supposed to have a "lesbian theme." When I finished it, I really disagreed with that statement, because even though there actually are 3 lesbian characters, they are not the main characters at all. The book is narrated by Tereska Torres, who was stationed with many other women of the French Free Forces in England in the women's barracks. Most of the action in this book consists of who these women sleep with because hooking up with other soldiers is all they are interested in. Apparently Tereska was a great listener, because she knows lots of detail about the other women, even as she narrates scenes in which she was not present at all. She talks about the inner thoughts and feelings of her comrades with more knowledge than is usually possible. Mostly she talks about poor little Ursula, who lied about her age to sign up for the Free French Forces, (which were similar to our WACS), who matures and becomes a woman by finally being brave enough to have sex with a man. Ursula had sex with one of the women at first, but then felt guilty, yet was struck with a huge crush on that woman who proceeded to totally ignore her. Thankfully the author says that woman wasn't even a real lesbian, because she slept with men just as easily. I was somewhat relieved about that, because if this character had been the lesbian example, that would have cast lesbians in a really inaccurate and bad light.
The real lesbians in this book deal with the usual lesbian relationship intrigues. Interestingly, the narrator sees them dealing with the same problems the straight women encounter - seeking true love. Not everything she mentions about them is judgmental. None of the lesbians in this book go crazy, or kill themselves, which is what I had heard always happened to them in pulp fiction. But the narrator does pass some severe judgment on them, that they are lonely, sad, unsatisfied, never smile, and the that only male company they keep is that of "pederasts". (Pederasts are men who have homosexual relationships with young boys.) She describes one of the older lesbian officers in unflattering words as having the air of a "little old man." And she judges the two younger lesbians' relationship as unsatisfying because one of them is apparently so frustrated because she just can't make the other one pregnant. These two then proceed to have a threesome with her brother (yes, so realistic) and when he fails to get her girlfriend pregnant, they drift apart. Alas. So basically, here we have see some severe judgment of lesbian relationships: they must be unsatisfying because they can't get each other pregnant. This isn't the main story of the book, but probably the most saliva-producing for the uptight 1950's reader.
Apparently, even though the straight women were quite liberated and made the independent choice to join the army and serve their country, they could only become "real women" once they had sex with men. This is the case not only for pathetic little Ursula but also for fun loving, easy going, confident Mickey. Mostly the book is about their sexual relationships and how they try to get married. I found this message ridiculous and reading about their efforts boring, but, like I said, my primary goal was to evaluate how lesbians are portrayed in pulp fiction.
The book has some redeeming value because it is anti-war. In the end, it is pretty sad when certain characters die. Ursula's boyfriend in particular was a deep thinker and had great ideas about how life could be better after the war. Also, he was a Polish Jew, so at least this book was not anti-semitic, just misogynistic and homophobic. Three stars, because it is probably has value as a literary marker and sign of the time. Its messages are questionable but exactly what you wold expect.
So this book is supposed to have a "lesbian theme." When I finished it, I really disagreed with that statement, because even though there actually are 3 lesbian characters, they are not the main characters at all. The book is narrated by Tereska Torres, who was stationed with many other women of the French Free Forces in England in the women's barracks. Most of the action in this book consists of who these women sleep with because hooking up with other soldiers is all they are interested in. Apparently Tereska was a great listener, because she knows lots of detail about the other women, even as she narrates scenes in which she was not present at all. She talks about the inner thoughts and feelings of her comrades with more knowledge than is usually possible. Mostly she talks about poor little Ursula, who lied about her age to sign up for the Free French Forces, (which were similar to our WACS), who matures and becomes a woman by finally being brave enough to have sex with a man. Ursula had sex with one of the women at first, but then felt guilty, yet was struck with a huge crush on that woman who proceeded to totally ignore her. Thankfully the author says that woman wasn't even a real lesbian, because she slept with men just as easily. I was somewhat relieved about that, because if this character had been the lesbian example, that would have cast lesbians in a really inaccurate and bad light.
The real lesbians in this book deal with the usual lesbian relationship intrigues. Interestingly, the narrator sees them dealing with the same problems the straight women encounter - seeking true love. Not everything she mentions about them is judgmental. None of the lesbians in this book go crazy, or kill themselves, which is what I had heard always happened to them in pulp fiction. But the narrator does pass some severe judgment on them, that they are lonely, sad, unsatisfied, never smile, and the that only male company they keep is that of "pederasts". (Pederasts are men who have homosexual relationships with young boys.) She describes one of the older lesbian officers in unflattering words as having the air of a "little old man." And she judges the two younger lesbians' relationship as unsatisfying because one of them is apparently so frustrated because she just can't make the other one pregnant. These two then proceed to have a threesome with her brother (yes, so realistic) and when he fails to get her girlfriend pregnant, they drift apart. Alas. So basically, here we have see some severe judgment of lesbian relationships: they must be unsatisfying because they can't get each other pregnant. This isn't the main story of the book, but probably the most saliva-producing for the uptight 1950's reader.
Apparently, even though the straight women were quite liberated and made the independent choice to join the army and serve their country, they could only become "real women" once they had sex with men. This is the case not only for pathetic little Ursula but also for fun loving, easy going, confident Mickey. Mostly the book is about their sexual relationships and how they try to get married. I found this message ridiculous and reading about their efforts boring, but, like I said, my primary goal was to evaluate how lesbians are portrayed in pulp fiction.
The book has some redeeming value because it is anti-war. In the end, it is pretty sad when certain characters die. Ursula's boyfriend in particular was a deep thinker and had great ideas about how life could be better after the war. Also, he was a Polish Jew, so at least this book was not anti-semitic, just misogynistic and homophobic. Three stars, because it is probably has value as a literary marker and sign of the time. Its messages are questionable but exactly what you wold expect.
June 11, 2012
The thing that struck me most about Women’s Barracks was how modern and dated it felt in equal measure. Modern in the sense that the setting, as the title suggests, exists away from the influence of men (all fighting in the war), a device that chick-lit has done to death in recent times eg. Sex and the City. Yet any hint of modern day sensibilities come crashing down with outmoded language. At times, comically to the modern reader, “gay” is used to mean “happy” but understandably stands out as an example of how language has changed. More jarring was the liberal use of “invert” as a descriptive term for lesbianism in the narrators more judgemental moments (this is explained by an interview with the author Torres. She clarifies that these lines were requested in the English translation as an attempt to appease any moral outrage that might arise from a book all about lesbians – Torres herself says she never held such disapproving views.)
While this 1950 book is undoubtedly ground breaking and laid the foundation for the pulp fiction that was to come it’s incredible how, from a modern point of view, the narrative conforms to the status quo. For example the main characters are heterosexual with bisexual sensibilities. The self-identifying lesbian in the novel are side players. I felt the love triangle between Ann, Petite and Lee could have been more at the forefront of the story, yet isn’t. This is perhaps a sign that this idea was to boundary pushing even in a novel that tested perception of lesbianism? Interestingly the heterosexual relationships within the story are played out in traditional fashion of this time, namely actions outside of the traditional are punished in some way. In other words pre-marital sex leads death, grief, suicides or unwanted pregnancies. The equilibrium is always restored.
Putting aside all these criticisms the book was written in 1950 where a sexual revolution was but a futuristic event. This novel should very much be read in that context, for that you should definitely read the foreword and afterword if you are reading the FEMME FATALES edition.
While I enjoyed the book, it was certainly far from perfect. That being said I will be seeking out more from the pulp genre.
While this 1950 book is undoubtedly ground breaking and laid the foundation for the pulp fiction that was to come it’s incredible how, from a modern point of view, the narrative conforms to the status quo. For example the main characters are heterosexual with bisexual sensibilities. The self-identifying lesbian in the novel are side players. I felt the love triangle between Ann, Petite and Lee could have been more at the forefront of the story, yet isn’t. This is perhaps a sign that this idea was to boundary pushing even in a novel that tested perception of lesbianism? Interestingly the heterosexual relationships within the story are played out in traditional fashion of this time, namely actions outside of the traditional are punished in some way. In other words pre-marital sex leads death, grief, suicides or unwanted pregnancies. The equilibrium is always restored.
Putting aside all these criticisms the book was written in 1950 where a sexual revolution was but a futuristic event. This novel should very much be read in that context, for that you should definitely read the foreword and afterword if you are reading the FEMME FATALES edition.
While I enjoyed the book, it was certainly far from perfect. That being said I will be seeking out more from the pulp genre.
September 25, 2012
This was a surprisingly good read. Naturally, I was attracted by the title and the cover, but how was I to know that the story would be good as well? Lesbian pulp is usually one of those things that you skim to the juicy parts and then stop reading because the lesbian usually dies in the end. This book is different. It has some very realistic depictions of all of the main characters, who are all very different. I especially liked the conversation that the narrator has with Ann (the Lesbian) and the differences between women who are lesbians and those who sleep with women occasionally but do not consider themselves lebians. The book doesn't center completely around this idea of sexual identity, there is also a very strong story of the question of war. Most of the characters in the book are convinced that the end of World War II will put an end to war altogether. As the book ends, the optimism they have of post-WWII Europe has begun to wane.[return][return]Women's Barracks was the first lesbian themed pulp to hit the US. It was published in 1950. It was also the first pulp fiction that made it big. It sold over 2 million copies in the first 5 years. Wow.
May 28, 2018
This book surprised me: rather than being some sort of scandalous, poorly-written lesbian pulp novel, it's very much a product of the "thinly fictionalized account of women's lives and sexual experiences during World War II" genre. I'm thinking, for example, of Mary Wesley's Camomile Lawn, which caused such a scandal when she published it - World War II is, after all, the "grandparent generation" for many of us, and the idea of people screwing like bunnies during wartime isn't really congruent with that. This one, however, came out very shortly after the war, and included some detailed lesbian (and bisexual) affairs, as well as unwed pregnancies, illegitimate children, etc. The writing is actually pretty good - it's a very readable book rather than "great literature," but it's nowhere near as awkward as e.g. The Camomile Lawn. At the insistence of the American publishers, there was a bunch of moralizing thrown in about lesbianism and promiscuity, which bumped this down a star for me, but over all, a really fun read, albeit not what I was expecting.
July 27, 2015
I know this book is representative of retro lesbian fiction and I'm sure it was something for the time it came out and had its market, but classic with historical value doesn't always translate to well written.
I did listen to the whole book, but I found many of the characters tedious in who they are and the writing style was very disconnected. The narrator is a person telling a story years later after knowing all the events after the fact. However, in the telling, she rambles from one character to another with no clear focus and I found it both boring and distracting.
As far as any lesbian content, it's very vague really. Some of the characters exhibit certain tendencies, however, it's kept rather vague. I can see how a lesbian reading this at original publication time would have loved it or identified.
Still though, it was interesting on the level of getting a glimpse into a certain time period in history and how women got along in it during war.
I did listen to the whole book, but I found many of the characters tedious in who they are and the writing style was very disconnected. The narrator is a person telling a story years later after knowing all the events after the fact. However, in the telling, she rambles from one character to another with no clear focus and I found it both boring and distracting.
As far as any lesbian content, it's very vague really. Some of the characters exhibit certain tendencies, however, it's kept rather vague. I can see how a lesbian reading this at original publication time would have loved it or identified.
Still though, it was interesting on the level of getting a glimpse into a certain time period in history and how women got along in it during war.
April 26, 2016
Anyone that reads lesbian pulp fiction will know and be pretty bored of the over the top dramatic endings forced on stories that were otherwise very entertaining. Due to censorship laws at the time no LGBT person was allowed to "live happily ever after" hence the plethora of bad endings to good stories (or, less often, some interesting cliff hangers)
Women's Barracks is a highly entertaining break from that. It's just honest. Honest and funny and sweet and heart breaking all at once.
As if you need any more incentive just read it so you can be seen reading it in public. It's a damned shame book covers aren't so sassy anymore.
Women's Barracks is a highly entertaining break from that. It's just honest. Honest and funny and sweet and heart breaking all at once.
As if you need any more incentive just read it so you can be seen reading it in public. It's a damned shame book covers aren't so sassy anymore.
March 29, 2009
1950's pulp fiction is so much fun, particularly given that what passes for racy or titillating for the time doesn't seem all that risque today. Although it's called a novel, it's actually more of a reworked memoir, as the author is the named narrator in the book and it is based on a diary she kept while living in a barracks during WWII. The characters and drama are quite interesting, though the over-all narrative thread is not as satisfying as what I would expect from an actual novel. Still, the book is quite entertaining on the whole and well worth reading.
May 12, 2015
I was prepared to place this in historical context to appreciate it, but it turned out to be a solid story all on its own. Of course, the fates of some of the women were decreed by contemporary morality when it came to literature, but the interview with the author that was included in this edition addressed that, among other things. It was much more well-rounded, and tender, than I was expecting.
May 6, 2024
(Full review here: https://www.sgn.org/story.php?ch=arts...)
Content warning: suicide, self-harm, pedophilia, sexual assault
When I picked up Women's Barracks, with its sexy, lingerie-clad soldiers exchanging sultry looks under heavy lashes, I was expecting a fun romp through the first Lesbian pulp fiction published in America. I wanted chain-smoking vixens and swaggering butches, maybe punching a Nazi or two before consummating their forbidden love with a shag in the bomb shelter.
This is not that.
This was sad, unsettling, unnerving, and (did I mention?) so sad. It was also real to the experience of Queer women in the 1940s and, if that doesn't give it away, I would like to emphasize again: it's a bummer.
To summarize, Tereska Torres, the author and semifictionalized narrator, joins the Free French Forces in London, where she is put in a room, dubbed the "Virgin's Room," with a few other girls. The rest of the story generally follows their romantic affairs (Queer and straight) throughout the war.
One woman becomes a pedophile because she had an abortion. Another attempts suicide and permanently injures herself after being assaulted for years by her guardians — but don't worry, because, in the words of our narrator, she only did it out of "a need for drama." Finally, a pregnant woman takes her own life days after the war has ended.
When the narrator was not being an incel, I did find myself pitying her from the parts of my younger, closeted self that related to how she was speaking. While Torres did not identify as Queer during her lifetime — and married two men — she spends paragraphs detailing the bodies of her friends, the exact shape of their breasts, and the curves of their hips. She lingers lovingly on how they look as they lie naked in front of fires, their glowing eyes, and the softness of their skin. Over and over again she writes how kissable her friend's lips are: Jacqueline's are "as soft to the eyes as they would be to kiss," and Mickey's are "constantly ready to be kissed."
Her descriptions of men are... not that. She focuses on their clothes, the stripes indicating rank, and such details as that one didn't take his shirt off during sex. The physical description we get at most is that one is "tall" — coincidentally the same answer a closeted teenage me gave when asked what I looked for in men.
More tellingly, none of the women really want to have sex with men. When they do, it's almost out of embarrassment that they haven't, something to check off the list so they can become "a real woman." In their liaisons with men, they're thinking of their women friends, and how sleeping with a man will make them closer to their women friends or more like them.
The most beautiful woman of the group, Jacqueline, comes the closest to lust. She's deeply infatuated with a man, but it's because he's married and unattainable. She treats it as a game in which she wishes to conquer said man, and, when she finally gets into a long-term relationship with a different, also married man, she's delighted he doesn't want to have sex with her, because, while she enjoyed the chase, she doesn't want to have sex with him either.
This is all as is to be expected, according to Torres, who also rejected reviewers describing her book as Queer literature because "only one and a half of them can be considered Lesbian." Thinking about your women friends while forcing yourself to have sex with men, dwelling on their kissable lips, choosing unattainable men to fantasize about, thinking of sex with men as a game (at most gymnastics), and believing it natural that only women would be capable of having tender, enjoyable sexual encounters... that's how straight women think, right?
Content warning: suicide, self-harm, pedophilia, sexual assault
When I picked up Women's Barracks, with its sexy, lingerie-clad soldiers exchanging sultry looks under heavy lashes, I was expecting a fun romp through the first Lesbian pulp fiction published in America. I wanted chain-smoking vixens and swaggering butches, maybe punching a Nazi or two before consummating their forbidden love with a shag in the bomb shelter.
This is not that.
This was sad, unsettling, unnerving, and (did I mention?) so sad. It was also real to the experience of Queer women in the 1940s and, if that doesn't give it away, I would like to emphasize again: it's a bummer.
To summarize, Tereska Torres, the author and semifictionalized narrator, joins the Free French Forces in London, where she is put in a room, dubbed the "Virgin's Room," with a few other girls. The rest of the story generally follows their romantic affairs (Queer and straight) throughout the war.
One woman becomes a pedophile because she had an abortion. Another attempts suicide and permanently injures herself after being assaulted for years by her guardians — but don't worry, because, in the words of our narrator, she only did it out of "a need for drama." Finally, a pregnant woman takes her own life days after the war has ended.
When the narrator was not being an incel, I did find myself pitying her from the parts of my younger, closeted self that related to how she was speaking. While Torres did not identify as Queer during her lifetime — and married two men — she spends paragraphs detailing the bodies of her friends, the exact shape of their breasts, and the curves of their hips. She lingers lovingly on how they look as they lie naked in front of fires, their glowing eyes, and the softness of their skin. Over and over again she writes how kissable her friend's lips are: Jacqueline's are "as soft to the eyes as they would be to kiss," and Mickey's are "constantly ready to be kissed."
Her descriptions of men are... not that. She focuses on their clothes, the stripes indicating rank, and such details as that one didn't take his shirt off during sex. The physical description we get at most is that one is "tall" — coincidentally the same answer a closeted teenage me gave when asked what I looked for in men.
More tellingly, none of the women really want to have sex with men. When they do, it's almost out of embarrassment that they haven't, something to check off the list so they can become "a real woman." In their liaisons with men, they're thinking of their women friends, and how sleeping with a man will make them closer to their women friends or more like them.
The most beautiful woman of the group, Jacqueline, comes the closest to lust. She's deeply infatuated with a man, but it's because he's married and unattainable. She treats it as a game in which she wishes to conquer said man, and, when she finally gets into a long-term relationship with a different, also married man, she's delighted he doesn't want to have sex with her, because, while she enjoyed the chase, she doesn't want to have sex with him either.
This is all as is to be expected, according to Torres, who also rejected reviewers describing her book as Queer literature because "only one and a half of them can be considered Lesbian." Thinking about your women friends while forcing yourself to have sex with men, dwelling on their kissable lips, choosing unattainable men to fantasize about, thinking of sex with men as a game (at most gymnastics), and believing it natural that only women would be capable of having tender, enjoyable sexual encounters... that's how straight women think, right?
March 11, 2018
This book gave me a whole range of different feelings. I picked this book up with a number of expectations, most of which were shot down. I believed this to be a self-indulgent book about lesbian antics in the Free France forces, that had very little sensibility and was mostly a pulp novel that would be easy to finish.
For my first expectation, we read the narrator's name just ONCE in the entirety of the book: this is indicative of how this is NOT the narrator's story, but how she gives voice to the women she is writing about instead.
For the 'lesbian antics' element, I was again misled by prejudices. There are very few characters in this novel who are lesbian, and more who are experimental/bisexual. The 'sad' lesbians in this book are given a very pale, melancholic light, and are mostly looked upon with pity (in reading an interview with the author, she explained that one agreement for publishing the book was that the editor added in these numerous pitying sentences and observations, because otherwise, the book would have been too 'immoral' for Americans at the time to handle).
I was also very surprised by the elements of care and thought that went into this book. There was a lot of pensive, careful ideas that were touched upon in this book - they could have been touched on a lot more, but that was not the point of this book. This book was meant to make everybody see that women are beings of their own and that they can question the morality of war without needing men to tell them how to do it.
Whilst this is the case, the varying levels of success are hard to gauge. Every single character in this novel is led and influenced by at least one man (and in some circumstances, to fatal results), which roughly challenges the idea of female autonomy that this book was striving for. Indeed, the first words of the introduction to this books are 'My husband tells me I ought to write my memoirs...'. Who was she writing this for? Seeing as this novel is based on the diaries that she wrote during the war before she was married or attached to any man, one can argue that they were purely for her. Another argument would say otherwise.
I suppose the crux of the matter is, this book is the 1940s 'Well of Loneliness'. It considered the same issues of women in wartime and beyond, and even faced the same prejudices and difficulties that Radclyffe Hall faced: lawsuits and bans, and cries of 'immorality, filth, and perversion.'
One can only admire the steps that were taken in that leap of time: it wasn't very much, but baby steps can make miles.
If anything, this book is an interesting read for the historical context. It was an insight into French female forces in London that I wasn't aware of. Whilst it isn't entirely encouraging feminist literature, it comes a long way from what there was on offer and should be read to help form a timeline of the lesbian literature we can find out there.
For my first expectation, we read the narrator's name just ONCE in the entirety of the book: this is indicative of how this is NOT the narrator's story, but how she gives voice to the women she is writing about instead.
For the 'lesbian antics' element, I was again misled by prejudices. There are very few characters in this novel who are lesbian, and more who are experimental/bisexual. The 'sad' lesbians in this book are given a very pale, melancholic light, and are mostly looked upon with pity (in reading an interview with the author, she explained that one agreement for publishing the book was that the editor added in these numerous pitying sentences and observations, because otherwise, the book would have been too 'immoral' for Americans at the time to handle).
I was also very surprised by the elements of care and thought that went into this book. There was a lot of pensive, careful ideas that were touched upon in this book - they could have been touched on a lot more, but that was not the point of this book. This book was meant to make everybody see that women are beings of their own and that they can question the morality of war without needing men to tell them how to do it.
Whilst this is the case, the varying levels of success are hard to gauge. Every single character in this novel is led and influenced by at least one man (and in some circumstances, to fatal results), which roughly challenges the idea of female autonomy that this book was striving for. Indeed, the first words of the introduction to this books are 'My husband tells me I ought to write my memoirs...'. Who was she writing this for? Seeing as this novel is based on the diaries that she wrote during the war before she was married or attached to any man, one can argue that they were purely for her. Another argument would say otherwise.
I suppose the crux of the matter is, this book is the 1940s 'Well of Loneliness'. It considered the same issues of women in wartime and beyond, and even faced the same prejudices and difficulties that Radclyffe Hall faced: lawsuits and bans, and cries of 'immorality, filth, and perversion.'
One can only admire the steps that were taken in that leap of time: it wasn't very much, but baby steps can make miles.
If anything, this book is an interesting read for the historical context. It was an insight into French female forces in London that I wasn't aware of. Whilst it isn't entirely encouraging feminist literature, it comes a long way from what there was on offer and should be read to help form a timeline of the lesbian literature we can find out there.
March 6, 2024
Not really lesbian pulp at all. A young French woman serving in the Free French force in England observes the other women serving with her and imagines their inner lives based on what she sees and what they confess to her. There are a few lesbian relationships but they are not the focus and I think really more time is spent on heterosexual activities and preoccupations. There's not a lot of pulp sleaze in here but she does describe their bodies and their youth in a detailed and objectifying way, maybe because that is something that would make the book sell, I don't really know.
I was expecting a sleazy, poorly written dramafest but it was more like a quietly sad diary where the diarist refuses to write about herself and instead imagines what everyone else around her is going through. She sometimes adds commentary about how dismayed and sad she is over the affairs of others and how she has to try really hard to believe genuine love between men and women is possible.
I actually recommend this if you're interested in World War II because it's a peek into the minds of the young people in Europe and what they tried to believe in - that after the war, a better world was coming, despite all the horror and death. It's also worth reading if you'd like to know more about how the hetero author, and perhaps the rest of the "straight world" perceived lesbians and bisexual women before the 70s came and we all got loud and proud.
I was expecting a sleazy, poorly written dramafest but it was more like a quietly sad diary where the diarist refuses to write about herself and instead imagines what everyone else around her is going through. She sometimes adds commentary about how dismayed and sad she is over the affairs of others and how she has to try really hard to believe genuine love between men and women is possible.
I actually recommend this if you're interested in World War II because it's a peek into the minds of the young people in Europe and what they tried to believe in - that after the war, a better world was coming, despite all the horror and death. It's also worth reading if you'd like to know more about how the hetero author, and perhaps the rest of the "straight world" perceived lesbians and bisexual women before the 70s came and we all got loud and proud.
January 7, 2025
The Women’s Barracks is a compelling historical fiction that offers a vivid portrayal of women's lives during World War II.. The novel not only explores themes of survival, loyalty, and the psychological toll of war, but it also provides an honest representation of lesbian relationships, shedding light on the complexities of female identity during a turbulent period.
One of the most striking aspects of the novel is how it reflects the author’s own experiences during the war, offering a deeply personal insight into the daily challenges faced by a group of women working closely together in the confines of a military barracks. Their individual stories are as unique as their backgrounds.. yet they are united by the shared experience of wartime service.
I found the novel thoughtfully examines how proximity and shared struggle can shape emotional connections between people. The way relationships develop under such intense circumstances is both poignant and revealing. “Love (or connection) by close proximity or shared experiences” is an interesting idea
A particularly heartbreaking part of the story is the portrayal of Ursula, a sixteen-year-old girl whose emotional neglect and search for deeper connection with others is profoundly moving.. we all share that desire to make a deep connection with someone beyond the needs of our bodies.
One of the most striking aspects of the novel is how it reflects the author’s own experiences during the war, offering a deeply personal insight into the daily challenges faced by a group of women working closely together in the confines of a military barracks. Their individual stories are as unique as their backgrounds.. yet they are united by the shared experience of wartime service.
I found the novel thoughtfully examines how proximity and shared struggle can shape emotional connections between people. The way relationships develop under such intense circumstances is both poignant and revealing. “Love (or connection) by close proximity or shared experiences” is an interesting idea
A particularly heartbreaking part of the story is the portrayal of Ursula, a sixteen-year-old girl whose emotional neglect and search for deeper connection with others is profoundly moving.. we all share that desire to make a deep connection with someone beyond the needs of our bodies.
August 6, 2017
I actually own a physical copy of this book! It's from 1951! I've been too afraid to read it, though, since it's fragile. But the other week I was surprised and delighted to see this as one of the available titles on a local library's ebook resource. I had to check it out at once.
I'm glad I ended up reading the ebook, because there's an interview with the author at the end which was quite interesting. I was gratified to learn that the American publishers had made her give the narrator a judgmental tone when it came to... well, I think it was only for the lesbianism. Which was portrayed much as one would expect from this era. This is considered the first lesbian pulp, after all. Though the topic certainly doesn't take front seat. Much like the only other lesbian pulp I've read, The Girls in 3-B, there was plenty of tiresome heterosexuality, as well. Though Women's Barracks had a handful of bi and lesbian characters, it was kind of a quantity-not-quality situation The Girls in 3-B showed its lesbian relationship in a much more positive light.
Tereska Torrès mentions in the interview at the end that her actual war diaries had been published... but only in France. I'd love to read them, mais je lis seulement un peu français. Sigh.
I'm glad I ended up reading the ebook, because there's an interview with the author at the end which was quite interesting. I was gratified to learn that the American publishers had made her give the narrator a judgmental tone when it came to... well, I think it was only for the lesbianism. Which was portrayed much as one would expect from this era. This is considered the first lesbian pulp, after all. Though the topic certainly doesn't take front seat. Much like the only other lesbian pulp I've read, The Girls in 3-B, there was plenty of tiresome heterosexuality, as well. Though Women's Barracks had a handful of bi and lesbian characters, it was kind of a quantity-not-quality situation The Girls in 3-B showed its lesbian relationship in a much more positive light.
Tereska Torrès mentions in the interview at the end that her actual war diaries had been published... but only in France. I'd love to read them, mais je lis seulement un peu français. Sigh.
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