Wednesday, 24 September 2025, at 10am BST/GMT+1
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Overlooked Occupiers: Women, Family, and the Home in Occupied Germany and Japan
Women are often overlooked as occupiers when it comes to interrogating the post-Second World War occupations of Japan and Germany, else their role in the occupation power dynamic is little understood. Yet many women participated in these occupations from varied Allied nations. This neglect is especially apparent with the wives of occupation soldiers and personnel who travelled to the occupied zones, along with their children.
In this paper, Dr Christine De Matos will consider the less visible occupation space, the requisitioned or constructed homes for occupier families, in both occupied Germany (US and British zones) and Japan (US and British Commonwealth areas). The home was part of the private rather than public sphere of occupation, yet operated as an integral extension of the latter, especially through the employment of occupied domestic workers. Alison Blunt (1999) has written of the European colonial project that women’s “domestic roles reproduced imperial power relations on a household scale and the political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of the home”, and this was replicated within the contexts of both occupied Germany and Japan. Dr De Matos will question what, if we take a comparative approach across these occupations, a study of the home, women, and families might reveal about the shape of military occupation, and of the enactment of occupation power infused with gendered, ‘raced’, and classed paradigms.
About the Speaker
Dr Christine De Matos is an adjunct researcher in the School of Arts and Sciences at The University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney. She uses gender, “race” and class to elucidate the power dynamics of the occupier-occupied relationship in occupied Japan and Germany. Her publications include: Imposing Peace and Prosperity: Australia, Social Justice and Labour Reform in Occupied Japan 1945-1949 (ASP, 2008); Occupying the ‘Other’: Australia and Military Occupations from Japan to Iraq (co-edited with Robin Gerster, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), Gender, Power, and Military Occupations: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945 (co-edited with Rowena Ward, Routledge, 2012), and Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied (co-edited with Mark E. Caprio, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Recent publications can be found in Histories (2024) and The International History Review (2024), along with a co-edited special issue of Labor History on “Gender, War and Coerced Labor” (2023). She is very excited that her research has been used to help create a fictional character in Chloe Adams’ 2025 novel on occupied Japan.