Shaven women were women humiliated for wartime collaboration during or after a war by having their hair shaved off from the 1920s onwards.
Precedents Shaving off women's hair was an ancient punishment in many cultures - examples occur in the Bible, in ancient Germany, among the Visigoths, in a Carolingian capitulary dating to 805 and against adulterous women in the Middle Ages. After the Tour de Nesle affair Philip IV's three daughters in law were convicted of adultery and had their heads shaved. In the 11 July 1682 ordinance against the Roma entitled "Declaration against vagabonds and people called Bohenmians and those who give them shelter", Jean-Baptiste Colbert condemned - even without a crime - men to the galleys in perpetuity and women to have their heads shaved. This was to prevent the men being easily recruited as troops for nobles revolting against royal authority. Women who returned to this life after being shaved were whipped and banished from France. Whatever the context, the punishment always had a marked sexual connotation and aimed to shame the victim, and again make her the property of the national community by purifying her and inflicting a public 'mark' on her. Shaving was felt to be all the more punitive in an era when appearance held more importance; symbolically it was equally used when the shaven woman was held to have sinned through her powers of seduction and remained visible for several months.
1918-1943
France and Belgium At the end of the First World War the French soldier Ephraïm Grenadou mentioned suspected female collaborators in the departments of the Nord in his memoirs:
When we arrived in that area, they were settling their accounts for old quarrels during the German occupation. They cut good women's hair. This is the only evidence of such a punishment there and remains subject to confirmation. though it is reliably attested to in Belgium in the same period.
Germany The first such public shavings were in the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s. Part of Germany was occupied by the French and Belgian armies and relations began between them and German women. Several local women were shaved as punishment, with the practice continuing into the 1930s. Posters were also sometimes put up identifying women who had had relations with the enemy. When the Nazis seized power in Germany their concern with "pure-race Germans" marrying "foreigners" and thus defiling the Aryan race led to the Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935 "for the protection of German blood and German honour". These forbade marriage between Jews and "nationals of German or related blood" and even between "good Germans" and Black people or Gypsies. Violation of these laws was punishable by prison and/or the woman involved having their heads shaved, or even death. A Nazi ordnance of 30 January 1940 forbade sexual relations between Aryan women and non-Aryans and made head-shaving a means of repression, but a circular of 13 October 1941 by Martin Bormann forbade that public punishment, fearing its negative reception in Allied nations and friendly countries which sent workers to Germany and aiming to avoid giving foreigners the impression of pillorying misbehaving Germans. It also forbade slandering them in the press, putting them in a literal pillory or parading them through the streets.
Spain The practice was resumed (or reinvented) by the Spanish falangists from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). A similar custom existed in the 17th century, involving the shaving of women's heads upon entering prison (considered, whatever the reason for their conviction, as fallen women), thus signifying a break with their past and the beginning of a new life. From the outset of the Spanish coup of July 1936, in Spanish Morocco, Republican women and female relatives of Republicans (wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters) had their heads shaved. This act of deliberate and premeditated terror was committed across conquered Spain, in order to keep the home front calm. It was an act exclusively committed by the nationalists, in a ritualized and consistent manner throughout the war, as a form of purification.
French liberation
The punishment is best known in western Europe at the end of the Second World War between the liberation of France and the war's end.
After 1945 It has also been used in 2004 by Hindu fundamentalists against Indian converts to Christianity.
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