For Food and Freedom: Female Resistance, Hunger Demonstrations and Looting during the Second World War in Belgium

This study focuses on women’s hunger demonstrations and lootings in occupied Antwerp in May 1941. These actions were not just expressions of social discontent but also political actions in the form of illegal propaganda against the occupier. Through specific cases of demonstrations and looting, the first part of this article explores the pattern of these actions and the involvement of participants, local and German police and mayors. The second part provides a general picture of women’s demonstrations and lootings in Belgium and Antwerp, discussing the chronology and repression of these actions and the social profile of the participants. This article tells the story of resistance by working-class women, a perspective still largely absent from resistance historiography. It shows how an explicit female perspective allows us to write a history of female resistance.