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Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945

Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945

Paperback

20th Century United States HistoryGeneral SociologyWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0820329053
ISBN13: 9780820329055
Publisher: Univ Of Georgia Pr
Published: Feb 15 2011
Pages: 344
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940s, Melissa A. McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became battlegrounds in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II.

Women were led to believe that the nation's success depended on their efforts--not just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. They were to fill their arsenals with lipstick, nail polish, creams, and cleansers in their battles to meet the standards of ideal womanhood touted in magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, pamphlets and in the rapidly expanding pinup genre. Scrutinized and sexualized in new ways, women understood that their faces, clothes, and comportment would indicate how seriously they took their responsibilities as citizens. McEuen also shows that the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and postwar opportunity coexisted uneasily with the realities of a racially stratified society. The context of war created and reinforced whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity.

Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory, Making War, Making Women offers a broad look at how women on the American home front grappled with a political culture that used their bodies in service of the war effort.

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20th Century United States History