The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s

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Summary: A must-read history of women in America
Review: Susan M. Hartmann describes and analyzes the effects of World War II on American women's lives in The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. The work focuses primarily on women's public lives, stressing Hartmann's belief that "women's movement into the public realm represents the most substantial change of the 1940s." Addressing women according to race, and to a lesser extent, according to age, class, educational and marital status, Hartmann adds a new dimension to the historiography of American women and World War II-- a historiography traditionally characterized by across-the-board generalizations molded around the experiences of white, middle-class women. Although her larger argument and conclusion speaks to women as a whole, she asserts and demonstrates that the effects of World War II upon American women were not uniform. Through careful examination of women's involvement in many aspects of public life during World War II, Hartmann shows that social, economic, and political changes put into motion by World War II affected the lives of American women by restructuring gender roles in American society. However, Hartmann asserts that this was merely a temporary reorganization of gender roles, not a permanent redefinition. Women's acceptance into nontraditional roles was limited to the duration of the war, after which they were expected to return to pre-war lifestyles. In keeping with the existing arguments of other prominent women's historians, Hartmann maintains that by stressing women's importance to the war effort, while simultaneously preparing them for eventual return to traditional female arenas, employers, the federal government, and popular culture media successfully achieved temporary gender reorganization. This reorganization got women out of the house and into the workforce as a wartime necessity, but ultimately ensured the short-term status of women's new roles and opportunities. Hartmann begins with a brief chapter detailing the developments in American social, economic, and political life throughout the 1940s. Her concise discussion of the Depression, New Deal efforts, foreign policy, and the outbreak of war, places women's experiences into historical context. The second chapter details the "historical subordination of women and the division of labor according to sex," highlighting women's status in society as wives and mothers at the start of the 1940s. In the chapters that follow, Hartmann examines women's experiences in the military services, female employment patterns, the treatment of women by the government and employers, women's involvement in and treatment by labor unions, female educational accomplishments, legal status, and direct participation in the political arena, and notions of family and womanhood within popular culture. Hartmann writes that that World War II increased and varied women's participation in public life. As more men joined the military, women's services became of crucial importance to keep the country running. Women were called upon to serve the government in all types of wartime activities. Factory jobs opened to women, women's divisions of the military services were created, labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) opened full admission to women and held conferences to address issues concerning female workers, educational institutions recruited women in the fields of science and technology, women were called upon for jury duty, and women's political activity as party workers and office-holders rapidly expanded. However Hartmann argues that, from the start, these opportunities for women were destined to be temporary, and designed to work without changing entrenched gender roles. Breaks in the traditional system opened to women out of necessity, but government and media propaganda aimed to recruit women "for the duration" and no longer. Mass media propaganda such as movies, posters, and radio jingles (government or otherwise) stressed that "women workers should be proud of their contributions to the war effort, but eager to return home and gladly relinquish their jobs to returning soldiers." Propaganda "feminized" wartime work to ensure that women retained the proper notions of womanhood while they performed masculine jobs. Propaganda also emphasized women's participation in the war effort as a way to bring home their men and help make the world safe for children. This method of recruitment opened doors for women, but also made their newfound positions conditional. Women got jobs in factories, but under the popular assumption that they would give them up and return home after the war. Women were admitted for military service, and although some gained full military status, other groups such as the Women's AirForce Service Pilots, were denied military commissions because their service was deemed necessary only during the war. Women in labor unions such as the AFL were granted full membership only for the length of the war, and others, as in the case of the Teamsters, were admitted only after signing a paper authorizing the union to dismiss them "whenever in their (the union's) judgment the emergency ceases." Although Hartmann demonstrates that the effects of World War II on women's public lives resulted in a temporary reorganization of gender roles, not a redefinition, she concludes that the result "does not cancel out the importance of World War II in altering sex roles." The opportunities opened to women in the 1940s altered women's behavior and beliefs about their proper place in the public sphere. After the war traditional gender beliefs reasserted themselves, but the changes made during the war left lasting impressions on women and others, and thus "laid the precondition for an awakened womanhood in the 1960s."