How did World War II impact different groups of women? Using specific evidence from your article, discuss gender roles as they pertained to either work or family. How did women use traditional “feminine” skills in the article (either at work or in activism)?
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The major focus of research on women in the World War II years has been in the area of work, as a whole new ideology was born to convince men and women both that formerly male-only jobs were, in fact, feminine, glamorous and patriotic. The history of women seems to have been a “two steps forward, one step back” progression, with wars somehow accelerating progress and postwar periods putting the brakes on the promises and coercing women back into idealized pre-war roles. World War II was certainly no exception.
While conventional wisdom has been that working conditions and employment possibilities for women improved during the war years, some historians have questioned this. Looking at the underlying motives and beliefs about women’s “war work,” the most significant of which was that women’s war work was “for the duration,” reveals that gendered ideas of work still prevailed during the war. Segregation on the basis of gender was firmly entrenched in the working system, so that male employees and unions lined up with management against their own class interests as workers, and employers did not replace men with women even though it was more profitable.
The war, many historians argue, did nothing to alter those underlying gender biases. Still, women were employed in industries that were formerly off limits to them, and were paid more than they had ever been paid in traditional women’s jobs. They were shipbuilders in Portland, munitions workers in L.A., and they were also professional baseball players. Because many people feared the demise of the national pastime with the major leagues decimated by so many male players in the service, in 1943, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League was born.
To this day, according to interviews with oral historians, women who had the opportunity during the war years to work in nontraditional fields, despite occasional harassment and long, hard days at work, regard the war years as the best years of their lives. Looking at the postwar years, particularly in terms of work, it is not difficult to figure out why.
What the war gave, the postwar period took away. The propaganda machine which had been driven full throttle to seduce women into the labor force was thrown into reverse. The jobs which had been theirs were now portrayed as inappropriate, and women were routinely fired.
But despite the 1950s propaganda that a woman’s place is in the home, the important fact about the postwar period is that very few women left the workforce. Almost all who joined the workforce in the 1940s remained in it. Of the 3.25 million women forced out of their “war” jobs, 2.75 million took other jobs, jobs which were considered more traditionally “feminine.” In other words, only 500,000 women actually heeded the propaganda and went home.
The war moved forward the women’s movement, which would fully erupt in the 1960s and 1970s. The feminist movement, though, was not the same for all women. It had divisions along race and class lines. However, the post-war years are often marked for increased activism, and much of that had its roots in the war. For women in the West, where many of the wartime jobs were located, the war had irrevocably changed societal expectations and gendered responsibilities.
