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

Drawing On war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940's, 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 encouraged to believe that the nation's success depended on their effortsunot just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. 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 the desirability of whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity.

Melissa A. McEuen is a professor of history at Transylvania University. She is the author of Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars, which received the 2000 Emily Toth Award for the best single work in women's issues from the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association.