[next] pages [1] [2] [3] [4]

This chapter, which covers the 1940s, was cut from Fresh Lipstick for length considerations. Though I incorporated some of the material—on kinship and on the postwar lesbian subculture—into the chapters on the 1930s and 1950s, much of potential value and interest was left completely out. In this chapter, I discuss subjects ranging from pinups to Latina movie stars to women war workers while exploring questions of work, sexuality, and kinship. The images mentioned are not included right now because I am working on permissions while the website in under construction. --LMS

A slew of images showing women in uniform or working in defense plants appeared in the pages of the women's magazines during World War II. After having to push for active roles in the Civil War and the Great War, females were actively recruited for jobs that ran nearly the full range of “masculine” employment, civilian and military, during the 1940s. Yet, in spite of the heroic images of women in nontraditional roles, a new genre of titillating sexual images, “pin-ups,” also emerged during that decade. Having appeared first in men’s magazines like Esquire and Police Gazette, these pictures were adapted to propagandize the war effort among soldiers. Pin-ups became so popular they eventually made their way into the pages of the women's magazines in ads for everything from face cream to corn removers. Images of women operating heavy machinery or wearing crisp uniforms ran in Vogue and The Ladies’ Home Journal, alongside air-brushed women in scanty clothes and impossible poses.

After the war, popular messages abruptly switched course, empha-sizing brides and motherhood instead of strength and independence. Some of the working woman imagery lingered, as did the pin-ups, but a new ethic was firmly on the scene by the end of the decade: the housewife-worship of the 1950s. The shift in imagery was, initially, accompanied by a labor shift. As the story goes, the female workers of the war period were immediately and unfairly displaced at the end of the war so that returning soldiers could have their jobs. Gains made during the war years were, therefore, temporary.

Feminist Historians like Sheila Tobias, Susan Hartmann, and Maureen Honey have explained the defense workers’ return to the home by pointing to the shift in popular imagery as a causal factor. Some claim that the war worker imagery was “a lie” to begin with. One argument is that the imagery suggested middle class women were working in the factories, when in fact the defense employees were predominantly working class. Thus, the imagery always contemplated a move by prosperous matrons back to the home, rather than a permanent change in the status of women who needed the work anyway. Another premise is that the war recruitment imagery contained feminine symbolism that intended to remind women of their “true” place all along—thus acting to anticipate their postwar return to home and hearth. Women were duped into working for the war effort for all the wrong reasons (concern for their men, a sense of duty) instead of the right one—an upgrade in the employment level of women as a class. The imagery itself is criticized for its “patriotic shrillness” and the messages for their appeals to fear. One rather extreme essay, by Susan Gubar, argues that pinup imagery was symptomatic of the impulse behind the war: to scare women with threats of violence, to entertain thoughts about violence to women, and to actually do violence to women.

As a whole, these treatments seem to me somewhat forced. They nearly always require that we view major social and economic shifts in a simplistic manner, while ignoring the long-term gains actually begun by women of the 1940s. (While women workers of the 1940s were initially out of work at the end of the war, they had regained full numbers by 1950.) The picture drawn asks us to believe in an efficient and conspiratorial organization of forces against the well-being of American women. Too many liberties are taken in the name of proving that the U. S. government, American businesses, and even ordinary servicemen were out, intentionally and malevolently, to “get” women. Finally, too much rests on the assumption that capitalism “requires” the oppression of women in a way that no other system does.

Women have been oppressed under every type of government and economic system we know, not just American capitalism. Further, as I discussed in the previous chapter, it is impossible to separate economic behavior from other cultural institutions in any society and still have a persuasive explanation for that group's behavior. I will offer here a corrective to the overemphasis on capitalist economics as the main causative factor in women's oppression. I propose that by looking more directly at kinship systems we will better understand how women get trapped in a mesh of work roles and sexual taboos. Economic behavior in this society is profoundly regulated by rules of kinship--and this is even more true in cultures with different modes of production but equally oppressive practices toward women. Thus, I will argue that a full explanation for women's postwar return to home-making must encompass the over-riding phenomenon: the kinship system, having been suspended in the face of a crisis, slammed back into place at the end of the war, sending women back into roles as wives, mothers, and daughters. While we are exploring the family system, however, I will be emphasizing the benefits as well as the drawbacks of kinship. One really shouldn't have to say this, but membership in a community is important to all human creatures and will have to be accommodated by any feminist solution. To simply toss aside the family as an out-dated stricture leaves important needs, for women and men, unattended.

Kinship Rules

Like other manifestations of human culture, kinship rules vary wildly from place to place, but they generally govern who may marry whom, who may (or may not) have sex with whom, rules of inheritance, terms of lineage, and membership in clans. Kinship rules also govern both labor specialization and consumption ethics. Every society divides labor by sex, though what tasks are considered “women's work” varies. The important thing, for our purposes, is that the resulting gender specializations usually make the combination of a man and a woman the smallest economically viable unit. For example, if men hunt and women gather, then a woman must exchange what she has gathered with a man in order to assemble a complete diet. And a man must do the same. Orders of kinship further govern what one may eat from another household's provisions. If a man kills a large animal, he must share it not only with his wife and children, but with her kin and his. Who eats which part of the animal and in what order is determined by each family member's relationship to the lucky hunter.

Marriage usually occurs as an extended negotiation between two clans, in which the exchanges of bride and dowry are reciprocated by promises of support that extend far into the future and apply not only to the woman and her children but to her other kin, as well. In most cultures, marriage is not only an exchange of commodities at the time it occurs, but affects the exchange of commodities between two families thus united for an indefinite period of time and in infinite ways. One of the best reasons to step back and view economics as the total picture of exchange, including favors and services as well as goods, is that it allows us to see quite clearly that women are traded--as wives, prostitutes, and laborers--in most places.

Because marital ties involve long-term obligations of the husband to the wife's kin, as well as creating future clans through children, men are as implicated in the marital exchange as are women. They, too, are commodities. Men, however, are usually in control of the exchange process, which means they get to choose when and with whom they will exchange themselves. Thus, women's oppression stems not from the fact that they are exchanged, but from kinship systems that award men the rights to exchange women, but do not allow women the right to give themselves. Since both the exchange system and the kinship system govern important areas of rights and privilege, any organization that uses women as gifts, but gives control of their exchange to men, results in the subordination of women as a class.

When a society is so fundamentally organized along lines of biological sex (and, again, this is a characteristic of virtually every known society, not just the capitalist ones), there arises a practical need to mark the differences between the sexes. Thus is created biology's social manifestation, “gender,” in which women are expected to have, wear, and exhibit certain “feminine” attributes, while men are expected to show “masculine” characteristics along the same dimensions. The concrete attributes we normally consider “feminine” mark, but do not cause, the sex-based nature of the social organization. Insofar as clothing is representative of the underlying system, however, women expropriating men’s clothing would be a potential transgression against that system. Similarly, women doing men's work, women engaging in market behavior in a traditionally “masculine” way, and women consuming “masculine” goods (smoking cigars, buying pornography) are a challenge. Anything that destablizes the marks of gender is a potential threat to its continuance. This is why cross-dressing and other “gender-bending” activities are often harshly punished.

What is “feminine” or “masculine” takes varied forms, but femininity nearly always requires sexual passivity. It's not difficult to see why. If the system demands heterosexual unions (one male and one female being the basic economic unit) and gives the right to control matrimony to males, then the female libido becomes a potential threat to the entire order. Sexually aggressive women, women who insist on choosing their own mates, women who are lesbians, or who exhibit any sexual behavior except that sanctioned for females (that is, heterosexual marriage as permitted by male kin) are a far more direct threat to the system than women who do men's work or wear men's clothes. This is why most societies have strong mechanisms to control female sexual behavior.

When the survival of the group is at risk--as in war--loosening of restrictions might be allowed to facilitate crisis response. Changes in the roles might even be demanded. Here, we will investigate two different models of behavior that challenged the American cultural system, but were tolerated during the crisis response: women who did men's work and sexually transgressive women. In both cases, wearing men’s clothing was part of the picture, but so was wearing extremely feminine clothing.

Women Wear the Pants

One of the oddities of the war years is that the official campaign to recruit female defense workers was left to an ad hoc coalition of advertising agencies, rather than being administered by the government itself. Ad agencies approached the government as early as the spring of 1940, offering to help with propaganda in support of the Allies, but bureaucrats hesitated to get their hands dirty working with people who made ads. So, the advertising agencies formed their own committee in November 1941 and called it the “War Advertising Council.” When Pearl Harbor suddenly put the nation at war a few weeks later, the ad people were ready to move. Recruitment ads appeared by March, l942.

The government remained squeamish about using the media for propaganda for nearly two years into the war. (This squeamishness is rather puzzling, since the government made extensive use of advertising and public relations in World War I.) The Office of War Information was formed in the summer of 1942, but an elaborate pretense was kept up in which the government hid its propaganda activities from the public. Eventually, the OWI directed the effort by issuing advisories to existing trade groups, like the Magazine Bureau, or by working with and through coalitions (such as the War Advertising Council) formed for the purpose. As it turned out, the War Advertising Council took on the primary responsibility for propaganda that encouraged women to apply for defense jobs, as they had been doing for the duration of the war. Because they were having to work through their normal channels—rather than through government edict—the Council necessarily relied on the voluntary efforts of their clients. Thus, the campaign to recruit female workers was not the result of an well-orchestrated, well-funded government and business conspiracy, but was left to volunteerism and happenstance.

The only major collaboration between the War Advertising Council and the government took place in early 1944--about eighteen months before the end of the war. Until 1944, therefore, all the ads that used images of either defense workers or women in military uniform also include some attempt to sell a product. The prominence of the selling message varies a great deal, as does the nature of the war message and the treatment of work versus marriage. Predictably, feminists object to advertisers using the war to “manipulate” women into buying their products. Because they were not supported by the government in this endeavor, however, advertisers had to use their own paid space to deliver the defense message. So, the advertisers were not using the war effort to advertise the things they produced, but the very opposite--they were using their advertising to produce the war effort. Perhaps for this reason, the number of ads containing war imagery or messages is surprisingly small. Over the entire course of the war, the Ladies Home Journal included an average of six ads per month with some kind of war imagery. Vogue ran an average of four per issue. Both of these magazines reached a peak in the frequency of war imagery in the winter of 1942/1943, before the Office of War Information had engaged the War Advertising Council with the “War of Women” effort. So, when you actually go back and read these magazines, the recruitment imagery seems less impactful than the histories might lead you to expect, in addition to having a considerably less coherent ideology than is usually described.

The women's recruitment effort at the War Advertising Council was led by Helen Lansdowne Resor. Probably because of this association, the advertisers managed by J. Walter Thompson are the ones we see most consistently delivering a war message. The Ponds ad in Figure 1 is a good example. This long-time JWT client had begun a new campaign just before the war. ‘She's Engaged! She's Lovely! She Uses Pond's!” showed aristocratic brides who used Ponds, along with pictures of their rings and gowns. The campaign was adapted, beginning in early 1942, by using engaged defense workers. Throughout the campaign, the fiancés are enlisted men and the engagement rings are often hand-me-downs (though vague reference is sometimes made to an “old name” ). So, the class status of the women in the Pond's war campaign is considerably downscale of the Ponds tradition: if anything, the bandana and clothing suggest this woman is working class. The overall framework here is an appeal to matrimony, which would make this Ponds campaign one of those that recruited women to work, but reminded them of their “true” destiny. Knowing what we do about the feminist politics of Helen Resor, however, it is rather more difficult to imagine that she would have maliciously tried to trick women into war work while inculcating traditional values just for the sake of keeping women down. As with other criticism of advertising, our willingness to believe in such wicked conspirators relies heavily on our not knowing anything about who is behind the campaigns. In this case, a little cautious trust may be justified: long after the war workers had supposedly gone home, the Pond's ads contained insets of women still doing work they had started during the war.

The kerchief-and-overalls uniform came to typify the genre of images the War Advertising Council produced--now known by the mythical name, “Rosie the Riveter.” Rosie was never any one picture or character, though some images of her are more famous than others (Figure 2). Instead, like Uncle Sam, Rosie was an archetype who showed up in many pictures, movies, songs, and books. In spite of the prevalence of this archetype, Maureen Honey argues that advertisers depicted defense workers as middle class women, which, she says, was “a lie,” since the bulk of the war workers came from working class women who changed jobs in order to get more pay. Yet, in every identifiable appearance of a “Rosie” character, the clothing she wears (overalls or a worksuit and usually a bandana or snood) would have marked her as working class, regardless of her true status. The Gossard ad in Figure 3, which essentially makes the worker look fashionable by using a fashion illustration style, is one of the rare exceptions. Other than the solution used by this Gossard ad, I am not sure how an explicit picture of a factory worker can be made to look like a middle class woman. Further, since most of this advertising occurred before the official government effort to recruit women workers, the advertisers would not have had statistics on the demographic makeup of the workforce. Indeed, it has taken nearly fifty years for historians to reach consensus that the factory workers of WW2 came from other jobs, rather than being stay-at-home housewives enthused by patriotism. It seems inappropriate to charge the people who made the campaigns with lying. The word “lie” implies not only a contradiction between the statement and the facts, but knowledge that the two do not match and an intent to deceive.

Some ads do imply a married woman, if not necessarily a prosperous housewife, as a reader. In the Kleenex ad in Figure 4, we see an ad intended to address directly the most prominent concern among women considering defense work—the objections of husbands who were not fighting age or who had not enlisted. Through a cartoon sequence, Kleenex suggests arguments to win over a recalcitrant mate so that the woman can be free to work. The state of matrimony is not glorified here, but is treated as an obstacle to be overcome. Many ads focus on romanticizing war work (Figure 5). In magazines for young working women, like Mademoiselle and Glamour, were career-oriented ads (Figure 6) that did not seem to contemplate a return to family after the war’s end.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Elizabeth Arden ad in Figure 7 presents an image common in the war years, the woman who waits for the return of her man. This ad would also be an example that supports feminist historians’ contention that the imagery reinforced traditional roles in anticipation of the return to “normal” family life (and therefore undermined women’s true interest in economic emancipation). I think such arguments construct too limited a conception of “women’s interests” and so ultimately fail to explain what happened after the war. The woman in this ad clearly misses her man and is worried about his safety. That’s because her mate and other males in her kinship group provide her with more than money. Like most other women, this sad face at the window looks to her kin—including the men—to give her love, warmth, attention, laughter, and other things essential to her well-being. When any one of their family members are in real danger, most women experience severe emotional distress. Women who had male kin fighting World War II bore this psychic stress for months, even years, on end. Many women dealt with this pain by going to work for the war effort. There were many other motivations—a sense of civic duty, the desire for more money, and so on. But I think it is essential for us to remember what none of these women could forget: that their husband, or son, or brother might be killed at any minute. The subjective experience of this prolonged fear must have seemed unbearable.

Like the ad agencies, the editors of the women’s magazines took it as their mission to recruit for the factories, the military, and the nursing forces. Features on proper clothing for war work appeared with great fanfare in Vogue, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and all the other major women’s magazines. Publications that catered to working girls in peacetime threw themselves into the war campaigns with special fervor. Both Mademoiselle and Glamour instituted regular sections on the war effort and their covers had war themes, showing young women in different roles.

Trousers appeared prominently in magazine features since defense work often required them. Many war jobs required uniforms. Though you would think selling uniforms would be anathema to a fashion magazine, the women's press stepped up to the challenge. This is from Vogue:

The uniform stands for our new spine of purpose, our initiative in getting women working, splayed out into hundreds of different jobs, to find talents which have been massed over. It means that we know that it is time to stop all the useless little gestures, to stop being the Little Woman and be women.

Because different classes of war work had their own dress requirements, magazines attempted to cover a range of outfits. They all addressed safety and cleanliness, as well as attractiveness.

Factory work, for instance, required some kind of hair covering for safety reasons. A persistent problem for employers was that women wouldn't wear their kerchiefs, caps, or snoods because they didn't want to cover up their hair. Magazines suggested ways to make hair coverings more stylish, suggested using other things like lipstick instead for color and femininity, and sometimes resorted to straightforward exhortations: “Here are some DO's and DON'TS, for safety and suitability, for these women in arms. DO WEAR a short 'defense haircut' and hair nets, low-heeled, arch--supporting shoes, short white socks, cotton sweat shirts. USE good cleansing soap, hand and nail cream, nail pumice. TAKE relaxing exercises at lunch hour; drink lots of water. DON'T WEAR jewelry, high heels, open toes, long stockings, sheer blouses, low necklines, nail polish, mascara, too much lipstick--and NO LOOSE ENDS that might catch in machinery.” In these “do's and don'ts” of factory dressing, the women's magazines often quoted verbatim from government safety directives. Some historians have inferred from these messages that the magazines were still trying to send “subliminal” messages to readers, so that women would remain feminine and thus be easier to rein in once the war was over.

Women sometimes spent the money they earned on very feminine items like furs, stockings, and jewelry. Some got bored with wearing slacks or overalls and used the higher paychecks to indulge in lacy lingerie that contradicted the bland, “masculine” sameness of their clothes. Others splurged on a party dress --even a fur--to break out of the grind of wearing overalls to work. Individual stories reveal the strains that such behavior put on family relations. One woman, who struggled with her mother and her soon-to-be-ex-husband throughout the war, told this story:

One time they came up with this jamboree session at the Plantation Club for people at the plant where I worked. All the girls were going, and I wanted to be a part of it too. I asked what people were gonna wear-- “Slacks?” “No,” they said. “The girls really dress up.” I had no dresses, just slacks, snoods, blouses, and flat-heeled shoes. So I went down to Sweldon's and bought this two-piece tunic dress--emerald green with dark lace. I splurged, and got a new hat--a fisherman's cloche--and new shoes too.

I'd asked my husband to come over to watch the kids. And my mother dropped by that day too--she hadn't known I was going out. The kids tattled on me, they said “Wait till you see Mom's new dress.” Then the Fight was on. My mother was shocked over the price of the hat and my husband thought I'd flipped my lid.

Somehow I got out of there, and ten of us jammed into a car. The ballroom was loaded with people. It was sort of a release. Most of the girls had gone out and bought clothes for this special occasion. Our lead man came and sat with us for awhile, and there were a lot of men from the different plants.

Count Basie's band was there. We had a table fairly close to the floor, and somehow I got to talking to Basie. He was very friendly, and full of fun. He said to me, “Are you a riveter?” “No,” I said,”but my sister's name is Rosie.” We got to kid-ding around, and then he sang that song called “Rosie the Riveter,” while I sat on the piano bench with him. I really had a wonderful time.

We had another big row when I got home. My mother thought I was ne-glecting the kids. Everyone was mad at me for going. But I wasn't that concerned about the fuss they made. By this time, you know, it was late in the war, and women were making more money, and we were starting to manage our own affairs.