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Even these purchases of traditionally feminine items, therefore, can be seen as rebellion from the proper feminine norm because they are violations of the consumption rules of kinship. As we have seen, a consistent complaint from unemployed women is that they have to wait for money and permission from a male family member (husbands, fathers) before they can buy small luxuries for themselves. For a woman to use some of her new paycheck to go out and buy, say, silk stockings, can be seen as a transgression just as legitimately as that same woman putting on pants.

It is true that both the articles and the ads in the women's magazines during the war years emphasize duty to country and concern for men overseas, as well as professionalism. However, though I checked all the wartime issues of the Ladies' Home Journal and Vogue and many issues of True Story, Mademoiselle, Glamour, and Radio Digest, I did not find anything to support Maureen Honey's charge that: “The progressive idea that women could perform all kinds of work in society was accompa-nied, however, by a shrill patriotic appeal that undermined its potential as a feminist reordering of national values.” The women's recruitment effort, in fact, seems infused with awareness that the war was not an attempt at national aggrandizement, but a distasteful task undertaken out of necessity. Though there is mild patriotic imagery--like the use of red, white, and blue--it is subsumed under a seriousness of purpose, rather than nationalistic search for glory.

My opinion is that the feminist literature on this topic shows an overall lack of appreciation for the magnitude of the threat posed by all out war. I was saddened by the repeated insistence upon counterposing some preferred feminist agenda against the drawing together of women to support their community. As Honey disapprovingly remarks: “War work became a vehicle for women to shoulder their civic and moral responsibilities as good citizens rather than a way to become more independent and powerful.” I think it's crucial to point out here that when a culture is under as serious a threat as the U. S. was during World War II, everyone's priorities change--and appropriately so. Women did wonder during the war whether they would be able to keep their gains when the peace came--and this was discussed at some length even in the fashion magazines--but they did not hesitate to commit themselves in spite of that uncertainty. Whether they would keep their jobs after the war was a moot point, after all, if there wasn't going to be any “after the war.”

The position avowed by these historians is also limited by an excessive focus on sexual relationships between men and women; in fact, Honey asserts that women who were unmarried had no reason to be concerned about the fate of men overseas. Other kinship relations that women had with fighting men should not be so callously underestimated. A major part of the power of kinship inheres in the extrasexual ties--brothers, uncles, sons, nephews, cousins and also sisters, aunts, nieces--that provide security, love, and stability for both men and women. Women have responsibilities to their gender, but they also must and should “shoulder their civic and moral responsibilities as good citizens,” particularly under circumstances of severe duress.
In fact, contrary to what has been proposed by feminists like Tobias, Honey, and Hartmann, I would argue that the shift in national priorities during the war produced a moral imperative that was essential to the gains that were made by women as a result. With the community's attention focused upon survival, the gender divisions in work, dress, and sexual behavior were relaxed. This not only allowed women to run through the suddenly-revealed gaps in the social structure, it compelled them to do so. As feminists seldom note, some women resisted recruitment into the war effort. Without media pressure to go to work, more might have stayed at home. Gains that come by permission from the social order are sometimes as meaningful, as useful, and as long-lasting as those that accrue from direct confrontation with it. The heroism that can be claimed today for the contribution of the “Rosies” of World War II is a priceless rhetorical asset in the continuing fight for employment equality—something that is roughly equivalent to the claims made by African-American males based on their combat contribution during this conflict. Though there are times for both, the increasing insistence among academic feminists that freedom can only be gained by radical confrontation, or by separating from culture and kinship altogether, is not only unnecessary, but ultimately self-destructive.

The return of normal kin relations brought both rewards and setbacks for women. The relief of wartime tension over missing loved ones must have been wonderful. And, for many women and girls, the return of eligible young men to dances, parties, and dates must have been nice, too. The postwar shift to bridal imagery is nevertheless sudden and startling. I do not wish to devalue the sincere and legitimate wishes of many women to find love and have children after the long delay of the war. However, this moment was undoubtedly the beginning of the biggest setback of the century, the birth of the “Feminine Mystique.”

Please bear in mind, though, that the “Feminine Mystique,” as described by Betty Friedan, had two faces. One was the dutiful house-wife. The other was the insatiable sexpot. In the decade that preceded the feminine mystique years, the sexuality of women was more brazenly displayed in the popular culture than ever before, leading to several controversies over censorship and pornography. At the center of this flurry over the depiction of sexual women was a new incarnation of the “spicy pictures” furtively traded by men for a hundred years, the pin-up. Appearing even in official government publications and genteel ladies' magazines, the pin-up’s impact upon the perceived sexuality of women must have been significant.

Pin-Ups on Parade

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chavez was flat broke. As he sat across the desk from the publisher of Esquire, his wife waited anxiously back in California. Though Alberto had built an impressive career as a “pretty girl” illustrator since emigrating from Peru in 1916, working first with the Ziegfeld Follies and then for the big Hollywood studios, he had been blacklisted after supporting a studio unionizing effort during the late 1930s. Struggling to survive without work, he and his wife had depleted their savings, borrowed many times against their home, and lived on the charity of friends. It was now 1940, and Alberto was desperate. Perhaps the man from Esquire knew this. He hired Alberto on terms only a desperate man would accept.

At that time, one of the most popular features in Esquire was the pretty girls drawn by George Petty. Though the “Petty Girls” had been appearing in their pages for only about a year, Esquire was already tired of the artist's complaints about being overworked and underpaid. As the man from Esquire, David Smart, sat looking at the pictures drawn by the soft-spoken Peruvian, he knew already he had found the way to replace Petty.

Alberto Vargas drew his first pretty girl illustration for the October 1940 issue. Smart insisted on calling the pictures “Varga Girls” rather than “Vargas Girls” for reasons only he knew. Soon, however, everybody recognized Vargas' drawings, whatever they were called. These extraordinary images became the most frequently cited memory of fighting men during World War II. They were pinned to lockers, made into six-foot posters for briefing stations, and appeared in the military edition of Esquire. Stateside, they also became very visible. A huge Varga Girl--a full city block long--posted over the New York Winter Garden Theater to promote Mexican Hayride, was reported by newspapers and magazines all over the country. The poster for Betty Grable's movie debut, Moon Over Miami, was by Vargas. The new “Varga Girls” were found in ads for Jantzen, MGM, Acme Beer, and Sealy Mattress Company.

Under the terms of his contract, however, Alberto Vargas could not produce work for anyone except as arranged by and through Esquire. For this privilege, Vargas was to be paid $75 a week. So Vargas himself never made any real money from his drawings. In fact, he and his wife lived in a building under Smart's supervision and all their bills were paid by a kind of “company store” system that left Vargas in debt to the magazine. His economic relationship was not unlike that of a wife whose husband provides for her every need, but allows her no freedom or money of her own.
Esquire ratcheted up the number of drawings required from Vargas until, at fifty-two a year for the magazine plus all the various calendars and advertisements Esquire arranged, it was no longer physically possible for him to produce them. Vargas sued, but the contract was upheld. So, by the end of the 1940s, Alberto Vargas was out of work and broke again. To this day, Esquire holds the rights to the body of work Vargas produced during the war.

George Petty, always Vargas' closest rival, was not subject to the same limited contract at Esquire. Petty had been illustrating ads since at least 1938 (Figure 8). Other artists who had illustrated various men's magazines, like Hollywood Humor and Police Gazette, also benefited from the sudden interest in their art. The resulting body of pin-up work shows a number of distinctive features. Certain facial expressions, gestures, and body positions appeared repeatedly. A favorite conceit was the blown-up skirt--as in Marilyn Monroe's famous pose--which was sometimes accompanied by fallen panties or slip (how or why a skirt blows up while the underwear falls down, I have never understood). These and other scenarios demanded an expression of surprise that became typical (Figure 9). A frequent body position has the woman's legs in the air (Figure 10). There was a variety of repeating cultural themes, such as Latinas, sailors, and cowgirls.

Advertisers of toiletries, lingerie, hosiery, and other personal adornment items hired pin-up illustrators for ads in that ran in the women's magazines. There we can see not only the work of known illustrators, but the surprised look, legs in the air, and other typical pin up features. These eventually appear even in ads for corn pads, menstrual pain relievers, and recruitment posters (Figure 11). Men have been looking at “dirty pictures” of women for an awfully long time without those same pictures showing up in ads for women's products.

The crossover appearance of the pin-up style appears connected to their meaning to soldiers overseas. It would be easy to explain away the connection between pin-ups and fighting men by assuming they were aids to masturbation, but the record suggests there was more to it than that. Historian William R. Brown has used the letters and poetry written by men in combat during the Second World War to document the ways these soldiers dealt with the very immediate inhumanity of battle and the seeming abstraction of the war's purpose. Letters, snapshots, posters, movies, and traveling shows from America were clearly crucial in helping these men retain a feeling of connectedness, even a sense of reality, that transcended the brutality of their conscious context. The soldiers of World War II looked at Vargas girls or Hollywood photos, but they also cherished snapshots of girlfriends. (Ads that coax the reader to “be his pin-up girl,” such as in Figure 16, harken to the fondness that soldiers had for both kinds of pictures.) An erotic response to any of these was possible, but in addition to the photos of the loved one, the soldiers also had pictures of children, siblings, and other kin. These pictures were carried to war as a reminder of emotional ties and as an expression of hope for a safe return, and so, by definition, were not just a way to reduce people to objects. In fact, such pictures were evidence of the young male's enmeshment in the same kinship system as the women.

In making sense of the purpose of war, a consistent tactic was to personify feelings about home through an allegorical figure, usually a female. One soldier wrote: “First of all, I don't know exactly what democracy is, or the real common-sense meaning of a republic. But as we used to talk things over in China, we all used to agree that we were fighting for The American Girl. She to us was America, Democracy, Coca Colas, Hamburgers, Clean Places to Sleep or The American Way of Life.” This allegorical heroine--no stranger to the culture in 1941--became the emblem for American life to soldiers under the strain of combat.

Thus, the “American Girls” who came to entertain the troops weren't just sex objects, but were also emblems, like Columbia or the Statue of Liberty. Maxene Andrews, of the Andrews Sisters, told a moving story about a soldier's response to one of the USO stars. At the height of the fighting in Naples, Ella Logan, a popular Broadway star, finished her show by telling the GIs she wanted to bring them the spirit of wives, sweethearts, mothers from home.

All of a sudden a tall blond soldier came down the aisle. He was covered with mud, his helmet and guns were slung over his shoulder, and his face re-flected too many days and nights of seeing too many friends die. With everyone in the audience watching him apprehensively, he walked up to the stage and lis-tened as Ella continued speaking. Then he climbed up onto the stage, took the mike away from her and said, “I'd like to say something.” Ella looked down at the floor, wondering what might be coming next. Everyone else was, too. “I've got to contradict you, Miss Logan,” he went on. “You don't look like anyone's sweet-heart. You don't look like anyone's wife. And God knows you don't look like anyone's mother.”

Then he lifted her chin. She saw tears on his cheeks. He kissed her on the forehead and said, “You look like an angel.” Then he turned around, climbed back down off the stage, and thumped out of the theater in his combat boots.

Later, press reports said every man in the place had his handkerchief out and the star herself was full of tears. Stories like these illustrate that images of beautiful women were more than pornography and more than propaganda; they became part of the mental equipment that helped soldiers stay sane under insane conditions. Thus, though anti-pornography forces typically insist that pornography is irredeemably a violent form, the pin-ups of the 1940s may have been used as an antidote to or inoculation against the total violence of war.

Feminist historian and antipornographer Susan Gubar would take issue with this idea. In her essay, “This is My Rifle, This is My Gun,” she shows an image of Betty Grable with a grid superimposed upon it and tells us that pinups were used to teach camouflage techniques and map reading. She talks about how fighter pilots sometimes named their planes after women, as other soldiers named barracks and bunks, and shows a photograph of Jane Russell standing beside a plane painted “Russell’s Raiders.” She describes violent wartime images, such as propaganda posters showing Germans threatening females. Merely by mentioning all these instances in one breath, Gubar collapses important situational and presentational differences to make a broadly outrageous declaration: she tries to persuade us that World War II itself was really about perpetrating violence upon women, and that all these images, including the pinups, were expressions of the desire to hurt, rape, and kill women.

Yet American women were as far removed from the violence of war as any group on the face of the earth between 1941 and 1945. What was unique about their experience—as compared either to American men or to women elsewhere in the world—was their relative freedom from fear during one of the most frightening episodes in human history. Gubar’s attempt to “coopt” the danger faced by others during this conflict to serve the political purposes of a relatively comfortable group is, in my mind, not only intellectually unsupportable but morally indefensible.

Another typical feminist attack on erotica is to assert that the pictures “commoditize” women. Certainly, the Alberto Vargas images of women were valuable commodities, as the struggle over their ownership shows. However, whether real women were thereby commoditized is less clear. Esquire wanted the Varga Girls because they believed, as had so many editors and publishers before them, that drawings of beautiful women would help sell the magazine. Therefore, the magazine itself was the item being intentionally commoditized here. Vargas, by selling his services to Esquire, was also commoditizing himself (particularly given the ultimate terms of his contract, under which Esquire virtually owned him). Esquire sold Varga Girl images to a variety of advertisers trying to commoditize their own products (like face cream), as well as putting them on many objects they offered for sale themselves (such as playing cards). So these, too, are instances in which the pictures were used to commoditize other objects.

But are the women depicted in these pictures themselves commoditized? Vargas sometimes worked with a paid model, who was offering her services as a commodity, just as Vargas offered his services to Esquire. His wife also posed for him. But since Anna Mae Vargas acted as her husband's business manager--pushing him, prodding him, and representing him throughout his career--she, too, was commodi-tizing him. All workers who contributed to the production of Vargas images, Esquire magazines, playing cards or face creams were commoditized, too. There appears to be an endless string of commoditizations involved with the Varga Girls.

If we use the term “commodity” in its more precise meaning--something that is being offered for an exchange of ownership--the scope is limited to the pictures, the magazines, the face cream, the playing cards. The only person who comes close to being truly commoditized is Alberto Vargas himself, whose work and even whereabouts were controlled by his “owner,” Esquire magazine. Even still, there are comparisons that would cast doubt on whether we should really call what happened to Vargas “commoditization.” If we allow Vargas to be categorized as a “commodity” for having sold his services under whatever conditions, we would eventually be led to classify a broad range of other services and creative work as the “commoditization of persons,” including doctors, lawyers, teachers, and even the authors of feminist books. This classification then becomes rather pointless, while at the same time trivializing actual commoditiza-tion.

Consider, for example, that while Alberto Vargas was slaving away at drawing beautiful nudes to appear all over the world, millions of Jews were being herded like cattle to the gas chambers. Before they died, the women often had their hair cut off to be sold as wigs. After they died, both sexes of these unfortunate people were subject to having their fillings pried out to sell as marketable goods. It seems appropriate to distinguish, therefore, between the commoditization of services (such as illustration), or performances (such as acting or modeling), and the commodi-tization of persons (as in slavery, the Holocaust, and marriage). When it comes to the point where our critique of the culture can no longer distinguish between a box of face powder, a girlie magazine, a feminist book, and the mining of a Jewish woman's dead body for precious metals, our terminology has lost its edge. It's time to rein in this talk.