WOMEN AT WORK

“We as a nation,” proclaimed one magazine article, “must change our basic attitude toward the work of women.” But change proved difficult. The government, employers, and unions depicted work as a temporary necessity, not an expansion of women’s freedom. Advertisements assured women laboring in factories that they, too, were “fighting for freedom.” But their language spoke of sacrifice and military victory, not rights, independence, or self-determination. One union publication even declared, “There should be a law requiring the women who have taken over men’s jobs to be laid off after the war.” When the war ended, most female war workers, especially those in better-paying industrial employment, did indeed lose their jobs.

This print, part of the America in the War exhibition shown simultaneously in twenty-six American museums in 1943, offers a stylized image of women workers assembling shells in a factory while men march off to war.

Despite the upsurge in the number of working women, the advertisers’ “world of tomorrow” rested on a vision of family-centered prosperity. Like Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, these wartime discussions of freedom simultaneously looked forward to a day of material abundance and back to a time when the family stood as the bedrock of society. The “American way of life” celebrated during the war centered on the woman with “a husband to meet every night at the door,” and a home stocked with household appliances and consumer goods. Advertisements portrayed working women dreaming of their boyfriends in the army and emphasized that with the proper makeup, women could labor in a factory and remain attractive to men. Men in the army seem to have assumed that they would return home to resume traditional family life. In one wartime radio program, a young man described his goal for peacetime: “Havin’ a home and some kids, and breathin’ fresh air out in the suburbs... livin’ and workin’ decent, like free people.”

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