Browsing by Subject "Office of War Information"

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Step Up Now, Step Back Later: The Politics of Gender, Consumerism, and Female Sacrifice, 1941-1945
(2021-05) Cardenas, Olivia
Traditional histories of women’s lives during World War II have stressed the dramatic changes that dominated the war period. This thesis offers a revisionist argument analyzing the ways government and private industry collaborated to promote continuity in women’s lives during and after the war. A close analysis of internal government memos, archived communications between the government and Madison Avenue, advertisements, women’s magazine articles, and wartime fiction offers insight into the ways propaganda and popular culture pressured women to preserve pre-war gender relations. The doyens of culture and the warlords of Washington insisted that the ideal, patriotic woman remain devoted to homemaking, motherhood, and beauty above all else. Emphasizing these pillars of traditional womanhood and femineity, propaganda and policy makers demanded wartime women adapt to the harsh realities of the homefront while pretending as if nothing had changed. Government and private interests extracted significant sacrifice from the wartime woman while offering her little lasting autonomy or power in return. Incorporating oral histories of women’s lived experiences during the war period, this thesis explores the complicated interplay between popular media and private belief. A central focus of this study is the ways women reinforced, reflected, and resisted propaganda during the war and beyond.