American Women in a World at War

Abstract

Early in 1943, Max Lerner, the well-known author and journalist, writing for the New York newspaper PM, pre dicted that when the classic work on the history of women comes to be written, the biggest force for change in their lives will turned out to have been With the renewed interest in American women's history that has occurred over the last quarter century, most historians interested in women and World War II have addressed the implication of Lerner's statement by asking the question Did World War II serve as a major force for change in the lives of American Our reading of approximately thirty thousand letters written by more than fifteen hundred women representing a broad cross-section ofthe wartime population has led us to conclude that the events of World War II did indeed have a dramatic and far-reaching effect on the lives of American women. For more than a decade, we have been engaged in a nationwide effort to locate, collect, and publish the wartime correspondence of American women. Our search began in the late 1980s as we were making the final revisions for a book, Miss You: The World War II Letters of Barbara Wooddall Taylor and Charles E. Taylor (1990), which was based on thousands of pages of correspondence between a young war bride and her soldier husband. We found the Taylors' letters to be extremely powerful documents, chronicling a grand story of romance, making do, and growing up during wartime. We were convinced that Taylor's story was similar to those of other women during the war. But how could we be sure? While conducting the research for Miss You, we learned that the letters written by men in combat had often been carefully preserved by loved ones, donated to military and university archives, and made into many books. But what had happened to the billions of letters written by American women? No one seemed to have an adequate answer to this question. During the early stages of our search for the missing letters, many of our colleagues and friends discouraged us from taking on this challenge because of the perceived wisdom that few, if any, letters written by American women had survived the vicissitudes ofthe war and the postwar years. After all, it was well known that men in combat were under orders not to keep personal materials such as diaries and letters. Moreover, we were repeatedly warned that should we locate letters written by women, they would include little, if any, significant commentary because of strict wartime censorship regulations. Others discounted our effort, arguing that women's letters would contain only trivial bits of information about the war years. Yet the historical detective in each of us was not persuaded by these arguments. In the spring of 1988, we intensified our search for women's wartime correspondence by devising a brief author's query re questing information from anyone who had knowledge about letters written by American women during the Second World War. We sent the query to every daily newspaper in the United States?about fifteen hundred newspapers in all?and requested that the query be printed on the letters-to-the-editor page. Much to our delight, newspapers throughout the United States com plied. Very shortly thereafter, wartime letters from across the United States began to pour into our offices. We soon realized that we had struck a gold mine of information. We supplemented our author's query to the nation's newspa pers with more than five hundred letters of inquiry to magazines and newsletters specializing in issues of concern to women, World War II veterans, and minorities. We wrote letters about our search to every state historical society and to dozens of research and university libraries. In an effort to locate the correspondence of African American women, we solicited the advice of prominent black historians, surveyed archives specializing in African Ameri can history, and sent out a special appeal to five hundred predomi nately black churches around the nation. In total, we have written more than twenty five hundred letters of inquiry. We often