"To Make the Boys Feel at Home": USO Senior Hostesses and Gendered Citizenship

Abstract

In 1943, Helen Scheidel and her sister, Marge, attended USO dances at Mayor Kelly's Servicemen's Center in Chicago, once a month on Saturday nights. As a single eighteen-year-old, Helen represented the typical junior hostess, famous for jitterbugging across the dance floor with fresh-faced soldiers and sailors. Helen and the other junior hostesses at the center tried let someone sit by themselves and eagerly listened servicemen's stories about their homes and families. When a soldier or a sailor seemed especially anxious or distraught, however, Helen recalls that she and her peers were not mature enough talk about their problems with them. What they needed in this instance was someone who was there to take Mama's place. Helen and Marge referred these boys senior hostesses, because they were there to do serious talking. Although mending shirts, baking cookies, and listening were hardly revolutionary undertakings for middle-class women in the early 1940s in the same way that working in factories or joining the Women's Army Corps were, USO senior hostesses transformed these activities ordinarily performed daily at home into a public fulfillment of their obligations the wartime state.' Senior hostesses, usually married women over the age of thirty-five, clocked hundreds of thousands of hours at the USO, where they only served as informal counselors, but also sewed insignias on servicemen's uniforms, baked sweets and made sandwiches, and chaperoned male soldiers' and sailors' interactions with junior hostesses. Their activities did threaten the patriarchal order or existing gender or sexual norms; however, women's domestic work and their in USO clubs were important. In her assessment of the modern welfare state, political scientist Laura Balbo details the invisibility, yet necessity, of women's unpaid emotion work, such as cooking, counseling, and mothering, in upholding a capitalistic society. Sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild takes the idea of emotional labor into the public sphere argue that feminized service professions require women feign happi-