Beyond Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War TwoJuliaBrock, Jennifer W.Dickey, Richard J. W.Harker, and Catherine M.Lewis, Editors. University of Arkansas Press, 2015.

Abstract

Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War Two Julia Brock, Jennifer W. Dickey, Richard J. W. Harker, and Catherine M. Lewis, Editors. University of Arkansas Press, 2015.Beyond Rosie was developed from a 2012 traveling exhibition, Beyond Rosie: Women and World War Two, by members of the Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. The book is mostly a collection of primary documents about women during the war, accompanied by commentary on why the various texts, illustrations, and photographs were included. It is designed for a school audience, either upper division high school or college, with the assumption that readers will know little or nothing about the war, especially the part that women played in it. The introduction provides some basic information about the war and makes it clear that age, race, class, sexual orientation, marital status, and children affected how women were able to participate. Areas of focus include factory workers, women's auxiliary services, women on the Home Front, espionage, and the opportunities afforded women as journalists, medical workers, and government girls.The editors provide a nice variety of texts, photographs, posters, oral histories, film script excerpts, and federal documents. The oral histories express the experiences of different kinds of women including Latina and African-American women in factories and war plants, a WAAC, an interned Japanese woman, a lesbian in the WAVEs, a WASP, a member of the Army Nurse Corps, a cryptographer, and a chemist for the Manhattan Project. These are interesting, but some could have been better edited in that if a question were asked and the respondent didn't answer, the question was left blank. These reminiscences are complemented by excerpts of letters written by wives to their husbands overseas about life back home.What may strike readers, especially students, about these materials is the condescending language used to describe women by the men for whom they were working. This is especially clear in statements about hiring practices and how managers should deal with women workers. For example, a film script excerpt, Problems in Supervision: Supervising Women Workers (1944), has a foreman telling his manager that women workers scare him. However, by the end, he realizes that women just need processes explained to them and that they have home responsibilities as well. Some of the suggestions for working with women, as in a brochure created by RCA (Radio Corporation of America), are actually just good managerial practice, such as arranging for brief rest periods, having good ventilation and lighting, and having clean restrooms and a lunch area. …