Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives

Abstract

If we are inclined to see the story of depression-era America in the troubled face of a migrant farm-worker mother from Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, Holly Allen's study of cultural narratives of the New Deal and World War II prompts us to reconsider that association. Resonating across the political and cultural landscape explored in Forgotten Men and Fallen Women were narratives that voiced the threats to white male breadwinners and citizen-soldiers posed by unemployment and armies of transient men, dependent women, and people of color. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the “forgotten man” into the American cultural imagination in a 1932 radio address, New Deal policy makers revealed that they had no intention of forgetting about the white male breadwinner. Relief policy privileged white married men above all others, thereby affirming “the ideal of white heterosexual masculine authority in the household and the public square” (p. 4). Criticism of federal unemployment relief was rooted in women-blaming narratives, focusing on the meddling of “pantry-snooping” female social workers who threatened masculine authority in their homes, or job-stealing married women workers who were “taking bread out of the mouths of others” (p. 101). Allen exposes as well the marginalization and blaming of women that undergirded civil defense programs on the wartime home front.