Keeping a Record of Life: Women and Art During World War II

Abstract

Home front popular culture during World War II played a significant role in building morale and sustaining support for the war. The Office of War Information (OWI) perceived women's support for the war as particularly important and encour aged the film, broadcasting, and advertising industries to create war messages, advertisements, reports, and patriotic programs especially for women. Approved films, newsreels, radio broadcasts, and adver tising portrayed women as necessary participants in defense work, rationing efforts, and war bond drives (i). These representations of women as critical to military victory abroad presented subtle shifts away from the glamorous individualism of women in the 1930s to one that portrayed women as feminine, able, selfless, and temporary workers. This propaganda encouraged women to enter the workplace not as equal to men, but as self-sacrificing heroines in service to the nation (2). The strong yet Madonna-like image of Rosie the Riveter, created by artist Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post, rep resents these values and intentions. Not all women received such positive representation. These of ficially sanctioned messages rarely portrayed women of color and did not fundamentally challenge ethnic and racial stereotypes of non whites in the larger popular culture. With few exceptions, throughout the war Japanese Americans were represented as dangerous foreign ers and disloyal citizens, necessitating their mass relocation and in ternment (3). Despite the increased presence of black and Hispanic women in defense industries, several popular media, such as Hol lywood films, radio programs, and advertising, continued to portray black women as domestic servants. While some OWI films and news reels praised blacks' efforts to help win the war, they remained silent about the segregated military and truculent employers who refused to hire blacks for defense work. Throughout the war, the OWI saw the inclusion of race in popular media as destabilizing and kept a censori ous eye on black newspapers and magazines, discouraging calls for any radical change in civil rights (4).