Women's Wartime Research Articles

Blackout: reinventing women for wartime British cinema

The most universal civilian privation in World War II Britain, the blackout possessed many symbolic meanings. Among its complicated implications for filmmakers was a stigmatization of film spectacle--including the display of women, whose extravagant appearance connoted at best unpatriotic wastefulness and at worst collaboration with the enemy. Exploring the wartime breakdown of conventional gender roles on the screen and in the audience, Antonia Lant demonstrates that many British films of the period signaled their national cinematic identity by diverging from the notion of the Hollywood star, the mainstay of commercial American motion pictures, replacing her with a deglamourized, mobilized heroine. Nevertheless, the war machine demanded that British films continue to celebrate stable and reassuring gender roles. Contradictions abounded, both within film narratives and between narrative and real life. Analyzing films of all the major wartime studios, the author scrutinizes the efforts of realist and melodramatic texts to confront women's wartime experiences, including conscription. By combining study of contemporary posters, advertisements, propaganda notices, and cartoons with consideration of recent feminist theoretical work on the cinema, spectatorship, and history, she has produced the first book to examine the relationships among gender, cinema, and nationality as they are affected by the stresses of war.

Working Women and World War II

W ORLD WAR II has been customarily studied as an international event. Recently, social historians have cited the impact of the war years on American domestic life, including women's work, but none has attempted to examine the details of women's wartime life. This essay is concerned with the domestic effects of World War II by focusing on occurrences in the American city of Lowell, Massachusetts. The kind of work women performed, the conditions under which they worked, and how they viewed their role as workers, reflect the influence of a major global conflict.

Films of Suspicion and Distrust: Undercurrents of Female Consciousness in the 1940's

FILMS OF SUSPICION AND DISTRUST: UNDERCURRENTS OF FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE 1940's By Andrea Walsh Andrea Walsh is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at S. U.N. Y. Binghamton, specializing in women's studies andpopular culture. This article is a sectionfrom her dissertation entitled: "The Weeds Grow Long Near The Shore: The Women's Film and Female Consciousness in the 1940's. " Suspicion and distrust toward men have long been expressed by women in twentieth century America. Across race, age, class, ethnic and sexual preference lines, we can read historical and contemporary accounts of woman-to-woman warnings and confidences that "you can't trust a man," "men are only interested in one thing," and "no man will marry a 'used woman.'" (1) These warnings were (are) often articulated by women who ran the gamut from acceptance to rejection of nurturing, subordinate and subservient female roles. This female mode of defensiveness and suspicion has often coexisted with a more dominant ideology that stressed love, support and nurturance of the 'right man.' Because of their potentially volatile effects, these mistrustful and defensive feelings have often been belittled, suppressed and denied, or confined to the little-understood female realm of gossip. And, although we can find evidence suggesting its prevalence in 20th century historical, sociological and psychoanalytical literature, this dimension of female consciousness—the 'culture of pain'—has rarely been the subject of academic study. In order to have a fuller understanding ofthe current, more explicitly feminist articulations of these long-held female sentiments, it is important to trace their historical roots. This paper is one attempt to do that, by locating and analyzing the expression of these feelings in the culture and consciousness of American women during and immediately after WWII, specifically through an analysis ofthe "films of suspicion and distrust" popular in the 1940s During World War II, American women were placed in an historically unusual situation. Over 1 1 million men were mobilized for war, and women, as a labor reserve, moved in to fill what were previously defined as "men's jobs." Many women experienced significant occupational as well as geographical mobility during the war, juggling new and untraditional work roles along with household duties. However, women's wartime double duty was never significantly alleviated; day care and community support services were, for the most part, grossly inadequate during WWII. And their inadequacy was far from accidental, prefiguring the massive layoffs of female workers that would occur in the immediate postwar period. Although wartime polls indicated that up to 75 percent of female war workers wished to retain theirjobs in peacetime, after the war ended they were forced or "cooled" out of the industrial sector of the labor market. Women were encouraged to channel their energies into the rehabilitation of the returning vet, and the reestablishment of interrupted family lives. "Go back home" became the postwar rallying cry, as some (mainly white, middle class) women actually "went home," the birth rate zoomed upward; and others (mainly working class and minority women) reentered the work force in the lower paid, dead-end clerical (read: "female") sector of an expanding monopoly capitalism. As we can see. WWII and the postwar transition period, with the particular strains it created in male/female relationships, as well as the changes it brought about in the work and family roles of women, provides an important vantage point for the study of female consciousness. How to study female consciousness, i.e., the way(s) in which women perceived their everyday lives in the 1940s, is a difficult problem. "What happened to women in WWII?" does not fully answer the question ofhow American women perceived and responded to their experience in the 1 940s. The need to study female consciousness "from the bottom up" is easy to demonstrate. How to go about it is much more complex and difficult. Few direct sources (e.g., diaries, letters) for the study of female consciousness exist, and these few are often limited by the particular class, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference of the author(s). While we could conclude that exploring popular female consciousness in the 1940s is important, but essentially impossible, we would be overlooking a...