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JOURNAL ARTICLE
Review
Reviewed Works: CreatingRosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War IIbyMaureen Honey; Women at War with America: Private Lives in a PatrioticEra by D'Ann Campbell
Review by: Leila J. Rupp
Signs
Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter, 1986), pp.401-403
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174065
Page Count: 3
Within the last decade, our knowledgeabout American women during the Second World War has grown by leaps and bounds.These two latest contributions represent the divergent approaches that have characterizedwork on the topic. Maureen Honey’s analysis of propaganda directed at white middle-class and working-class women focuseson the images of women created by the government and the media. In contrast, D’Ann Campbell turnsher gaze on women themselves, looking not only at riveters but also at servicewomen,nurses, housewives, and volunteers. Both move beyond existing literature, Honeyby analyzing class differences in recruitment propaganda and Campbell by uncoveringaspects of women‘s lives that historians have not previously been able to explore.And both raise, but ultimately leave us with, questions about the impact of thewar on women’s lives in the years following 1945.
Honey sets out to explore the propagandadirected at women by the government in order to understand how women were to bemobilized into nontraditional jobs without threatening traditional gender arrangements.To this end, she performs a content analysis of fiction and advertising in two magazines, the Saturday Evening Post. aimed at a white middle-class audience,and True Story, directed at working-class women. Neithermagazine included material on Black women or other women of color beyond the occasionalstereotyped or negative portrayal, suggesting that an analysis of magazines aimedat Black women would be necessary to see how race interacted with class and genderin propaganda.
Honey's chapter on the Saturday Evening Post presents some freshperspectives on recruitment propaganda, but the major contribution of the book liesin the analysis of True Story. Honey’sdifficulties in getting access to the confessional magazine speaks worlds about theclass bias inherent in the research process: confessional magazines are notcollected by libraries, and the publisher of True Storyallowed her access only during business hours for two weeks. Nevertheless, she readenough stories to allow her to draw out patterns in the propaganda directed at working-classwomen that differ from those in the Saturday Evening Post.While both magazines created positive images of working women, True Story portrayed fewer women in traditionally maleroles; continued to emphasize motherhood; and depicted women as passive, resigned,and vulnerable, compared with the competent, assertive heroines of the Post stories.
Honey ultimately explains the apparentparadox of the feminine mystique that followed on the heels of a supposedly liberating war by emphasizing the tension between traditionaland egalitarian images of women throughout wartimepropaganda. While certain aspects of the image of women, particularly in middle-classpropaganda, emphasized independence, competence, and autonomy, other aspects, especiallythe use of women as symbols of the family and of essential American values, leddirectly to the idealization of women that characterized the feminine mystique of the 1950s.
Honey‘s work adds an important dimensionto the existing picture of wartime propaganda directed at women. At times, though,her explanation of class differences in propaganda overlooks what seems to me primary—theinterests of government and business in stifling assertiveness and perpetuating powerlessnessamong working-class people, particularly working-class women—in favor of a perhapsunwarranted assumption that True Storyfiction responds to the needs of its readers. Although Creating Rosie the Riverter may not provide a definitive analysis ofthe interaction of class and gender in the creation of images of women, it goesfar beyond the myth of the housewife-turned-riveter so common in middle-class magazinepropaganda.
Women at War with America, as its subtitle reveals, eschewsany consideration of propaganda in favor of the actual experiences of women. Campbellmakes use of census and survey data and a wide range of published and unpublishedsources. Her statistical reanalysis of public opinion polls, in particular, allowsher to be sensitive to differences of race, class, ethnicity, age, marital status,and religion, This material provides the most comprehensive picture of women’s livesduring the war that we have to date.
Campbell fashions her material into anoriginal—if, in my opinion, not convincing—argument about the effects of the waron women. She focuses on women's attitudes and values, rather than on the impactof government, corporations, or the media. While she is following here in the traditionin women’s history that encourages attention to women as actors rather than passivevictims, she diverges from much of the recent work by arguing that attitudes, ratherthan material factors, play a central role in history. She argues that women'sreactions ”were produced primarily by their attitudes and values, especially thoseexpressed in the interaction of women and men, rather than by material factors suchas paychecks” (p. 4). In contrast with both those historians who argue that thewar served as a watershed for American women, laying the foundation for the women‘smovement of the 1970s, and those who maintain that the war had little long-termimpact on women, Campbell suggests that the war set the stage not for the 1970sbut for the 1950s and 1960's by shaping the suburban ideal of attention to familylife.
Campbell's argument that women are motivatedby internalized, private goals and ambitions suggests that structural changes—suchas admittance of women to the military, the establishment of day-care centers, andthe opening up of the labor force to larger numbers of women— have little impact.“Values” seem to take on a life of their own in Camp- bell’s analysis; they seemindependent of material reality, so that it is not clear how changes in values occur.Campbell identifies a “permanent equalitarian shift in the war generation" (p.228), which she sees as not incompatible with the widely held conviction that homemakingought to be a full-time job. She concludes: ”With marriages more companionate,and family life so psychologically rewarding to the vast majority of women, it requiredno mysterious packet of social or economic forces to keep women at home" (p.233). While I do not find Campbell’s argument convincing, Women at War with America does raise fascinating questions about therelationship of attitudes, ideology, and material reality.
It seems to me a mark of the vitalityof women’s history that scholars can identify both the feminism of the 1970s andthe domesticity of the 19503 as consequences of the same war.
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发表于 2018-4-21 09:56:20
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