World War II exacted a heavy toll on every country that was dragged into the conflict. Dawson (2019) states that “women were conscious actors who made decisions to fight for survival, for civil rights and for participation in the war” (176). During the war, thousands of women served their land everywhere: both on the front line, fighting alongside men, and in the rear – working on factories and plants manufacturing weapons, clothes, food.
Factory work was by no means easy, and it did not provide many opportunities such as career growth or social welfare. Instead, it only asked for sacrifices – shifts lasted more than 10 hours in a row, and the production demand was very high. Women had to leave their families, parents, and children, to provide for them, working themselves to the bone. In addition, the conditions in which women worked were not pleasant either, and more often than not become the cause of illnesses and injuries to them.
Despite the war being a major danger for everyone, there were still racial and gender prejudices in American society. For example, factories did not allow Black women to work in higher positions, such as clerks or secretaries. Instead, they were only let into the harder jobs of a lower level. Moreover, Blacks, as well as other minorities, were not allowed into the workers’ unions, and there was still racial tension towards them.
In the propaganda posters of military time, women were represented more as symbols of liberty, painted in a feminine light, according to the gender stereotypes of women being lesser than men. Wollney and Sternadori (2019) state that “wartime posters and ads typically showed middle-class women in individualistic jobs, while lower-class women were depicted in more communal settings, subordinate to men, and working unskilled factory or farm jobs” (6). Rather than calling into action as an example – like in the Soviet war propaganda – American propaganda mostly depicted women as White, middle-class caretakers, drawn into the labor by patriotic impulses.
World War II was unprecedented in its scale and impact. During it, a lot had changed, and the perception of women was one of the aspects that gained a new perspective. I would like to think that women, whose labor helped to secure a victory against the Nazis, taught then their children – especially daughters – that they are capable of much more than what society thinks they are.
Works Cited
Dawson, Sandra Trudgen. “Women and the Second World War.” International Journal of Military History and Historiography, vol. 39, no. 2, 2019, pp. 171–180., doi:10.1163/24683302-03902002.
Wollney, Easton, and Miglena Sternadori. “Feminine, Competent, Submissive: A Multimodal Analysis of Depictions of Women in U.S. Wartime Persuasive Messages During World War I and World War II.” Visual Communication Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 2019, pp. 3–21., doi:10.1080/15551393.2018.1530600.