Lecture Outline for Monday, March 3

BRAVE MEN AND COMMON WOMEN: GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURAL LIFE DURING WORLD WAR II

Summary: Today we will examine the gender contours of American culture during World War II. We will consider how mobilization for "total war" led to a privileging of the "citizen-soldier," and a corresponding revaluation of women's social and cultural roles. Using clips from the documentary film "Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter," we will examine how the US government and corporate enterprise first encouraged women's workforce participation, then discouraged it and reinforced women's traditional roles in the reconversion period. In addition to film clips, the lecture will also touch on the writings of Ernie Pyle and Philip Wylie. Both were popular writers of the war period whose work reflects the cultural preoccupation with gender during World War II. Finally, the lecture will address the unique cultural circumstances of World War II, particularly the government's use of media like radio and film to engage Americans in a "total war."

I. Introduction

A. Connections to last week:

1. focus on political culture

2. gender as a metaphoric field for the articulation of larger, national concerns

B. What were Americans' common, national concerns during WWII?

1. military mobilization

a. its implications for individual citizens

b. massive dislocation of individuals and families

c. anxieties about the effectsof warfare on America's young men

d. fear of attack and the new rhetoric of "total war"

II. World War II and American Culture: Myths and Realities

A. Was WWII a "Good War"?

B. Was the war a "watershed event" for women?

C. WWII and the American home front: propaganda and patriotism

III. Pyle and Wylie

A. Pyle immortalizes the American GI

1. the ordinary Americans whom Pyle describes were vastly appealing to
civilian readers during the war

2. implications of privileging the soldier for Americans not engaged in
the military effort: What did you do today . . . For Freedom?

B. Wylie condemns the leisurely and self-indulgent life of American women

1. reference back to last week: persistence of woman-blaming

2. reference back to two weeks ago: persisting influence of Freud on
American culture

a. mother-blaming

b. relationship to filmic construction of motherhood during
reconversion

IV. Clips from Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter

A. Initial celebration of the woman war worker

B. Increasing criticism of the woman war worker and civilians generally as the
war proceeds

C. Reconversion and the redomestication of wartime womanhood

V. Elasticity of wartime gender ideology and its relationship to larger cultural themes