"Join Up... But Don’t Let Your Family Down:" Married Women War Workers and the American Family Meal during World War II

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2014
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
American society remembers "Rosie the Riveter" of the popular 1942 song as the typical woman war worker during World War II; "We Can Do It!," the idealized Rosie says, managing to appear strong, feminine, and patriotic. The myth of unattached young Rosie obscures the fact that the majority of female war workers during World War II were married and that many were married with young children. For these wives and mothers, entering the workforce during the war was fraught with social and logistical difficulties. Propaganda from the Office of War Information (OWI) urged married women to enter the wartime workforce to ease the labor shortage caused by the conscription of men into the armed forces; these propaganda images leveraged themes of duty, patriotism, and country. Despite this government approbation directed toward working wives, deep cultural anxieties centered on the figure of the married woman who entered the workforce and, in doing so, flouted traditional gender roles. As a result of this discomfort with married women entering the paid labor economy, women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping re-emphasized the importance of female domesticity. The magazine's articles encouraging married women to focus on domestic work conflicted with the OWI's propaganda that asked women to take on jobs in war industries. Wives and mothers therefore met with competing pressures: these two sets of sources simultaneously urged them to work in the paid labor or in the domestic economy. The following thesis uses the lens of food preparation and the family meal to illuminate the conflicting pressures placed on married women during the war. Using sources from the OWI, Good Housekeeping, and The New York Times, I examine cultural constructions of food, food preparation, and mealtimes during the war. I also look at the ways in which women's magazines expected housewives to interact with food and the kitchen. The nutritional and cultural imperatives surrounding the family meal revealed the competing standards that converged on wives and mothers during the war. The family meal was a site in which women demonstrated adherence to both patriotic and domestic ideals—their love both for country and for family. However, Good Housekeeping also emphasized the importance of food preparation and family meals in a way that encouraged women to focus on their domestic roles rather than the jobs that were newly available.
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