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Books : History : United States : 20th Century : World War II : Women
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Our Mothers' War is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated.Our Mothers' War gives center stage to one of WWII's most essential fighting forces: the women of America, whose extraordinary bravery, strength, and humanity shine through on every page.
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Tells of women’s experiences keeping the city alive and functioning during the 900 day Siege of Leningrad, through their own words and descriptions.
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The sixth volume in one of the great ongoing works of American cultural history--Kevin Starr's monumental Americans and the California Dream--Embattled Dreams is a peerless work of cultural history following California in the years surrounding World War II.
During the 1940s California ascended to a new, more powerful role in the nation. Starr describes the vast expansion of the war industry and California's role as the "arsenal of democracy" (especially the significant part women played in the aviation industry). He examines the politics of the state: Earl Warren as the dominant political figure, the anti-Communist movement and "red baiting," and the early career of Richard Nixon. He also looks at culture, ranging from Hollywood to the counterculture, to film noir and detective stories. And he illuminates the harassment of Japanese immigrants and the shameful treatment of other minorities, especially Hispanics and blacks.
In Embattled Dreams, Starr again provides a spellbinding account of the Golden State, narrating California's transformation from a regional power to a dominant economic, social, and cultural force.
"With a novelist's eye for the telling detail, and a historian's grasp of the sweep of grand events.... [Starr's] got it all down.... I read the book with absorbed admiration."--Herman Wouk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War
"The scope of Starr's scholarship is breathtaking."--Atlantic Monthly
"A magnificent accomplishment."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Brilliant and epic social and cultural history."--Business Week
"Ebullient, nuanced, interdisciplinary history of the grandest kind."--San Francisco Chronicle
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View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction“In this carefully crafted and highly readable history, Marilyn E. Hegarty reminds us of the multiple links between sexuality and war. She captures the contradictions and shows us how women's sexuality was both mobilized and policed.”
—Joanne Meyerowitz, author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States“Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes offers a substantive and complex narrative of the sweeping and multiple constraints on female sexuality during World War II. Hegarty's study is the best since Allan Brandt's epic work in its nuanced attention to the process by which female sexuality — deemed both necessary and suspect — was harnessed in service to the state, while female sexual desire and women’s choices to engage in heterosexual activity remained unspeakable and became critical targets for containment during and after the war. This is a provocative and compelling book.”
—Leisa D. Meyer, author of Creating G. I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II“The strength of Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes is [Hegarty’s] delving deep into bureaucratic files, piecing together the Federal and state US officials’ steps toward, and thinking behind, mobilizing and controlling American women’s sexuality.”
—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of EmpireVictory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes offers a counter-narrative to the story of Rosie the Riveter, the icon of female patriotism during World War II. With her fist defiantly raised and her shirtsleeves rolled up, Rosie was an asexual warrior on the homefront. But thousands of women supported the war effort not by working in heavy war industries, but by providing morale-boosting services to soldiers, ranging from dances at officers’ clubs to more blatant forms of sexual services, such as prostitution.
While the de-sexualized Rosie was celebrated, women who used their sexuality — either intentionally or inadvertently — to serve their country encountered a contradictory morals campaign launched by government and social agencies, which shunned female sexuality while valorizing masculine sexuality. This double-standard was accurately summed up by a government official who dubbed these women “patriotutes”: part patriot, part prostitute.
Marilyn E. Hegarty explores the dual discourse on female sexual mobilization that emerged during the war, in which agencies of the state both required and feared women’s support for, and participation in, wartime services. The equation of female desire with deviance simultaneously over-sexualized and desexualized many women, who nonetheless made choices that not only challenged gender ideology but defended their right to remain in public spaces.
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Critical acclaim for Sisters in the Resistance
"Often moving . . . always fascinating . . . women in the French Resistance is a key subject. Margaret Weitz has gathered personal testimonies . . . and set them in an intelligible context that helps us understand how all French people--men and women--experienced the Nazi occupation." --Robert Paxton, Mellon Professor of Social Sciences, Columbia University, and author of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944.
"Compulsive reading . . . a valuable book which vividly portrays the intricacies of resistance within France, written in an easy but serious style." --Times Literary Supplement (London).
"An absolutely stunning and compelling chronicle of dauntless courage and unflagging patriotism." --Booklist.
"[Margaret Collins Weitz's] well-researched, thoughtful study. . . has filled a gap in the history of World War II." --Publishers Weekly.
"Balancing absorbing narrative and astute analysis, Margaret Collins Weitz has integrated the unsung achievements of women into the history of the French Resistance." --Carole Fink, Professor of History, The Ohio State University, and author of Marc Bloch: A Life in History.
"Fifty years after the end of World War II, Sisters in the Resistance renders homage to the courageous women of the French Resistance. It is high time for their contributions to be fully acknowledged, and fortunate indeed that they have found such a sympathetic, scholarly, and lucid chronicler in Margaret Collins Weitz." --Marilyn Yalom, author of Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory.
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In a disturbing behind-the-scenes history of the early achievements of Margaret Sanger's American birth control movement, Carole R. McCann scrutinizes the movement's compromises as well as its successes.
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The Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women pilots to fly combat missions. During World War II the Red Air Force formed three all-female units--grouped into separate fighter, dive bomber, and night bomber regiments--while also recruiting other women to fly with mostly male units. Their amazing story, fully recounted for the first time by Reina Pennington, honors a group of fearless and determined women whose exploits have not yet received the recognition they deserve.Pennington chronicles the creation, organization, and leadership of these regiments, as well as the experiences of the pilots, navigators, bomb loaders, mechanics, and others who made up their ranks, all within the context of the Soviet air war on the Eastern Front. These regiments flew a combined total of more than 30,000 combat sorties, produced at least thirty Heroes of the Soviet Union, and included at least two fighter aces.
Among their ranks were women like Marina Raskova, the "Soviet Amelia Earhart," a renowned aviator who persuaded Stalin in 1941 to establish the all-women regiments; the daredevil "night witches" who flew ramshackle biplanes on nocturnal bombing missions over German frontlines; and fighter aces like Liliia Litviak, whose twelve "kills" are largely unknown in the West. Here, too, is the story of Aleksandr Gridnev, a fighter pilot twice arrested by the Soviet secret police before he was chosen to command the women's fighter regiment.
Pennington draws upon personal interviews and the Soviet archives to detail the recruitment, training, and combat lives of these women. Deftly mixing anecdote with analysis, her work should find a wide readership among scholars and buffs interested in the history of aviation, World War II, or the Russian military, as well as anyone concerned with the contentious debates surrounding military and combat service for women.
This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.
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Here is the fascinating story of the first women to fly U.S. military aircraft—the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. Although these pioneers were never allowed to fly in combat, they did fly in many essential wartime missions—some that the men didn’t even want to take on.
Through firsthand accounts, these women share their experiences as they test-fly newly repaired aircraft, drag banners behind their planes so male trainees can practice shooting moving targets (!), and ferry all kinds of aircraft from factories to military bases. Their courage, determination, and lively camaraderie make every page inspiring and surprising.
Yankee Doodle Gals will give today’s young people a new look at World War II and show them just how dramatically society has changed since then.
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The story of the fallen woman was a staple of film melodrama in the late 1920s and 1930s. In traditional plots, a woman commits a sexual transgression, usually adultery. She becomes an outcast, often a prostitute, suffering humiliations that culminate in her death. In more modern variants, the heroine is a stereotypical "kept woman," "gold digger," or wisecracking shopgirl who uses men to become rich. In The Wages of Sin, Lea Jacobs uses the fallen woman film, which served as a focal point for public criticism of the film industry, to explore Hollywood's system of self-censorship and the evolution of the rules governing representations of sexuality.
Drawing on the extensive case files of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the industry trade association responsible for censorship, Jacobs focuses on six films. Her close analyses of The Easiest Way, Baby Face, Blonde Venus, Anna Karenina, Kitty Foyle, and Stella Dallas reveal the ideology of self-regulation at work and the social constraints affecting the film industry.
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"There is nothing like a dame," proclaims the song from South Pacific. Certainly there is nothing like the fast-talking dame of screen comedies in the 1930s and '40s. In this engaging book, film scholar and movie buff Maria DiBattista celebrates the fast-talking dame as an American original. Coming of age during the Depression, the dame—a woman of lively wit and brash speech—epitomized a new style of self-reliant, articulate womanhood. Dames were quick on the uptake and hardly ever downbeat. They seemed to know what to say and when to say it. In their fast and breezy talk seemed to lie the secret of happiness, but also the key to reality. DiBattista offers vivid portraits of the grandest dames of the era, including Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, and others, and discusses the great films that showcased their compelling way with words—and with men.With their snappy repartee and vivid colloquialisms, these fast-talkers were verbal muses at a time when Americans were reinventing both language and the political institutions of democratic culture. As they taught their laconic male counterparts (most notably those appealing but tongue-tied American icons, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart) the power and pleasures of speech, they also reimagined the relationship between the sexes.
In such films as Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and The Lady Eve, the fast-talking dame captivated moviegoers of her time. For audiences today, DiBattista observes, the sassy heroine still has much to say.
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Olga Greenlaw kept the War Diary of the American Volunteer Group--the Flying Tigers--while those gallant mercenaries defended Burma and China from Japanese aggression during the opening months of the Pacific War. Returning to the United States in 1942, she wrote The Lady and the Tigers, which war correspondent Leland Stowe hailed as "an authoritative and true to life story of the AVG." Out of print for more than half a century, her book has now been brought up to date by Daniel Ford, author of Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group. What's more, Ford explains for the first time where Olga and Harvey Greenlaw came from, how they became caught up in the saga of the Flying Tigers, and what happened to them after their tumultuous year with the AVG. Black and white photographs--many never published before--round out the text.
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Before December 1941 drew to a close, five navy nurses on Guam became the first American military women of WWII to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than seventy army nurses survived five months of combat conditions in the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor before being captured, only to endure more than three years in prison camps. In all, nearly one hundred nurses became POWs.Many of these army nurses were considered too vital to the war effort to be evacuated from the Philippines. Though receiving only half the salary of male officers of the same rank, they helped establish outdoor hospitals and treated thousands of casualties despite rapidly decreasing supplies and rations. After their capture, they continued to care for the sick and wounded throughout their internment in the prison camps.
When freedom came, the U.S. military ordered the nurses to sign agreements with the government not to discuss their horrific experiences. Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have conducted interviews with survivors and scoured archives for letters, diaries, and journals to uncover the heroism and sacrifices of these brave women. Their dedication to accuracy, combined with their personal expertise in medical care and military culture and discipline, has resulted in a honest, fair history of the dedicated military nurses who were captured in the Pacific theater during WWII.