American Women In The 1940s Essay

The war provided radical new employment opportunities for women in the U.S. Many took advantage of those opportunities which led to an increased employment among American women. These opportunities contributed in defeating the stereotypical tasks of women such as cooking, cleaning, and motherhood. It allowed women to prove their leadership and worth by working in the military, in governmental departments, and in public transport. On the other hand, Japanese women were treated as objects and presented as gifts to Japanese military troops. They were known as comfort women and were forced into prostitution services. This reveals the differences of women’s roles in America and Japan. American women were offered more noble involvements, and were

Within a few years, the role of women morphed from a simple housewife to a hardworking war industry worker. With millions of men fighting in the war, employers turned to women to fill the empty jobs. Slogans, such as “The more women at

Picture living in a society where women did not have the rights they have today. The right to work, the right to an education, and most importantly the right to vote. The emergence of these rights along with various others dramatically changed the lives of women across America during the 1920’s. Due to the hard work and determination of these ladies, their lives changed in politics, the home, the workplace and in education (ncpedia.org). Little did they know, their actions would change the lives of countless women across the world forever.

In 1942 the Women’s Army Corps was introduced. These women worked in more than 200 non- combatant jobs stateside and also every part of the war. They served not only as common nurses but also “within the ranks of the United States Army.” There was also the Women’s Army Corps introduced in 1942. This group of 1,100 women was asked to join and fly military aircraft, due to the shortage of pilots. Their job was to fly from factories to military bases and also different take off points around the country. Even though during their enlistment the WASP were supposed to become part of the military, after a couple years the program was cancelled. The last group the, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, was already established. After being absent for twenty-three years, they had to be reactivated because of WW2. While a large portion of these women did the job of secretarial and clerical they had other jobs they did. Thousands of WAVES performed duties in aviation, medical professions, communication, intelligence, science and technology. These military jobs and the other non-traditional jobs the women participated in made them almost like a ghost in their home front.

As Amy Bloom once said “I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves”. As the Depression was ending, people wanted to reinvent themselves and be better. They had a new outlook on life; it was full of positivity and belief that they could do anything. It was a time of coming together for common causes, and trying new things that they thought they could not do.

The Effect of World War II on American Women America entered the 2nd World War in December 1940 after the Japanese Air force attacked American war ships at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. They fought alongside Britain and France against Nazi Germany and her allies. Although many American soldiers were injured and killed in the war, the impact on Americans back home was generally positive, as the US was too far away from Europe to suffer from bombing etc. America was far better off than it had been before.

The role of women in society in the United States has undergone dramatic changes over the past several decades. For instance, an increasing number of women have taken on new responsibilities besides the traditional ones at home and taken up paying work. Besides making up a lot more of the work force than before, more women are also taking up leadership roles and have also made great progress on health issues affecting women. While World War II and the feminist revolution of the Sixties did a lot to redefine gender roles in American society, equality has not yet been fully realized for women in America.

During World War 2, women took up roles in the workforce that had been left understaffed as men were sent into service. They were encouraged and commended for fulfilling the needs on the home front, this included working in traditionally male roles such as work in manufacturing supplies for war. Once the war was over, soldiers returned and demanded their jobs be yielded to them. Mass media turned

The women’s rights movement was a huge turning point for women because they had succeeded in the altering of their status as a group and changing their lives of countless men and women. Gender, Ideology, and Historical Change: Explaining the Women’s Movement was a great chapter because it explained and analyzed the change and causes of the women’s movement. Elaine Tyler May’s essay, Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism and Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism by Alice Echols both gave important but different opinions and ideas about the women’s movement. Also, the primary sources reflect a number of economic, cultural, political, and demographic influences on the women’s movement. This chapter

Prior to and during the 1960’s the traditional outlook on women as equals was limites in nearly every aspect. From marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood a woman was expected to follow a pre destined order and timeline in life to complete these tasks. The expectation of women at the time was to marry young, 18-24, and quickly start a family where she would devote her life to raising children and housekeeping. Wives of the time period shouldered the responsibilities of child care and home making, while men were expected to merely work, come home to a clean house and dinner, and then slip off to bed. Until the late-1960’s when women began pushing for social change to rid themselves from the slavery of traditional womanhood. Though this life style seems more like imprisonment, some women didn’t feel that way, for example my grandmother Armalene Haxby, was content in her role as the home maker. However we know that this idea wasn’t shared with the rest of American women. The 1960’s was filled with social reforms and women rights protest meant to free the American women to be equal to their male counter parts. An excerpt from Betty Friedan 's book The Feminine Mystique, gave insight to some women’s outlook on life, "I 'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I 'm a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?"(Friedan 63) What was it like to be a house wife? Was it in fact

In a sense, women in America were the epitome of the term “housewife”. Most of the women in this era had no meaningful occupation to bide their time while their husband was at work, or while her children were at school. To fill this nagging void, they often filled their time by doing menial and often unneeded tasks, such as “matching slipcover material”. The most glaring fact is that to these women, these tasks were not meaningless. They were small iotas of proof that these women lived vicariously through their youth and their husbands. Essentially, they were simply brainwashed catalysts that helped push their husbands and children’s future ahead while their life stood in stagnancy, unbeknownst to them. In their endless pursuit of facilitating the growth of their family, society has “taught [the women] to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted

After 1917, when women were allowed to join the military, the most popular job was nursing. 33,000 women served as nurses during the last two years of World War One, for the first time women were officially considered apart of America’s military (Time Line: Women in the U.S. Military). The more years that passed with women involved in the military, the more respect they gained in the

3. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, events occurred and organizations were formed to increase awareness of feminism and how it affected society. The Civil Rights Movement had the support of many women. However women were hardly recognized in their participation in the movement. Unrecognition motivated women to found organizations that would be recognized as the “Second Wave” of feminism. In the late 1960s, organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) were founded to help put forth the issues women faced during this time. NOW dedicated its focus to employment equality, and later extended its focus to child care,

The women’s movement began in the nineteenth century when groups of women began to speak out against the feeling of separation, inequality, and limits that seemed to be placed on women because of their sex (Debois 18). By combining two aspects of the past, ante-bellum reform politics and the anti-slavery movement, women were able to gain knowledge of leadership on how to deal with the Women’s Right Movement and with this knowledge led the way to transform women’s social standing (Dubois 23). Similarly, the movement that made the largest impact on American societies of the 1960’s and 1970’s was the Civil Right Movement, which in turn affected the women’s movement (Freeman 513). According to

The rise of feminism in the 1960s can be contributed to contradictions in economic labor incentives, conservative social constraints and women’s exclusion from reactionary movements. Whereas both before the war and during the war, American society taught, encouraged and reinforced women to enter the workforce, when men returned from WWII, the idea that women could continue to play prominent roles in the workplace shifted and societal norms replaced the riveter with the housewife. These housewives, sometimes college educated, grew to an ever larger population as the fifties progressed. Compounded with technology reducing the more traditional workload for the average housewife, women felt discontented and frustrated with their lives. by the time of release of The Feminine Mystique, women were ready to fight for something more. More than personal discontent, economic contradictions fomented the rise of feminism in the 1960’s by reinforcing labor demand for women while the society excluded them. Due to the influx of capital and productivity after the U.S. began to shift towards a military-industrial complex, demand for women in the labor force nearly tripled, but their wages decreased relative to mens. Further contradictions that were a result of exclusion from reactionary movements, include the exclusion of the topic of women’s rights in the original counter-culture protes, the contradiction that feminist women’s groups proved easy to put together and that southern religious