1. For a detailed account of how the recruitment campaign was handled by the Post and other magazines, see my study Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Other overviews of cultural changes prompted by women's entry into war jobs include Rupp, Leila, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Hartmann, Susan, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982)Google Scholar; Anderson, Karen, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981)Google Scholar; and Chafe, William, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. An informative essay on the Post's cover of Rosie the Riveter is Dabakis, Melissa, “Gendered Labor: Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter and the Discourses of Wartime Womanhood,” in Gender and American History Since 1890, ed. Melosh, Barbara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 182–204Google Scholar.

2. Peterson, Theodore, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 183Google Scholar. Other studies of the Post include Tebbel, John, George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948)Google Scholar; and Cohn, Jan, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989)Google Scholar. The central place of magazines in American popular culture in the first part of the century, driven largely by the fiction they published, is described in Peterson, , Magazines, 1964Google Scholar; Ohmann, Richard, “Where Did Mass Culture Come From? The Case of Magazines,” Berkshire Review 16 (1981): 85–101Google Scholar; Wood, James P., Magazines in the United States (New York: Ronald, 1971)Google Scholar; Woodward, Helene, The Lady Persuaders (New York: Ivan Oblansky, 1960)Google Scholar; Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines, 1905–1930, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Ballaster, Ross, Beetham, Margaret, Frazier, Elizabeth, Hebron, Sandra, eds., Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and the Women's Magazine (New York: N.Y.U. Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

3. I have described extensively the connection of these and other magazines to the government's propaganda operation in Creating Rosie the Riveter (28–59). I have read 50 stories, randomly selected, from women's magazines (Good Housekeeping, The Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's) during the recruitment campaign and have found themes similar to those in Post fiction, but a narrower narrative scope, one that avoids industrial jobs.

4. Professional writers could make anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000 a year publishing in the Post on the eve of the 1940s according to a Time article, “Inheritor's Year,” 31 (01 10, 1938): 22–24Google Scholar. Writers of the stature of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck, and Mary Roberts Rinehart were regular contributors to the Post before the war, drawn by its generous and prompt commissions. Other evidence that the Post offered lucrative deals to writers is provided by Peterson (Magazines, 182). Although the Post's chief architect, George Horace Lorimer, retired in 1936, the solid reputation he established for the magazine as one of high quality drew many writers who also knew they would get paid promptly for their work (Cohn, , Creating America, 276–84Google Scholar).

5. The Saturday Evening Post is listed as a member of the Magazine Advisory Committee in a memo from Dorothy Ducas to Palmer Hoyt, September 17, 1943, Magazine Advisory Committee file, entry 340, box 1696, Record Group 208, National Records Center, Suitland, MD (all references to archival material are from this center). The best information on the history and makeup of the Writers' War Board is Howell, Robert, “The Writers' War Board: Writers and World War II” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1971)Google Scholar. The most prominent analyses of the Office of War Information are Winkler, Allan, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Jones, David, “The U.S. Office of War Information and American Public Opinion During World War II, 1939–1945” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York—Binghamton, 1976)Google Scholar. Regular contributors of fiction to the Post who were executive members of the Writers' War Board included Rita Halle Kleeman, J. P. Marquand, Stephen Vincent Benet, Walter D. Edmonds, Margaret Culkin Banning, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Arthur Train, Bernard DeVoto, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Kenneth Roberts, Sophie Kerr, Robert Pinkerton, Paul Gallico, Katharine Brush, and Faith Baldwin.

6. Ben Hibb, editor of the Post at this time, is mentioned in much OWI correspondence as an attendee of government meetings on media issues.

7. The Magazine War Guide was published by the Magazine Bureau and ran from July 1942 until April 1945. It reached the editors of up to 600 magazines with a combined readership of 140 million people and it was sent to over 900 people on magazine staffs, along with 400 government information employees. One thousand copies were sent to free-lance writers through the Writers' War Board. The Guide was circulated three months ahead of desired publication date of stories to give editors and writers time to put them together. The Magazine Bureau was established in June 1942 and closed operation in August 1945. This study is informed by my reading of all issues of the Guide and its supplement for genre fiction plus all records of the Magazine Bureau. These are located in Record Group 208, National Records Center.

8. This study is based on a reading of all fiction concerning women in wartime work in the Saturday Evening Post from January 1941 through March 1946 and includes all first stories in each issue from those years whether or not they concerned women in the work force. The number of first stories and others selected for their subject matter totaled 472.

9. Magazine editorials, articles, and fiction stories on programs being promoted by OWI file, entry 343, box 1699, National Records Center.

10. Sangster, Margaret E., “The Wartime Love Story,” Writer 57 (03 1944): 67–69Google Scholar. As I have indicated, fiction writer Rex Stout headed both the Writers' War Board and the Authors' League during the war. In addition, Elmer Davis, OWI's chief of operations, was a former free-lance writer for Adventure, an action story pulp magazine, and an early member of the WWB. WWB member and fiction writer, Robert Landry, described his role in the war effort as follows: “I think we broke through a lot of taboos, did many things the government wanted done and could not itself do… The government was slow; we were fast… World War II was strangely unemotional and needed a Writers' War Board to stir things up.” Another writer of popular fiction, Clifton Fadiman, agreed, characterizing the Board as “an arm of the government.” So enthusiastic was the WWB, in fact, that it failed to follow OWI instructions in October 1944 to cease much of its operations when Germany was defeated, and it picked up the slack left in OWI operations by a budget cut in late 1943 that was imposed by Republicans fearful that Roosevelt's New Deal was being propagandized (Howell, , “Writers' War Board,” 58, 135, 149, 499Google Scholar). Fiction writers who published in the Post and were executive members of the WWB are listed in note 5. Other fiction writers who published in magazines and worked for WWB committees included Struthers Burt, Van Wyck Brooks, Alan Green, Christopher LaFarge, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Upton Sinclair, Fannie Hurst, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, MacKinlay Kantor, Kenneth Roberts, Margaret Widdemar, and Ray Stannard Baker. Other writers in this executive group were Langston Hughes, Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Thompson, and Oscar Hammerstein II, among others (“Writers' War Board Annual Report,” January 1944, Writers' War Board file, entry 339, box 1695).

11. The genesis of this character in the 1920s is described by Ryan, Mary P., “The Projection of a New Womanhood: The Movie Moderns in the 1920s,' in Decades of Discontent: The Woman's Movement, 1920–1940, ed. Jensen, Joan and Scharf, Lois (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), 113–30Google Scholar. See also Fishbein, Leslie, “Dancing Mothers (1926): Flappers, Mothers, Freud, and Freedom,” Women's Studies 12 (1986): 241–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Melosh, Barbara, Engendering Culture: Manhood & Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991)Google Scholar.

13. Todd, Ellen Wiley, The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 178–79Google Scholar.

14. Although women experienced a 20 percent unemployment rate during the Depression, clerical work held its own and provided consistent employment for young, single women during the first three decades of the 20th century, including the 1930s. Ware, Susan, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 32–36Google Scholar. For discussion of negative cultural images of women and work from the 1930s, including the gold digger, see Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 144–51Google Scholar; and Weibel, Kathryn, Mirror, Mirror: Images of Women Reflected in Popular Culture (New York: Anchor, 1977), 102–10Google Scholar. See also Humpries, Jane, “Women: Scapegoats and Safety Valves in the Great Depression,” Review of Radical Political Economist 8 (Spring 1976): 98–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scharf, Lois, To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980)Google Scholar; Wandersee, Winifred, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jensen, and Scharf, , Decades of Discontent, 1983Google Scholar.

15. This poll is entitled, “National Registration for Civilian Defense or War Work,” September 1943, Special Services Bureau file, entry 118, box 706.

16. These appeals appear in “The Womanpower Question,” Magazine War Guide Supplement 3, 10 30, 1942Google Scholar; “Womanpower in the War,” New Magazine War Guide for 11/12 1942 and 08 18, 1942Google Scholar; “Education for War Jobs,” Magazine War Guide for 02/03 1943 and 11 19, 1943Google Scholar; “Manpower,” Magazine War Guide for 03/04 1943 and 12 17, 1942Google Scholar; and “Skilled Workers Wanted,” Magazine War Guide for 04/05 1943 and 01 5, 1943, entry 345, box 1700Google Scholar.

17. “Warning to Servicemen's Wives,” Magazine War Guide for 05/06 1943Google Scholar. This item says in part, “Migration of men and women to other towns is decidedly undesirable because of housing and transportation lacks. Therefore your best service can be rendered right in your own town.” “Women in Necessary Services,” Magazine War Guide for 06/07 1943 and 03 17, 1943Google Scholar also mentions this issue (entry 345, box 1700).

18. Magazine War Guide for November/December 1942 and August 18, 1942; and Magazine War Guide for January/February 1943 and October 19, 1942, entry 345, box 1700.

19. “Discomfort,” Magazine War Guide for 03/04 1943 and 12 17, 1942Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

20. “War Production Drive,” Magazine War Guide for 12/01 1943 and 09 18, 1942Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

21. “Toughening Up for War,” War Guide Supplement for Love and Western Love Magazines, 10 15, 1942Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700. Although this directive was aimed at “Love” magazines, the supplements for genre writers were not limited to those venues. They were accessible to all writers subscribing to the Magazine War Guide and just about all specifically fiction-oriented guidelines from OWI were in the supplements.

22. Ibid.

23. Magazine War Guide for June/July 1943 and March 17, 1943, entry 345, box 1700.

24. War Guide Supplement for Confession Magazines, September 11, 1942, entry 345, box 1700.

25. Melosh, , Engendering Culture, 83–109Google Scholar. Women were only 19 percent of New Deal artists according to Melosh (220).

26. “A Challenge to America's Womanhood,” War Guide Supplement for Love and Western Love Magazines, 10 15, 1942Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

27. Sangster, “Wartime Love Story. The reference “4-F” is to the military classification designating someone as physically unfit for service.

28. A relevant study is Litoff, Judy Barrett and Smith, David, “‘Will He Get My Letter?’ Popular Portrayals of Mail and Morale During World War II,” Journal of Popular Culture 23 (1990): 21–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. The quote appears in “The Womanpower Question,” War Guide Supplement 3 for Confession Magazines, 10 30, 1942Google Scholar. Items urging conservation of the kind found in this story include “Silk and Nylon Stocking Conservation Campaign,” November 19, 1942; “Fashions,” December 17, 1942; “Fashions for War Workers,” May 15, 1943; “Fashion,” June 16, 1943; “Conserving Resources,” September 15, 1943; “Equitable Distribution of Consumer Goods,” December 10, 1943; and “Wage Stabilization,” 03 17, 1943, Magazine War GuideGoogle Scholar, entry 345, box 1700. This campaign, timed to run in the spring of 1944, was designed to showcase women in the military and to encourage women to stay on the job in wartime plants until victory was declared.

30. Karen Anderson discusses wartime propaganda's tendency to cast masculine work roles in traditionally feminine terms in Wartime Women (61).

31. Sangster, “Wartime Love Story.”

32. “Resistance to Taking War Jobs in Three New England Cities,” Special Memorandum, no. 62, June 24, 1943, Special Services Bureau, entry 118, box 706.

33. The equation of female sexual display with overconsumption of consumer goods we see in this story, “My Own Money,” was also a characteristic of wartime films according to Doane, Mary Ann, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. “War Jobs,” Magazine War Guide Supplement 7 for 05/06 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

35. “Women in Necessary Services,” Magazine War Guide for 06/07 1943 and 03 17, 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

36. “September Women at Work Covers,” Magazine War Guide for 07/08 1943 and 04 17, 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

37. “Training Five Million War Workers,” Magazine War Guide for 08/09 1943 and 05 15, 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

38. War Guide Supplement 3 for Confession Magazines, October 30, 1942, entry 345, box 1700.

39. “Jobs for Returning Soldiers and Sailors,” Magazine War Guide for 09/10 1943 and 06 16, 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700. For an illuminating discussion of the propaganda directed at women about soldiers returning to civilian life, see Hartman, Susan, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on Women's Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” Women's Studies 5 (1978): 223–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. “Simplified Entertaining,” Magazine War Guide for 01/02 1943 and 10 19, 1942Google Scholar; Magazine War Guide for March/April 1943 and December 17, 1942; and Magazine War Guide for June/July 1943 and March 17, 1943, entry 345, box 1700.

41. U.S. Women's Bureau, “Women Workers in Ten War Production Areas and Their Postwar Employment Plans,” Bulletin 209 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 4.

42. Ibid. This 1944 survey showed that only 25 percent of women in wartime plants had less than two years of work experience in 1944 and that about 50 percent of new labor-force entrants into these jobs were former high-school students. A Roper poll taken in June 1943, of which the government made note, indicated that 47.8 percent of employed women wished to do the same kind of work after the war and an additional 16.9 percent said they would switch jobs but keep working (“Postwar Employment of Women,” Special Services Bureau file, entry 118, box 706).

43. Sheila Tobias and Lisa Anderson, “What Really Happened to Rosie the Riveter: Demobilization and the Female Labor Force, 1945–47” (New York: MSS Modular, 1974); Quick, Paddy, “Rosie the Riveter: Myths and Realities,” Radical America 9 (07 1975): 115–32Google Scholar; and Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Rosie the Riveter: Who Was She?” Labor History 24 (1983): 248–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. For a description of the propaganda specifically directed at working-class women, see my study Creating Rosie the Riveter, chapter 3, “The Working-Class Woman and the Recruitment Campaign.” I found in my study of True Story, a leading confession magazine of the 1940s, that images of work were more traditional than those in the Post and that women characters tended not to be placed in factory settings. Interestingly enough, I found similar tendencies in middle-class women's magazines where characters tended to be office workers, although more women professionals appeared in this venue than in the confession magazine.

45. “Postwar Plans for Small-Town USA,” Magazine War Guide for 12/01 1944 and 09 15, 1943Google Scholar; “Need for Teachers,” Magazine War Guide for 03/04 1944 and 12 10, 1943Google Scholar; “Procurement and Assignment Service for Nurses,” Magazine War Guide for 07 1944Google Scholar; “Women in Post-War Jobs,” Magazine War Guide for 01 1945Google Scholar; and “Teacher Shortage,” Magazine War Guide for 02 1945Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

46. “Post War,” Magazine War Guide for 06/07 1943 and 03 17, 1943Google Scholar, entry 345, box 1700.

47. Eleanor Straub describes this government policy toward women workers and the unsuccessful battle of the Women's Bureau to protect new industrial work opportunities for them in “U.S. Government Policy Toward Civilian Women during World War II,” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1973Google Scholar; and in Prologue 5 (Winter 1973): 240–54Google Scholar. See also Danker, Anita, “Government Policy and Women in the Workplace through Depression and War,” New England Journal of History 45 (1988): 16–38Google Scholar.

48. Memo on “Women in the War Campaign” to advertisers from Allan Wilson, undated; Womanpower Recruitment Campaign files, War Advertising Council, entry 90, box 587.

49. In contrast, Karen Beck Skold reveals that at least 50 percent of the women working in such jobs at Kaiser shipyards wanted to keep their jobs (Skold, , “The Job He Left Behind: American Women in the Shipyards During World War II,” in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. Berkin, Carol and Lovett, Clara [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980], 55–75Google Scholar). See also Kesselman, Amy, Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver During World War II and Reconversion (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

50. Melosh, , Engendering Culture, 53–82Google Scholar.

51. Michel, Sonya, “American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the World Wars, ed. Higonnet, Margaret, Jenson, Jane, Michel, Sonya, and Weitz, Margaret (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 154–67Google Scholar. Michel includes a significant statement made by Paul McNutt, head of the War Manpower Commission, that reinforces our view of the government's commitment to home roles for women: “The first responsibility of women with young children in war and peace is to give suitable care in their own homes to their children.”

52. Anderson, , Wartime Women, 36–42Google Scholar.

53. Anderson, Karen, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers During World War II,” Journal of American History 69 (06 1982): 82–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chester Gregory confirms Anderson's picture of the wartime black labor force, adding that ammunition and small arms plants hired the most black women (Gregory, , Women in Defense Work During World War II [New York: Exposition, 1974], 142–45Google Scholar).

54. Women's Bureau, Women Workers, 1946, 18Google Scholar; and “Negro Women War Workers,” Bulletin 205 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945).

55. Sporadic attempts were made by the Magazine Bureau to combat “race hatred” on the home front as it called for writers to feature African Americans in defense work. It arranged, for example, to have an article published entitled “Negro Women in Skilled Defense Jobs” (Magazine editorials, articles, and fiction stories on programs being promoted by OWI file, entry 343, box 1699). M. Joyce Baker also notes the stereotyped treatment of an African-American character played by Hattie McDaniel in the 1944 film Since You Went Away. McDaniel, had recently received an Oscar for her mammy role in Gone With the Wind (1939)Google Scholar. Although this character takes a job in a wartime factory, she insists on living with the white family for whom she worked as a live-in domestic (Baker, , Images of Women in Film: The War Years, 1941–1945 [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978], 100Google Scholar).

56. Domestic service work declined from 60 to 44½ percent of all employed black women between 1940 and 1944 (Anderson, , “Last Hired,” 1982Google Scholar).

57. Berelson, Bernard and Salter, Patricia, “Majority and Minority Americans: An Analysis of Magazine Fiction,” Public Opinion Quarterly 10 (1946): 168–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Doane, Mary Ann confirms this study in her discussion of racism in the era's films, The Desire to Desire (80)Google Scholar. See also Koppes, Clayton, “Hollywood and the Politics of Representation: Women, Workers, and African Americans in World War II Movies,” in The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society, ed. O'Brien, Kenneth and Parsons, Lynn (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995)Google Scholar.

58. At the moment, little has been published about wartime experiences or images of minority women. A good oral history of some of these workers is provided by Gluck, Sherna, who interviewed former aircraft workers in California (Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change [Boston: Twayne 1987])Google Scholar. Connie Field interviews three black war workers in her film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Clarity Educational Productions, 1980)Google Scholar. A revealing analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry during the war, as well as that of Nisei women, is provided by Schweik, Susan, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 109–39Google Scholar. See also Santillan, Richard, “Rosita the Riveter: Midwest Mexican-American Women During World War II, 1941–1945,” Perspectives in Mexican-American Studies 2 (1989): 115–40Google Scholar; Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar.

59. Cripps, Thomas, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 349–89Google Scholar; and Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie From World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Bogle, Donald, Brown Sugar: 80 Years of America's Black Female Superstars (New York: Da Capo, 1990)Google Scholar.

60. The resistance of women to losing their war jobs is recorded in Tobias and Anderson (“What Really Happened”). See also Goldfarb, Lyn, Separate and Unequal: Discrimination Against Women Workers After World War II (Washington, D.C.: Union of Radical Political Economists, n.d.)Google Scholar; Milkman, Ruth, The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kossoudji, Sherrie and Dresser, Laura, “The End of a Riveting Experience: Occupational Shifts at Ford After World War II,” American Economic Review 82 (1992): 519–25Google Scholar. War workers' resistance to being channeled into pink-collar jobs after the war is recorded in Employment of Women in the Early Postwar Period, Bulletin 211, U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946)Google Scholar.

61. Women's Bureau, Women Workers in Ten War Production Areas, 1946Google Scholar.

62. Gluck, Rosie the Riveter. Another oral history is Wise, Nancy Baker and Wise, Christy, A Mouthful of Rivets: Women at Work in World War II (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994)Google Scholar. Campbell, D'Ann also emphasizes the diversity of women's feelings about their wartime jobs in Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

63. Rupp, Leila and Taylor, Verta discuss the 1950s in terms of the survival of women's impulses toward autonomy in Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Lynn, Susan, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar.

64. The Magazine Bureau's spotcheck of 200 magazines, including the Post, from March 1943 to August 1945 indicated that it found 433 articles, stories, and editorials supporting OWI's Womanpower Campaign, 399 on women in the military, 138 on nurse recruitment, 58 on child-care centers, and 26 promoting efficient housekeeping so wives could combine wartime jobs with home care (Magazine editorials, articles and fiction stories on programs being promoted by OWI file, entry 343, box 1699). In October 1943, the bureau sent a survey to 600 editors asking them whether they used the Magazine War Guide. Of 348 replies, 163 editors said they read the Guide thoroughly and 166 others indicated they found it helpful in selecting material for publication (memo from Genevieve Herrick to Mary Keeler, December 20, 1943, Magazine Bureau Organization file, entry 339, box 1695). Polls cited by OWI as evidence that its campaigns were effective include one that showed 83 percent of respondents believed women working in service industries were just as important to the war effort as those in war plants, the major theme of OWI's womanpower drive in the fall of 1943 (“Women on Women in War Jobs” [1943]). Others showed that two-thirds of respondents thought people should be required to give up their jobs to returning servicemen who had held them before (February 1944); 59 percent felt there was a greater need for women in the armed forces than ever before, a goal of the spring 1944 “Women in the War” campaign (May 1944); seven of ten women said they had canned food in 1943 and nine of ten reported plans to can food in 1944, another OWI campaign (January 1944) (Current Surveys file, entry 118, box 706).

65. M. Joyce Baker notes that maternal figures were foregrounded in wartime cinema about the home front, even if such characters also worked in factories (Images of Women in Film, 83–98). An excellent discussion of the maternal emphasis in film of the 1940s is provided by Doane, Mary Ann (Desire to Desire, 70–95)Google Scholar. Jane Gaines discusses sexual display among working-class women during the war as a signifier of financial freedom and rebellion against hierarchies in the home and work worlds, a perspective she found reinforced by wartime ads for beauty products in fan magazines. Consumer purchases other than makeup, she found, were discouraged as they were in the Post (Gaines, , “War, Women, and Lipstick: Fan Mags in the Forties,” Heresies 5 [1985]: 42–47Google Scholar). See also Renow, Michael, “From Fetish to Subject: The Containment of Sexual Difference in Hollywood's Wartime Cinema,” Wide Angle 5 (1982): 16–27Google Scholar; and Penn, Donna, “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America,” in Meyerowitz, , Not June Cleaver, 358–81Google Scholar. Other relevant studies include Hunt, Lynn, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Costello, John, Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985)Google Scholar.

66. Descriptions of these characters and film histories of this period include Haskell, From Reverence to Rape; Walsh, Andrea, Women's Film and Female Experience, 1940–1950 (New York: Praeger, 1984)Google Scholar; Doane, Desire to Desire; Deming, Barbara, Running Away From Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn From the Films of the Forties (New York: Grossman, 1969)Google Scholar; Polan, Dora, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (New York: Avon, 1974)Google Scholar. Friedan, Betty's The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963)Google Scholar describes the eroticized, yet restrictive, maternal ideal for American women that permeated postwar culture. For a reading of the period counter to Friedan's, see Meyerowitz, Joanne, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” in Meyerowitz, , Not June Cleaver, 229–62Google Scholar. Studies of maternal emphasis in the postwar era include May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic, 1988)Google Scholar; and Kaldein, Eugenia, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston: Twayne, 1984)Google Scholar.