The Home Front & Beyond: American Women in the 1940s

Susan M. Hartmann describes and analyzes the effects of World War II on American women's lives in The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. The work focuses primarily on women's public lives, stressing Hartmann's belief that "women's movement into the public realm represents the most substantial change of the 1940s." Addressing women according to race, and to a lesser extent, according to age, class, educational and marital status, Hartmann adds a new dimension to the historiography of American women and World War II-- a historiography traditionally characterized by across-the-board generalizations molded around the experiences of white, middle-class women. Although her larger argument and conclusion speaks to women as a whole, she asserts and demonstrates that the effects of World War II upon American women were not uniform. Through careful examination of women's involvement in many aspects of public life during World War II, Hartmann shows that social, economic, and political changes put into motion by World War II affected the lives of American women by restructuring gender roles in American society. However, Hartmann asserts that this was merely a temporary reorganization of gender roles, not a permanent redefinition. Women's acceptance into nontraditional roles was limited to the duration of the war, after which they were expected to return to pre-war lifestyles. In keeping with the existing arguments of other prominent women's historians, Hartmann maintains that by stressing women's importance to the war effort, while simultaneously preparing them for eventual return to traditional female arenas, employers, the federal government, and popular culture media successfully achieved temporary gender reorganization. This reorganization got women out of the house and into the workforce as a wartime necessity, but ultimately ensured the short-term status of women's new roles and opportunities. Hartmann begins with a brief chapter detailing the developments in American social, economic, and political life throughout the 1940s. Her concise discussion of the Depression, New Deal efforts, foreign policy, and the outbreak of war, places women's experiences into historical context. The second chapter details the "historical subordination of women and the division of labor according to sex," highlighting women's status in society as wives and mothers at the start of the 1940s. In the chapters that follow, Hartmann examines women's experiences in the military services, female employment patterns, the treatment of women by the government and employers, women's involvement in and treatment by labor unions, female educational accomplishments, legal status, and direct participation in the political arena, and notions of family and womanhood within popular culture. Hartmann writes that that World War II increased and varied women's participation in public life. As more men joined the military, women's services became of crucial importance to