War as an agent of progressive social change?

Topic: In the final seminar of the module, we take stock of where we've been over the course of the term, drawing some preliminary conclusions about the material we've studied. Are you left with a sense that wars repeatedly and radically shook up US society, including ideas about gender identities and sexuality? Or do you conclude that war, even if it temporarily disrupted peacetime norms, did rather little to alter patriarchal structures in any profound or durable way? How do we weigh up the balance between continuity and change over time, and between war's ruinous and more emancipatory consequences?

Come to class prepared to offer your reflections on these big questions and the key themes of the module. What have you been most surprised by this term? Given the imminence of essay deadlines, there is no required reading for this seminar, only some retrospective reflection. However, if you're keen to discuss issues of war and social change in your essay, here are a few pointers for reading.

Supplementary reading:

April Carter, 'Should Women Be Soldiers or Pacifists?' in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin (eds), The Women and War Reader (1998)

Claudia Goldin, 'The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women's Employment,' American Economic Review 81, 4 (1991): 741-56

Claudia Goldin and Claudia Olivetti, 'Shocking Labor Supply: A Reassessment of the Role of World War II on Women's Labor Supply,' American Economic Review 103, 3 (May 2013): 257-62 [JSTOR]

Taylor Jaworski, '"You're in the Army Now": The Impact of World War II on Women's Education, Work, and Family," Journal of Economic History 74, 1 (March 2014): 169-95

Jennifer D Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (2001)

Kevin M Kruse and Stephen Tuck, The Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012) e-book

Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States (1974)

Laura McEnaney, Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (2018) e-book

Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (2005)

Evan K Rose, 'The Rise and Fall of Female Labor Force Participation During World War II in the United States,' Journal of Economic History 78, 3 (2018): 673-711

Megan Taylor Shockley, 'Working for Democracy: Working Class African American Women, Citizenship, And Civil Rights in Detroit, 1940-1954,' Michigan Historical Review 29, 2 (2003): 125-57

James T Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (2011) e-book