'Good' and 'bad girls' in the 'Good War'

Topic: During World War II, 'patriotic' wartime culture assigned women and girls key roles in raising and sustaining the morale of men in uniform: as providers of love and care, dates and dance partners, masseuses of the male ego, writers of endlessly upbeat letters, and as appealing emblems of the hearth and home men were (supposedly) fighting for. But these gendered prescriptions for civilian women in wartime were bound up with pronounced double-standards, particularly with regard to sex. If (as many American military men maintained) soldiers needed regular heterosexual intercourse as a motivation or reward for service-- to boost their fighting esprit-- who was to supply it if 'good girls' weren't to jeopardize their moral reputation?

Seminar questions:

• why did WWII pose such acute-- and contested-- questions about romantic love, marriage and heterosexuality, particularly between civilian women and male soldiers?
• what messages did the Ladies' Home Journal pieces convey to their female readers?
• what prompted the moral panic in wartime America about female sexuality, and how did excoriation of 'khaki-wackies' intersect with anxieties about female infidelity?
• how did race and class inflect wartime discussions of, and attempts to regulate, female sexuality?
• would you evaluate World War II as a time of sexual experimentation and opportunity for American women and/or a time of repression and 'straightened' desire?

Required reading:

Primary sources: 

Gretta Palmer, 'Marriage and War,' Ladies' Home Journal, 59, 3 (March 1942), pp.110-11

Louise Paine Benjamin, 'What Is Your Dream Girl Like?', Ladies' Home Journal 59 3 (March 1942), p. 114

Secondary sources: read Hegarty and either Littauer or Winchell

Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II (2008), ch. 4, '"A Buffer of Whores": Military and Social Ambivalence about Sexuality and Gender,' pp.85-109, e-book

Amanda Littauer, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion Before the 'Sixties (2015), ch. 1, 'Victory Girls, Sex, Mobility and Adventure on the Home Front', pp.18-51, e-book

Meghan K Winchell, '"To Make the Boys Feel at Home": USO Senior Hostesses and Gendered Citizenship,' Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 25, 1 (2004), pp.190-211

Supplementary reading:

For the NYT's first reference to 'Dear John' letters: Milton Bracker, 'What to Write the Soldier Overseas', NYT Sunday Magazine, Oct. 3, 1943

Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (1992)

Brooke L. Blower, 'V-J Day, 1945, Times Square,' in Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley (eds), The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), e-book

D'Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (1984)

Susan L Carruthers, Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America (2022), e-book

Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century (2009), ch.2, 'Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? Keeping Women on the Marital Job in War and Peace,' e-book

Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (1984)

Judy Barrett Litoff and David C Smith, '"Will He Get My Letter?: Popular Portrayals of Mail and Morale During World War II,' Journal of Popular Culture 23, 4 (March 1990), pp.21-43

Judy Barrett Litoff and David C Smith, '"Writing Is Fighting, Too:" The World War II Correspondence of Southern Women,' Georgia Historical Quarterly 76, 2 (1992), pp.436-58

Melissa McEuen, Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945 (2010) e-book

Ann Pfau, Miss Yourlovin: ch.1 'Fighting for Home'; http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pfau/chapter1.html

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013) e-book

Mary Louise Roberts, 'The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944-1946,' American Historical Review 115, 4 (Oct. 2010): 1002-1030

Robert B Westbrook, '"I Want A Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Henry James:" American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War Two,' American Quarterly 2, 4 (Dec. 1990), pp. 587-614