The 'remasculinization' of wounded veterans after World War II

Topic: This week we will consider the homecoming, "reintegration" and recuperation struggles experienced by American service personnel returning from war. We will assess the ways in which civilian and military experts construed the nature of wartime injury, focusing in particular on "invisible wounds"-- psychological damage and trauma suffered by veterans then referred to as "neuro-psychiatric" (NP) cases. Gender will, of course, loom large in our discussion. Many Americans considered veterans' successful recovery to involve "remasculinization," and restoration of manliness was work in which women were deemed to play pivotal roles. Where, and how differently, mothers, wives and girlfriends fit into these recuperative processes will form a key question for our investigation of postwar recovery.

Seminar questions:

• Come to class prepared to discuss a particular scene from Let There Be Light that you found especially revealing, outlining what you think it illuminates about contemporary attitudes towards wartime injury, recovery and masculinity
• How did Americans during (and just after) WWII explain the sources of wartime psychological injury? Did they regard combat as the central site of damage or other background factors, including those prior to men's induction into the armed forces?
• What kinds of treatment did contemporary authorities-- including Hollywood film directors-- recommend for helping alleviate or cure mentally injured veterans? How were these prescriptions gendered?
• How far did wartime "experts" assign mothers and wives/'sweethearts' distinct roles in the healing process?
• How did constructions of race and class intersect with ideas about gender in the film and advice columns we've studied?
• What did contemporary depictions of mental injury suggest about the prospect for recovery for 'neuro-psychiatric cases'?

Required reading/viewing:

Before class you should watch Huston's hour-long documentary, having first read the accompanying guide:

John Huston (dir.), Let There Be Light (1946)

Film production notes and link to the documentary here.

Primary sources:

Lt. Comdr. Leslie B. Hohman, 'Combat Fatigue', Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1945, pp.146-47

Franklin M. Reck, 'Will He Be Changed?', Better Homes and Gardens, Dec. 1944

Willard Waller, 'What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran,' Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1945

Required secondary source: Christina Jarvis, '"If He Comes Home Nervous": US World War II Neuropsychiatric Casualties and Postwar Masculinities,' Journal of Men's Studies 17, ii (Spring 2009), pp. 97-115

NB: If you're writing an essay on this topic, I recommend also watching William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, available on DVD in the library.

Supplementary reading:

David A. Gerber, ‘Heroes and misfits: The troubled social reintegration of disabled veterans in The Best Years of Our Lives,’ American Quarterly 46, 4 (1994): 545-574

David A. Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History (University of Michigan Press, 2012) e-book

Sarah Handley-Cousins, 'Best Men, Broken Men: Gender, Disability, and American Veterans,' in Kara Vuic (ed), The Routledge History of Gender, War and the U.S. Military (2017), pp.323-35, e-book

Susan Hartmann, ‘Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,’ Women’s Studies, 5 (1978): 223-39

Robert F. Jefferson, '"Enabled Courage:' Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans in Postwar America,' Historian, 65, v (Fall 2003): 1102-24

John Michalczyk & Susan Michalczyk, 'Troubled Silences: Trauma in John Huston's Film Let There Be Light,' in War & Film in America (McFarland, 2003)

Rebecca Jo Plant, 'The Veteran, His Wife, And Their Mothers: Prescriptions for Psychological Rehabilitation After World War II,' in Diederik Oostdijk and Markha Valenta (eds), Tales of the Great American Victory: World War II in Politics and Poetics (2006), pp. 95-105

David Serlin, 'Crippling Masculinity: Queerness and Disability in U.S. Military Culture, 1800-1945,' GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 9, 1-2 (2003), pp.149-79

Reading on disability and veterans of earlier wars:

David Anderson, 'Dying of Nostalgia: Homesickness in the Union Army during the Civil War,' Civil War History (Sept. 2010)

Kathleen M Brian and James W Trent (eds), Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity (2017)

Sarah Handley-Cousins, '"Wrestling at the Gates of Death": Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post Civil War North,' Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (June 2016), pp.220-42

Paul Lawrie, '"Salvaging the Negro:" Race, Rehabilitation and the Body Politic in World War I America, 1917-1924,' in Disability Histories, eds. Michael Rembis and Susan Burch (2014) e-book

Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (2011) e-book

Larry M Logue and Peter Blanck, Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness and Suicide (2018) e-book