Zelda Popkin’s 1945 novel, The Journey Home, opens with Lieutenant Don Corbett plotting to spend his twenty-one-day leave on liquor and women. In a Miami bar, he realizes that his months-long obsession with “American Girls” had imprinted on his mind’s eye “one single person, one face, one body, one voice.” He is surprised to find much greater variety in the women he observes than his war front imagination had allowed.¹ What led the fictional Lieutenant Corbett to envision American women so narrowly? And what of millions of Americans who entertained a similar image? Making War, Making Women attempts to answer...

Late in 1942 the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger headlined a story, “Cosmetics for Girl Workers Boosting War Production.” It recounted a Vogue magazine feature about a New York factory that had recently installed large mirrors in its women’s restrooms and offered employees free cosmetics—changes linked to favorable results on the factory floor. Stressing the importance of personal appearance to women, the Jackson paper compared those who had answered the nation’s call to their female counterparts in mental hospitals, concluding, “[w]omen remain women, cherishing vanity, even when they have become more or less insane or when they take hard jobs in...

As the U.S. War Manpower Commission (WMC) intensified its massive campaign to recruit women for industrial jobs in 1943, mobilization efforts took their toll on female bodies. Daily exposure to metal filings, soot, and extreme heat, in addition to the physical demands of some assignments, such as holding a twelve-ounce rivet gun steady for several hours, yielded unsightly consequences that shocked many industrial neophytes, as well as their friends and family members.True Confessions magazine, a Fawcett Group publication, sponsored a war worker makeover to help a young woman who had “neglected” her health in the interest of carrying out her...

In April 1943 U.S. Labor Department field researcher Sara Buchanan completed a ten-page progress report on the state of housing for women war workers. Later published as Women’s Bureau Special Bulletin Number 17, the document represented the final analysis of hundreds of interviews and surveys, as well as information that Buchanan and her staff at the Women’s Bureau (WB) had gathered from newspapers and magazines the previous year. More groundwork had gone into this report than into any of the WB’s sixteen previous special bulletins. What could justify such monumental expenditure of division members’ time and energy? Was the subject...

In February 1944 writer Margaret H. Gammon offered a “consumer viewpoint” on women’s wartime clothing. “Isn’t it time to stop treating women like nincompoops? Isn’t it time to consult them about their tastes in fabrics, color, fit, becomingness . . . ? They are the buyers and users and they might have some useful words to say, even in the fashion field where they are supposed to leave matters in the competent hands of masculine esthetes.” Gammon’s indignation over current styles seemed less important than her concern about the silencing of women in an arena that clearly mattered to them:...

In the spring of 1943, a manuscript copy of a brief essay by writer and raconteur Dorothy Parker circulated behind closed doors in Washington. The sharp-edged story criticized American women who refused to take up “paid” work for the war effort. In the acerbic tone for which she was famous, Parker railed, “Inside many pretty heads, where there is plenty of room, there still runs the notion that war is conducted rather like a charity bazaar, with the workers—close quotes—giving their services in the booths for a couple of hours around cocktail time.” She admonished such women to...

Making War, Making Women begins with fictional airman Don Corbett hoping to find the ideal American Girl among the flesh-and-blood women on a train. My story ends with a less glamorous character but a real one—an airplane mechanic who left the U.S. Army Separation Center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in late 1945. On the train home, the twenty-four-year-old veteran wrote, “When I get my $200 mustering out pay I’ll buy a piano and take lessons. I’ll buy paintings for the house, and go to concerts and ballet, and take Mama and Daddy and William. Occasionally a cold thought squelches...