Abstract
In October 1943, a writer for the Women’s Home Companion observed: “American men, bless them, expect their women to be (a) useful or (b) beautiful, but seldom both at once. To many of them there’s the type of girl they dream about when they’re growing up and the type they marry. Or in reverse order, there’s the kind who is capable in an emergency and the kind who’s nice to have around when there’s moonlight … the girl who can handle a crane like a man and the girl who is too pretty to learn … the girl the boys overseas are engaged to and the girls whose pictures they use to adorn the walls of their tents. Grease paint and black velvet are the magic brew of fascination, but a gal whose face may be charmingly daubed with engine grease and black oil is the kid the boys have got used to ignoring.”1 This conundrum of glamour and grime, of Miss America and Rosie the Riveter, defines the America of 1941 to 1945 with its conflicting worlds of beauty pageants, defense factories, cosmetic advertising, and scrap drives. How and why was it possible, almost imperative, for the World War II ideology of the United States to support both the glamour girl of the beauty pageant and the grimy girl of the factory swing shift?
When the day’s work is done, is our usefulness to be judged if we appear bathed, coiffured and smartly groomed? Or will it serve a greater purpose if we appear tear-stained and worn? After all, it’s the men we try most to please; let’s ask them. Would we help them more if, when they are about to perish for freedom’s sake, we showed ourselves to them worn with sorrow and dejection? O, let’s lift our heads and send them off with iron in our hearts, a smile on our red lips and a bloom in our cheeks. I say: Thank God for cosmetics and the other harmless foibles. I, as one American woman, think these inventions—of man’s lesser intelligence, shall we say—serve their purpose well.
—Mrs. Horace L. Harrison in “Glamour as Usual. A Reply,” New York Times Magazine, 26 April 1942
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Notes
Michael Renov, “Advertising/Photojournalism/Cinema: The Shifting Rhetoric of Forties Female Representation,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 1.
Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, “The Miss America Pageant: Pluralism, Femininity, and Cinderella All in One,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 106.
See Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981);
D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984);
William Henry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); William Henry Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press);
Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982);
Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender and Propaganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984);
Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987);
Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); and
Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II (New York: Facts On File, 1990).
Page Dougherty Delano, “Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture,” Feminist Studies 26, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 41.
Melissa Dabakis, “Gendered Labor.” Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter and the Discourses of Wartime Womanhood,” in Gender and American History Since 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh (London: Routledge, 1993): 185.
Maureen Honey, “The ‘Womanpower’ Campaign: Advertising and Recruitment Propaganda During World War II,” Frontiers 6, nos. 1–2 (1981): 50.
Barney Oldfìeld, “Miss America and the 301st Bomb Group,” Air Power History 37, no. 2 (1990): 41–44.
Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 270.
Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (New York: New American Library, 1987), 31.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Mixed Messages: Women and the Impact of World War II,” Southern Humanities Review 27 (Summer 1993): 238.
See Ruth Schwartz Cohan, “Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The American Housewife Between the Wars,” Women’s Studies 3 (1976): 147–172.
Elaine Tyler May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” in The War in American Culture, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 137.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl In the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 24.
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© 2004 Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin
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Schofield, M.A. (2004). Miss America, Rosie the Riveter, and World War II. In: Watson, E., Martin, D. (eds) There She Is, Miss America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_3
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