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Portrayal of women in media, how does this contradict gender norms and feminists
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Women Portrayed through Media
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Popular media during World War II, such as the propaganda poster “Rosie the Riveter” and the video “Glamour Girls” depicted women as being strong and able to stand on their own because they were needed to replace the men in the factories who left for war and thus served as a call for American females to support the war effort at home. Media after the war such as the television show “I Love Lucy”, however, portrayed women as quite the opposite: unable to work and more suited to being a housewife. The lived experiences of Vera Haney from Richard Haney’s “When is Daddy coming home?”, a memoir published in 2005 about the impact of World War II on an American family, and Betsy Rath in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”, a novel written by Sloan …show more content…
Wilson and published in 1955 about the search for purpose in a country dominated by business, prove that the media was not entirely accurate in their representation of women. Through an analysis of the lives of Vera Haney and Betsy Rath during and after World War II, it is evident that these experiences both confirm and contradict how popular media depicted American women in both the war and postwar period, and thus that one cannot fully trust the media’s representation of women during these time periods. During World War II, there was a push by the government to get women to work in the factories and replace the jobs that the men left empty when they enlisted in the war effort.
In order to encourage women and convince them to work outside of the home, popular media began depicting women as strong workers who can fit in just fine at the factories. “Rosie the Riveter”, a poster depicting a working woman flexing her bicep and saying “We can do it!”, did just that. This poster acted as a call to action for American women as they had a new role to fulfill: take on the wartime jobs of producing munitions and war supplies and combat the shortage of available workers. Rosie the Riveter depicted the American woman as strong and independent, and although the creator did not produce the poster intending to create a call on women, Rosie the Riveter quickly became a cultural icon and a symbol for the working …show more content…
woman. Similar to that of Rosie the Riveter, the 1943 promotional video produced by the Office of War Information, “Glamour Girls”, depicted women as powerful workers, but, unlike Rosie the Riveter, also showed how they could retain their feminist qualities while working outside of their home. The video portrayed women working on various parts of airplanes showing how their feminism applies to the factory, saying that “instead of cutting out dresses, this woman stamps out the patterns of airplane parts” and “instead of baking cakes, this woman is cooking gears.” This video, in addition to showing women working in the production of war supplies in supplies, describes how women are taking jobs everywhere from milk delivery to handling tractors in the Midwest, showing how far women have come and how integrated they are into the working society. In his memoir “When is Daddy coming home?”, Richard Haney described life during World War II while his father, Clyde Haney, was deployed overseas.
In particular, he described his mother as “much more independent than most women of her generation. She had been a professional musician, a corporate accountant, and among other skills she could both drive a car and change its tires” (Haney, p. 55). Haney’s mother, Vera Haney, was committed to her nuclear family and waited for her husband all throughout the war. In order to maintain and support herself and Richard while Clyde was gone, Vera worked as a music teacher. In reference to her independent nature and her participation in working, Vera was very similar to those women shown in popular media during World War II. However, despite the fact that she worked and was not a stay-at-home mother, her work was not in the factories where the media depicted most women working. She participated in a form of feminine labor, not the intensive labor of ammunitions production, so in some ways she fulfilled the female depiction in media during the war, but in other ways she did
not. In the postwar period, the portrayal of women in media drastically changed however. Instead of women being encouraged and shown as strong, independent workers, they were shown as incapable of working and only being useful as a housewife doing work in the home. In the 1951 television show “I Love Lucy”, Lucille Ball’s character of Lucy Ricardo was a zany but good housewife. The plot of the show revolved around Lucy’s repeated and failed attempts to get a job. Lucy also constantly spent her husband’s money and got in trouble with him for doing so. This show painted the picture of Lucy being the ideal women during this period of time. She was a feminine, stay-at-home mother who cleaned, cooked, took care of her children, and spent money the family did not necessarily have, while her husband worked all day. The rigid gender roles of this time were at the center of television and thus the idea that women should not work and simply just stay at home and spend money while their husbands worked and earned money was prevalent in the media.
Rosie the riveter was the face of recruiting women into the Armed Forces during WWII. The increasing demand for soldiers was not being filled fast enough by just males. As a result, between the years 1940 and 1945, the percentage of female service members increased from 27% to 37%. Even on the civilian side of things, the ratio of married working women outside of their homes increased to one out of every four. The population of women that did not join the war was prompted by Rosie the Riveter’s iconic image of working in one of the many munitions industries throughout the US.
Even though the real-life munitions worker was one of the basis of the Rosie campaign it took on a persona of its own. This persona was a fictitious character that was strong and bandanna-clad (“American Women in World War II”). Rosie was one of the most success recruitment tools in American history, and one of the most iconic images of working women during World War II. The most prominent image of Rosie the Riveter popularized in American culture was the version featured on the “We Can Do It!” posters created by the United States government (Hawkes). The Rosie the government made has a resemblance to Rockwell’s Rosie, but she is less masculine. This propaganda poster of Rosie the Riveter employed by the United States government was popular because she appealed to the sense of patriotism and common goal of the Second World War. Upgraded Rosie also showed that women could retain their femininity and womanhood in their service. Every Rosie the Riveter image played to this prevailing sense of patriotism that abounded in America during World War II. Patriotism was used as a primary motivator to recruit women for war work. Most American women had husbands, brothers, sons, and fiancés fighting on the frontlines of the war, so the women felt compelled to provide to make a contribution as citizens at home. Most of the time woman had to take care of their children and household while
One such propaganda poster that was spread across Great Britain features a female factory worker with her arms spread wide that reads: “Women of Britain come into the factories”. This particular poster targeted an audience of women and was used to persuade woman to become more involved in the workforce. By showing the young woman wearing a factory uniform while posing in a victorious manner, the poster has the effect of giving future female factory workers the impression that woman participating in factory work will lead to a victory for Great Britain and its Allies in the war.
The article was published on February 6, 1943 in the midst of World War II. Women had become an asset to the war effort and were then considered "At Home Soldiers" or "Riveters". They worked in the factories constructing submarines for the Navy, planes for the Air Force, and became medics.
The film titled, “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter”, looks at the roles of women during and after World War II within the U.S. The film interviews five women who had experienced the World War II effects in the U.S, two who were Caucasian and three who were African American. These five women, who were among the millions of women recruited into skilled male-oriented jobs during World War II, shared insight into how women were treated, viewed and mainly controlled. Along with the interviews are clips from U.S. government propaganda films, news reports from the media, March of Time films, and newspaper stories, all depicting how women are to take "the men’s" places to keep up with industrial production, while reassured that their duties were fulfilling the patriotic and feminine role. After the war the government and media had changed their message as women were to resume the role of the housewife, maid and mother to stay out of the way of returning soldiers. Thus the patriotic and feminine role was nothing but a mystified tactic the government used to maintain the American economic structure during the world war period. It is the contention of this paper to explore how several groups of women were treated as mindless individuals that could be controlled and disposed of through the government arranging social institutions, media manipulation and propaganda, and assumptions behind women’s tendencies which forced “Rosie the Riveter” to become a male dominated concept.
For the first time women were working in the industries of America. As husbands and fathers, sons and brothers shipped out to fight in Europe and the Pacific, millions of women marched into factories, offices, and military bases to work in paying jobs and in roles reserved for men in peacetime. Women were making a living that was not comparable to anything they had seen before. They were dependent on themselves; for once they could support the household. Most of the work in industry was related to the war, such as radios for airplanes and shells for guns. Peggy Terry, a young woman who worked at a shell-loading plant in Kentucky, tells of the money that was to be made from industrial work (108). “We made a fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. To us that was an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing (108)." Sarah Killingsworth worked in a defense plant. " All I wanted to do was get in the factory, because they were payin more than what I'd been makin. Which was forty dollars a week, which was pretty good considering I'd been makin about twenty dollars a week. When I left Tennessee I was only makin two-fifty a week, so that was quite a jump (114)." Terry had never been able to provide for herself as she was able to during the war. " Now we'd have money to buy shoes and a dress and pay rent and get some food on the table. We were just happy to have work (108).” These women exemplify the turn around from the peacetime to wartime atmosphere on the home front. The depression had repressed them to poverty like living conditions. The war had enabled them to have what would be luxury as compared to life before.
Sorensen, Aja, Rosie the Riveter: Women Working during World War II. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/pwro/collection/website/rosie.htm, (n.d.)
Prior to World War II women were expected to be housewives by cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children. Women were discouraged to work outside of the home and often judged by the rest of society. Bobbie Ann Mason gives great examples of the duties expected by women of the time period and her grandmother is a perfect model of domesticity. At one point Mason talk about a conversation between her grandmother and mom. Mason’s mom, Christy, decides to go back to work, but her grandmother disapproves and says she should be home taking care of her girls (Mason, 116). Christy on the other hand is an example of the modern woman. A woman willing to go to work outside of the home to help support her family when needed. Christy gets a job at a clothing company. Mason says that many women were leaving the farm and taking work in factories (Mason, 83). During and after World War II many women began to work outside of the home changing the idea of what it meant to be a women and the duties that accompanied.
During WWII, women took over the work force, and had such inspirations as Rosie the Riveter. This created a generation of women who wanted more out of life than birthing children, and keeping a nice home for their husband. The end of the war, however, brought with it a decrease of working women. In the 1950’s the rate of working women had slightly rebounded to 29% following the post-war decrease in 1945. These women were well rounded, working outside the home, and still having dinner on the table by 5PM.
During the war, men were off fighting for America, and the women were left behind to take over their jobs in the factories. Women proved that they can do almost all of the same jobs as men. Rosie the Riveter, a picture of a woman flexing with a caption of “We Can Do It,” became the symbol for women all across the nation. After the war, years later, women began to receive equal pay for the same jobs that the men were doing. Many other minority groups, such as African Americans, played a huge
These questions are still being studied and debated by historians today. Several books have been written on the subject, including "Rosie the Riveter Revisited" by Sherna Berger Gluck, "The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s" by Susan M. Hartmann, and "Creating Rosie the Riveter" by Maureen Honey. Additionally, scholarly articles such as "Working Class Rosies: Women Industrial Workers During World War II" by Sherrie A. Koussoudji and Laura J. Dresser and "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958" by Joanne Meyerowitz have contributed to the ongoing discussion.
"Women in WWII at a Glance." The National WWII Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
During America’s involvement in World War Two, which spanned from 1941 until 1945, many men went off to fight overseas. This left a gap in the defense plants that built wartime materials, such as tanks and other machines for battle. As a result, women began to enter the workforce at astonishing rates, filling the roles left behind by the men. As stated by Cynthia Harrison, “By March of [1944], almost one-third of all women over the age of fourteen were in the labor force, and the numbers of women in industry had increased almost 500 percent. For the first time in history, women were in the exact same place as their male counterparts had been, even working the same jobs. The women were not dependent upon men, as the men were overseas and far from influence upon their wives.
In Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier the continual coverage made by the media of the war during its occurrence and the infectiousness it had on those back home is portrayed through the eyes of her narrator, Jenny. The use of a female narrator wasn’t uncommon nor new but the way West includes her feminist values into Jenny without making it central to the story is fascinating. Up to this point in history, coverage of a war had never been read about as it was during this period. Because of this advancement in getting news out had improved drastically from the last war, people back home were more aware of what was occurring from reading a newspaper without having to wait for letters from their loved ones out on the front lines. West took this information in full stride and wrote about the emotional turmoil it causes the women back home waiting for their men to come back. She makes mention by focusing and bringing to attention the elements of class, exile from being deployed and the trauma that war causes on the soldier.
"The Image and Reality of Women Who Worked During World War II." National Parks Service.