Women's Work: Domestic Labor in American World War II PostersAuthor(s): Sara HarringtonSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 22,No. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 41-44Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949264 .

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Women's Work: Domestic Labor in American World War II Posters_

by Sara Harrington, Rutgers University

"The many thousands of women who are..sunning their houses quietly and efficiently are contributing more to the war effort than they them selves realize"

These words, written by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for an article in The Reader's Digest in 1944, both reassured and chal

lenged the American housewife during a time of national crisis.1 In highlighting the overlooked contributions of the housewife to the war effort, Mrs. Roosevelt at once affirmed the centrality of the American wife and mother in both family life and the life of the nation.

Women were both the subject of and audience for visual

imagery during the Second World War. This article examines a discrete group of poster images of women depicting the American housewife and her domestic activities in World War II. The posters are held in the E.H. Tepper Collection of World War II Posters at Rutgers University, and in the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives. In World War II posters aimed at the American housewife and mother, a woman's work inside the home was conceived of and celebrated as a direct part of the over?ll war effort. The images represent but a small subset of the hundreds of images of women during the war, for the sheer vol ume of home front posters during World War II was staggering. Yet there was considerable variety even within the range of

imagery aimed specifically at the housewife. Such images encouraged women to plant gardens,

can food, conserve, and

ration foodstuffs, to write letters to those serving in the war, and to recycle household goods and wastes.

The Image of Women in World War II The participation of women in the war in a variety of capac

ities?as industry workers, as Red Cross nurses, as armed

services personnel, and as members of various home front orga nizations (such as the Women's Land Army Corps and many others)?has been well-chronicled.2 Indeed, representations of American women during the war period are numerous and diverse. Yet perhaps the best known image, and the one that has become emblematic of women's experience during wartime, is the figure commonly known as Rosie the Riveter (Figure 1). Rosie symbolizes those women who worked in the defense industries as replacements for men who were called into active

wartime service. In this famous poster from the period a woman is clad in a rough but close-fitting denim work shirt, her pin curls tucked carefully under a bright red polka dot headscarf. She rais es a clenched fist while rolling up her shirtsleeve to reveal newly

Figure 1. Color Poster No. 179-WP-1563 (Artist J. Howard Miller); "We Can Do It!" Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 179, Courtesy National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

developed forearm and bicep muscles. Spouting the slogan, "We can do it!" this allegorical Rosie represents all women who, dur

ing the war period, flexed the newly found muscle of female

productivity outside the sphere of the home.

The Role of Posters during World War II

Sixty years later it is difficult to imagine a culture in which television and the Internet did not play a chief role in the shap ing of societal views and cultural consciousness, and in which the details of the war effort were not available in the immediate

Volume 22, Number 2 ? 2003 ? Art Documentation 41

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Figure 2. Color Poster No. 44-PA-380; "Save Waste Fats for

Explosives/Take Them to Your Meat Dealer;" Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 44; Courtesy National Archives at

College Park, College Park, MD.

aftermath of wartime events. During World War II, posters were

relatively inexpensive to produce in great numbers. The large scale of many of the posters, their sizable numbers, bold colors,

striking compositions, stark messages, and sheer vibrancy were both startling and persuasive to contemporary audiences. While these posters lose some of their original rhetorical force in black and white and at the scale that they are reproduced here, never theless the bold messages retain much of their original urgency and immediacy. Powerful and prolific, the poster messages were an efficient means of communication and an effective consensus builder during the war period. But, unlike the presentations of

today's news organizations, which aim at some measure of

objectivity, World War II posters were clearly propagandistic, intended to encourage particular views and perspectives of

wartime events.

Unlike traditional works of art, in which meaning is often

only revealed after close and careful examination, the poster messages are designed to be immediately understood by the

viewer, their meanings clear and not subject to debate. Indeed, the messages of World War II posters seem blatant rather than

latent. The posters often couple the use of a line of text and an

image. The text translates the image for the viewer, and tells the viewer not only what the image means, but how the viewer should feel, think, and even act. The images are intended to reach a receptive audience meant to be further unified by the

poster's message and ultimate aim. Yet the design of these

posters revealed theories about the subtle psychological effects and utility of propaganda. World War II posters utilized propa ganda, as Daniel Lerner has written, as an "instrument which

manipulates not only the symbols by which people think, feel, believe; it works with threats and promises to affect people's hopes and fears."3

Picturing the American Housewife

Some World War II posters used specific rhetorical devices to demonstrate that through her labor the American housewife

directly affected the war effort. In a poster entitled "Save Waste Fats for Explosives/Take Them to Your Meat Dealer" (Figure 2) and in artist McClelland Barclay's "Save Your Cans/Help Pass the Ammunition," (Figure 3) the importance of the housewife's domestic labor is highlighted by the direct connection between her activities and the action at the war front. This connection is rendered explicit by the composition of both images.

In the image "Save Your Cans/Help Pass the Ammunition," the arm of a housewife reaches in from the lower right fore

ground, the sleeve of her pastel dress and white cuff are pulled back to reveal a strong and steady forearm, an open palm, and nails manicured to match the pinkish hue of her garment. In her hand she grips a can labeled prominently with a tomato, and just the tips of her smallest finger and thumb extend across the wide

white bottom border of the poster into the main body of the scene. A second can of tomatoes is discernable after the first, but as the cans recede into the distance, the silver cylinder of the can is stripped of its label. Gradually, in the middle distance of the

poster, the cans become the blue-tipped bullets of a machine gun manned by two soldiers fighting behind a low bluff, while a fire

rages in the distant background. Likewise, in "Save Waste Fats for Explosives/Take Them to

Your Meat Dealer," a woman's polished fingernails and part of her arm are just visible in the upper right-hand corner of the

poster. She grips a cast iron frying pan with her bare hand. As she empties the pan of its considerable content of white-hot

grease, the liquid cascades to the middle ground of the composi tion, where it explodes into a smoking blaze of mortar shells.

Today it seems a dubious assertion that the barrel of even the longest gun could transform tomato cans into ammunition, or that hot grease could be made into bombs. Fats and recycled

metals, however, were indeed used to manufacture gunpowder and ammunitions during the war. Other war posters detailed how recycled goods were used by the military, and the specific steps by which waste fats were transformed into explosives.

While the posters discussed above create a visual link between the housewife and battle, another cartoon-like image from the period (Figure 4) draws an explicit verbal connection between the housewife and the violence of war. A woman is shown in her kitchen straining fats from a frying pan into a large can resting on the edge of a sink. She is a whirlwind of activity her feminine garments are practically windblown, the full bow of her apron strings billows behind her.

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The woman's face is a picture of concentration as she throws herself into the task at hand. Yet the flurry of the mother's motion is contrasted with her young daughter's seriousness of

purpose. The young girl reads a daily newspaper, which pre sumably not only chronicles the war effort, but as is evidenced

by the headline "Save fat for bullets," spurs the home front to action. The image informs the viewer of the necessity of trans

mitting wartime lessons from mother to child. The caption on the

image, "Pistol Packin' Mama," is intended to be both funny and

ironic, but the inference is that in filling a can with grease, this woman is helping to fill a shell casing.

All of these images allude in their own way to the house wife's physical labor. Like Rosie the Riveter's bicep muscle, the forearm of the woman passing cans into the frame of the poster in the "Save Your Cans/Help Pass the Ammunition" poster (Figure 3) is solid and well-formed. The designs of the posters seem simple, composed of only a few compositional elements for

maximum legibility. It is easy for the viewer to intuit that in sav

ing the tomato cans the housewife uses, or the waste fats that she

produces, the cans are recycled to make bullets and the fats are

Help pass the Ammunition

PREPARE YOUR TIN CAN FOR WAR

: ? : M : i *: ANO i'.'

2 ' ? ? : :: ? ? * ? i * . ? ? ?

* * A s *? ? H 0 R 0 ? ? , *

Figure 3. Color Poster No. 44-PA-1679 (Artist McClelland Barclay); "Save Your Cans/Help Pass the Ammunition;" Records of the Office of

Government Reports, Record Group 44; Courtesy National Archives at

College Park, College Park, MD.

Figure 4. Poster No. 208-COM-385; "Pistol Packin Mama;" Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 208, Courtesy National

Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

transformed into explosives. But the images are rather decep tively simple, because they also imply that the American housewife has touched the battlefield, that she herself has

passed a bullet to a soldier. The viewer may wonder if the toma to-labeled can is but a coincidence, or if the red hue of the tomato alludes to the blood that a bullet will eventually draw. It is also worth noting here that posters often picture the hands, or agents of activity, of women, but much less frequently their eyes or their faces. The imagery of the posters affirms that housewives

should, and must, act on behalf of the war effort, but that they should never themselves witness the carnage of war.4

World War II posters such as those discussed here promoted the idea of the mobilization of the American housewife through her domestic occupations. These images valorized her labor by forging an association between her daily routine and activities, the action at the front, and the overall success of the war effort.

During the war period, the gendered spheres that separated the labor of men from the work of women were partially bridged. The home was no longer merely a sanctuary apart from the war effort. Rather, the protection of the American home and way of life was a national rallying cry. The engagement of women with the exterior world during the war period meant, as these posters demonstrate, that the American housewife had a direct hand in the war effort. While the particularities of domestic labor might be the individual task of the American housewife, she too par ticipated in the collective responsibility for the actions, and eventual success, of the national war effort. As historian Amy

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Bentley has succinctly summarized, for the American housewife,

"Every meal served was a political act."5

Conclusion: The Kitchen in Combat The construction and compositions of World War II posters

invoked symbolic figures like the housewife that loomed large in the American cultural consciousness. They placed an emphasis on both the anxieties and the responsibilities of the American

people, on the necessity, and even the inevitability, of concerted action. Their messages were a reaffirmation of the American val

ues of safety, security, and family. World War II posters remind us that not only does imagery reflect the mood of the nation, but such imagery informs and shapes the nation's beliefs and actions as well. The American housewife's responsibility during World

War II was to keep the home fires burning. The posters discussed here insist that her efforts were a flame that illuminated the field of battle.

Acknowledgments For their generous assistance I would like to thank Holly

Reed and Theresa Roy of the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and Ron Becker, Al King, and Michael Joseph of Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University.

Notes 1. Eleanor Roosevelt, "American Women in the War,"

Reader's Digest 261 (January 1944): 44. 2. See, for example, Judy Barrett Li toff and David C. Smith,

American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997), Susan M.

Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1982) and Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II (New York, NY: Facts on File, 1990).

3. Daniel Lerner, "The Psychological Warfare Campaign Against Germany," In Paper Bullets: Axis and Allied Countries WWII (New York, NY: Chelsea House, 1977): [1].

4. As George Roeder has pointed out, World War II was a "censored war." See George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War:

American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

5. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998): 31.

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Bredhof, S. 'Towers of Persuasion and American World War II

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