What do shared beliefs about and behavior toward women tell us about the generation of men who served in the U.S. Army during World War II? This question drives Ann Pfau’s study of wartime gender roles.

Focusing on five categories of real and imaginary women, Pfau uncovers conflicts of obligation and desire. These conflicts, although seldom directly articulated, were never far from the surface of soldiers' thoughts and beliefs about women, family, and home. By looking beneath the surface, we gain a deeper understanding of the nature of wartime military service and of the domestic yearning that sparked the postwar marriage and baby booms. (gutenberg-e.org)

Ann Pfau Studies wartime gender roles, focusing on five categories of real and imaginary women. While soldiers typically asserted that they fought for home and family, they also believed that family obligations could trump the state's claim to their services.

This tension between private concerns and national goals was particularly apparent in servicemen's attacks on the reputation of the Women's Army Corps.

The hostile rumors that hobbled the Army's efforts to recruit women originated with male soldiers who sought to protect their homes by preventing wives, sisters, and sweethearts from enlisting. Some men even threatened to fight their own government in order to preserve the domestic life to which they longed to return. A similar note of alienation is evident in soldiers' stories about the notorious broadcaster Tokyo Rose.

An imaginary enemy agent, Rose served as a mouthpiece for American servicemen, allowing them to voice attitudes they might otherwise have kept to themselves.

The case studies that compose this book reveal that while male comradeship, as many have argued, was central to wartime combat motivation, soldiers' relations with women--absent and present, real and imaginary--were key to their understanding of wartime obligation and limitations.

Pfau's probing history offers a deeper understanding of wartime military service and of the domestic yearning that drove the postwar marriage and baby booms.

Read Miss Yourlovin: Women in the Culture of American World War II Soldiers Online

ISBN: 9780231135528
Author: Ann Elizabeth Pfau
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: August 2008
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Pages: 320

Introduction
Real and Imaginary Women

Artwork from the fuselage of the B-24 Miss Yourlovin. Miss Yourlovin was the name of a B-24 bomber assigned to the Mediterranean theater of operations during World War II. The plane's crew named and decorated it with a pinup girl copied from a calendar or men's magazine. The pinup saunters toward her viewers wearing abbreviated panties and nothing else; an arm coyly covers her bare breasts. To the left of the name and image are three rows of miniature bombs, each denoting one of the forty combat missions completed by the men who served as the plane's crew. What appears to be damage from enemy fire is visible above and to the left of the pinup's head.

This combination of sentimentality, eroticism, and danger was characteristic of GI culture. The women who dominated soldiers' artwork, reveries, and rumors were objects of nostalgic yearning and subject to independent desires. This independence made women fitting mascots for military aircraft; to the men who crewed these powerful machines, heavy bombers seemed to have minds of their own. But female independence, particularly in the case of bombers, also represented danger to the men who depended on them for survival. Should a system malfunction, the members of the bomber's crew were vulnerable to capture, injury, and death. ...

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