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Abstract
This essay investigates the dynamics of the Women in National Service (WINS) campaign, an attempt by the magazine Ladies' Home Journal to militarize middle-class housewives on the U.S. home front during World War II. Adapting the construct of gendered spheres to the campaign, the analysis suggests that the WINS effort carefully modulated its prewar depictions of domesticity and female submissiveness to offer a transformative view of the wartime home and the role of the housewife in it. The essay concludes, however, that while this transformed vision was overtly empowering, its built-in limitations effectively created a sense of covert disempowerment.
Acknowledgments
This essay was accepted under the editorship of Dr. Cindy L. Griffin.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2009 Women and Society Conference in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The author wishes to thank Diane Marie Blair, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and support.
Notes
Although by the 1960s the word housewife had become objectionable to some women (see, e.g., Turner, Citation1964, p. 280), primary sources from the war period often used this word and homemaker interchangeably and without a noticeable difference in meaning. In this essay I use both synonymously.
No doubt many women did these sorts of chores capably even before the war. The WINS campaign's Wartime Homemaking Manual (WINS, 1943), however, specifically mentioned these tasks and implied that they were properly the province of now-absent male family members.
This is not to say that the magazine was overly critical of women who chose to work in war jobs. One article, for example, asked, “Can women in war industry be good mothers?” (Hohman, Citation1942, pp. 100–101). It responded affirmatively, suggesting that “if we had enough working mothers, there would be a reinstatement of work training and early feeling for useful accomplishment” (p. 101).
There is no overt discussion in the Journal about the publishers' motivation for producing this campaign, nor is there any discussion of it in the magazine's extant archival records at the University of Pennsylvania. However, as Maureen Honey (Citation1995, p. 90) notes, beginning in 1942 the Office of War Information's Magazine Bureau developed a bimonthly publication, the Magazine War Guide, which solicited “womanpower” campaign story lines and ideas. Though the Journal would surely have received OWI's guide, the magazine's published support of women working in the factories was sporadic compared with many of its rival publications. It is possible that the WINS campaign might have emerged, then, as a measured response to the government's womanpower efforts, albeit one that aimed for changes seemingly more suited to the Journal's general readership.
Ironically, when authors have examined housewives during the war, the perspective has often been of the home as a refuge of the domestic, as in Hayes (Citation2000).
The WINS campaign was, in many respects, just such a restricted context. The readership of Ladies' Home Journal primarily represented middle-class women (as well as some upper-class women); relatively few readers were among the country's poor. The magazine's readership was also largely White, even Anglo-Saxon (see Scanlon, Citation1995, p. 7; Zuckerman, Citation1998, p. 34). Still, aside from Reader's Digest, the Journal boasted the largest circulation of any magazine in the war period. Furthermore, the Curtis Publishing Company's (Citation1941) internal research suggested that the Journal's reach was significantly greater than its actual circulation numbers, as many copies were purchased at newsstands and many others were passed along from subscribers to friends. In an era when magazines remained a vital national medium, then, the Journal's public influence was immense.
The other two elements of the feminine sphere, according to Welter (Citation1966), were purity and piety; as these qualities did not appear to be a vital element of the WINS campaign, I have not included them here. My analysis does not assume, of course, that the Journal editors were aware of the strategic labels I use in this essay.
Here the magazine was quoting James M. Landis, director of the Office of Civilian Defense.
In 1943, the word auxiliary was dropped and WAAC became WAC. Also in late 1943, the WAFS and WFTD organizations merged to form the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots). The Washington Post recognized the WINS organization's homage to these military groups, writing that readers had “heard and read a lot about the WAACS, the WAVES and the WAFS.” Yet now on the scene, it continued, was “a larger feminine force than all those put together. It's the WINS—Women in National Service—and it includes 20 million housewives who are now being mobilized into a Home Front Army” (Miller, Citation1943, p. S1).
By emphasizing the WINS organization's strength in numbers, the Journal was echoing a strategy used a generation earlier by several women's magazines in support of the Maternity and Infancy Act (Pierce, Citation2008, p. 78).
That this was an officer's cap (as opposed to caps worn by enlisted men) might have provided an even greater sense of masculine authority in the image.