Making War, Making Women

In this well-written, compelling book Melissa A. McEuen, a historian of photography, explores the connections between women, appearances, and power to illustrate the gendered meaning of patriotic duty during World War II. She begins by considering how “women wanted to be seen and whose rules dictated their appearance,” and asserts that how women used makeup, cleansed their bodies, and chose their clothing reveals much about wartime America’s construction of an ideal femininity (p. 2). McEuen intends her study to balance the “over-masculinizing” of the war emphasized by the “Greatest Generation” school of books (p. xi). Men certainly bore the biggest and most dangerous burden: fighting the war. But women were not only expected to pull their weight in home front support but they also had to “make themselves into something worth fighting for” (p. 2). For clues as to how women managed these two directives and how they were advised to manage them, McEuen mined documents of wartime governmental agencies, popular magazines, and the archives of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Clothing · Duty · Femininity · Front (military · Home front · Ideal (ethics · Meaning (existential · Political science · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Studio · Visual arts · Engineering · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Psychology

• Women at the front

  Open Access•Lise Zurné•Journal of War and Culture Studies•2023

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