Office of War Information (OWI) and Women

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the extent of the affect of the OWI's campaign to get women to enlist and help in the war effort during WWII. It argues that the OWI's determination to protect the traditional image of women was genuinely a reflection of the deep-rooted attitudes of American society regarding womanhood. While magazine propaganda strove to attract women to war work, advertisers expressly exercised discretion not to challenge strongly other societal assumptions about the place of women in the work force; they endeavored to adapt female images to the needs of the war-waging nation.

From the Paper:

"Advertisers used several tactics to attract women to war work, but the fact that so many recruitment advertisements embraced the "American Homemaker" image of the woman to some extent reveals the true import of the traditional female image in American middle-class society and thus best explains why advertisers could not afford to change the feminine image of women during World War II. As home-makers, women were naturally and intimately associated with the family and the home, two cherished American institutions (Honey,"Remembering" 136). In raising the notions of protection and stability, the ads made the family and the home symbolic of the comfortable way of life which people hoped to resume after the war. As guardians of an idealized way of life threatened by the war, women simply could not abandon their niche as society's nurturers. Because conventional associations of women and the home provided a means by which Americans could achieve happiness and security during World War II, the traditional image of the woman prevailed in wartime advertising (May90). In effect, the advertisements commissioned by the OWI during World War II certainly were never intended to effect changes in already-established notions about the woman's place as a delicate, nurturing figure in American society."

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