A Blog About Women Who Were Homefront Heroines: the WAVES of World War II
While searching for some images of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), we came across this image. Like the Vargas Navy calendar girl we showed earlier in the week, this image too comes from Esquire. The WAAC is from their 1943 calendar (the WAVE from 1944).
Her poem reads:
A Merry Christmas to you elf! I’m off to join the WAACs. And serve the country that I love until the Axis cracks.
Yes, we’re taking a line from the upcoming PBS series in today’s missive. But the announcement in the wee hours of the morning (local time) that a trio of women campaigning for peace in Africa and the Arab world had won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize made us think that this is a good topic for today.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Africa is Libera’s first elected female president (a feat we have yet to accomplish in the United States) and her choice is controversial. She’s a leader who is in the midst of a heated election campaign in her home country and who is much more admired abroad than in Liberia. Her fellow countrywoman, Leymeh GBowee, is the head of the Women for Peace movement, and was lauded for reaching across religious boundaries to unite Muslim and Christian women against the warlords who dominate Liberia. The third woman, Tawakul Karman of Yemen, is a pro-democracy demonstrator who was instrumental in the events of the Arab Spring.
So why should a blog about World War II veterans concern itself with peace prizes? Because these women, like the women we’ve talked to about their World War II experiences, were agitating for change. Some saw their wartime roles as a temporary sacrifice which would ultimately result in a shorter war, others saw joining the military as a way to prove that women could to the same work men did (and get paid the same).
Congratulations to this year’s Nobel Prize winners.
The World War II-era pin-up art is quite amazing. It’s no surprise that scholars like Walt Reed have dubbed the era “the golden age” of the pin-up. Think about it: pin-ups were everywhere, from magazines like Esquire to the noses of planes to even personal snapshots (check out our friend Maria Elena Buzek’s fascinating book Pin-Up Grrls for a discussion of that phenomena). The director’s mother – the WAVE who inspired this project – had a collection of drawings she did during the war era of women in pin-up guise. They were everywhere.
This is a recruitment poster for the WAVES and SPARs done by pin-up artist George Petty. Petty was the “establishment” when it came to pin-ups – he pretty much created the famous Esquire pin-up centerfolds. But when he left the magazine in 1940, his role was taken over by an young upstart, Antonio Vargas. His pin-ups (dubbed “Varga Girls”) made the Petty pin-ups look tame by comparison: buxom, long legs, tiny waists – to contemporary eyes a combination of Barbie doll and Playboy centerfold.
This image came from a calendar Esquire ran during the war – which featured a WAVE-to-be. The poem alongside her reads:
I’m going to join the Navy WAVES and help the war to halt, and also show my Navy beau that I am worth my “Salt!”
Vargas also did the SPARs recruitment poster, below.
This blog began as a way to share stories and photographs about the women who served in the WAVES of World War II. We’ve veered from that a bit recently, but today we wanted to get back on topic (of sorts).
A new book is out on the topic of oral history and photography. Shameless plug: Homefront Heroines director Kathleen Ryan has a chapter in the book. She talks about how the women she’s interviewed use photographs to help in their storytelling – and how certain photographs, like stories, can become a part or our memories (and that storytelling when used with photographs can make the memory “stick” even more firmly than without). There are a lot of other really interesting essays in the book as well.
Kind of what we’re doing here in the blog, no?
So we’re chugging along on the film and various ancillary projects and this discussion came up with our Production Assistant today (Laura, who’s temporarily stepped aside from the wonderful work she’s been doing on the blog to work on the Homefront Heroines TagWhat project): when does something move into the public domain?
We’re considering works originally published during World War II, films and newsreels for the most part. According to copyright law, the works might be in the public domain. Then again, they might not. It all depends upon if the copyright was renewed or not. If it wasn’t, the work is in the public domain. If not, a film produced in 1944 would remain copyright protected until 2039.
We understand (and fully support) copyright protections. It keeps the creator of the work in control of how the work is distributed. That’s a good thing. However, where it gets muddy is when a corporation uses film produced by a public entity, such as the U.S. government, and then masks its production of the film in copyright. We’re running into that issue with newsreels right now. Much of the footage is government produced – yet the copyright in some cases is held by a film studio. Or, a film produced by a studio has fallen out of copyright, but the production company who repackages the material claims they have “copyright” on the production. Not exactly. On the DVD packaging, yes. On the film itself, not so much.
Muddy areas. Frustrating areas. And all of it is complicated by the web and the publishing that occurs therein.
That being said, this photo is produced by the U.S. Navy. We’re sharing it with you because it is “owned,” as it were, by the U.S. public.
Navy WAVE Airbrushes Photo
at Navy Art & Animation Division
The Guardian UK published a piece Friday from author Julia Lovell where she talks about “common knowledge” in publishing that women can’t write about war. In it, she argues (quiet compellingly, I might add) that the view of military history as only being about explosions and battlefields is in fact an old fashioned model of military history. A more contemporary view, she says, is to think about military history as a multidisciplinary field, which embeds “political, social, cultural and personnel contexts.” In other words, war is about more than just battles.
Yet “we” don’t want to hear that. I’ve been told that the everyday stories of the WAVES I’ve interviewed are just anecdotes, and not really “important” history. Or (horrors!) the stories are told in a way which is too conversational and attempts to reach to a larger audience, so so clearly can’t be “proper” history. The criticism seems to echo what the women have told me frustrates them about the World War II histories they’ve seen: it’s evident their story isn’t really worth telling (at least to the powers that be).
The larger story of war, of course, is all about the minutiae. The battles and explosions are few and far between when compared with the everyday: the people who work behind the scenes to make sure the troops on the front lines have what they need, the waiting and training in between the fights, the political machinations as each side jockeys for position. One women we spoke with described her military group as something closer to the to sarcastic cut-ups of M*A*S*H than the heroic portrayal by Tom Brokaw of The Greatest Generation. Others talk about the waiting, the boredom, the crushing dullness of the day-in-day-out sameness as their wartime experience. They challenge our notion of what heroism is. And, yes, their experiences, even the minutiae, can change the course of the world.
So why is there such a resistance to tell that story?
WordPress, the web platform we’re using to create our blog, has issued a “post-a-day” challenge. It’s a way for those who have a blog to flex their writing muscles for National Novel Writing Month in November, where writers around the globe each attempt to write their 50,000 word novel in a one month time period. FYI, that would mean writ between 1600 and 1700 words a day. A lot.
We’re not sure that this project will become a 50,000 word novel. After all, that would be in addition to the film, website and smartphone elements we’ve already created (or are creating). So we’re using this challenge as an incentive to keep up short daily posts while we’re working on the more complex elements of the film.
We’re thinking our “post-a-day” will initially include artifacts from archives which we really enjoy.
Today’s artifacts are two about the WAVES recruits. Both images came from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland and was part of a larger collection they have of Navy photographs. There are (conservatively) tens of thousands of World War II-era Navy photographs in the archive, and in May of 2010 the Homefront Heroines producer and director spent several days there digitizing images for the documentary.
In the image above, WAVES recruits are taking the oath of office with Lt. Stewart (at left in the image). in April of 1944.
In this photo from February of 1943, women who have volunteered to be WAVES and SPARs (the WAVES’ Coast Guard counterparts) are getting ready to board a special subway train in New York which will take them to commissioning ceremonies at the WAVES boot camp, Hunter College. They’re part of a group of 418 women who first took part in a mass swearing in at City Hall in lower Manhattan, and then headed up to Hunter as the first class of boots at the new training center.
We’ve been neglecting the blog a bit recently, because we’ve been experimenting with a new storytelling platform. TagWhat brings virtual reality to storytelling, allowing us to geo-tag artifacts and share them with people via the smart phone app. In our case, we’re telling a part of Margaret Anderson Thorngate’s story. But while the blog brings her story to you in your home or office (or wherever), in TagWhat we can also bring her story to the location. So if the user has the app downloaded to a smartphone and goes to the U.S.S. Missouri, Margaret’s story about her experiences aboard the ship pops up on the phone for the user to see. You can also watch it online.
We think that this can be another platform, in addition to our website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and, of course, this blog to share the story of the Navy WAVES and Coast Guard SPARs.
It’s a pretty cool format. Take a look at Margaret’s story and let us know what you think – even if you haven’t seen it at the Missouri.
Janette experienced the good and bad of America’s reaction to women in military service. The concept of women in uniform was completely new to many Americans. They were used to seeing women participate in the military as nurses, but not taking the same jobs as men.
After more than a year and a half in the service, Janette went home to Indiana to visit friends and family. She shares one negative encounter she had with the sister of a childhood friend:
” I go in the house, I guess. Her sister was in there. I didn’t know her sister. I had never met her sister. I was in uniform because you had to wear them all the time. And her sister said …
‘I want you to leave!’ Just as soon as I stepped in the door.
She wanted me to leave; I couldn’t imagine what was going on. And Teresa, this friend of mine, said to her … ‘What do you mean?’
She [the sister] said, ‘It’s because of her that my husband has to go out on a ship and any woman in uniform should not be in.’ She said, ‘It’s the worst thing that ever happened to our country.’
You see, from her point of view, that was how she thought. But I, I was astounded. I just said, ‘Oh, no, they need everybody.’ … Then I turned around and left. There was no point in arguing or anything. But I’ll never forget that because that was a shocker.”
Janette also had positive experiences where she was honored for her service in touching ways. She shares about an experience she had in the bus station while returning to the base from her visit home:
“I was walking through the station and a very elderly man said, ‘Ma’am?’ And I looked at him. He said, ‘Here’s 50 cents I would like to give you.’
And I said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t need that. I’m going back to the base.’
He said, ‘No, I just want to give it to some service person.’
I kept saying, no, but finally I saw he was so patriotic he just wanted to give it — see, it almost makes me cry to think about it. And I so I took it and thanked him and went on. That was his contribution. I’ll never forget that.”
Janette finished a bachelor’s degree at Purdue University. She minored in physical education, which was her passion and got her major in home economics. Through her four years in school she spent most of her free time in the gymnasium as a member of the athletic association.
When she graduated she got a job teaching home economics and coordinating 4H in an high school in northern Indiana, but she didn’t stay there for long. Pearl Harbor was struck and the very next day Janette signed up for the WAVES.
(‘Coach Janette’ pictured above on the bottom row, left.)
Her love for sports started when she was a child. Her father was an avid sports fan and would play catch with Janette and her sister after he came in from working in the fields at night.
After officer training, Janette was sent back to Pensacola as an athletic officer. She and another WAVE set up an athletic program so that the women could pick and choose athletic activities each day in order to fulfill their physical fitness requirements. She even arranged for the WAVES to have athletic clothes that they could use, since their uniform set didn’t include anything suitable for playing sports.
“If a man could check out shorts or get shorts, see, for the activity, so could the women. See that was the first time I’d come up with equality.” – Janette Alpaugh
Hinges of History 