Franny Prindle met her husband-to-be Seth Taft while she was still in college. Seth was the grandson of the former U.S. President William Harding Taft. They were both officers in the Navy.
Initially, WAVES weren’t allowed to be married. But the Navy discovered that they were losing out on some qualified women (or were forcing them to resign upon marriage). So first women were only allowed to marry outside of the Navy. Then that policy too changed, and WAVES were allowed to marry Navy men.
This photograph is of Franny on her wedding day: June 19, 1943. She and Seth were both Ensigns at the time – he wore his dress whites to the ceremony. She had a half-dozen bridesmaids and changed into her Navy uniform before departing on her honeymoon.
This photograph is courtesy of Franny Prindle Taft.
Navy WAVES were active, regular military. That meant they were expected to wear their uniforms during all public functions. Including weddings.
Franny Prindle, like other WAVES of the era, had to get a special dispensation from the Executive Officer of the Naval Reserve to wear something other than her uniform on her wedding day. But note the special conditions: no photographs of Prindle outside of her uniform could be released to the press.
This photo was taken sometime in 1943 while she was on her honeymoon with her husband Seth Taft (the grandson of President William Howard Taft). They traveled up the Hudson River to Canada; both were officers in the Navy and had met while at college (she at Vassar, he at Yale).
I did work in cancer research at Yale right after I got out. That’s where I went immediately after graduation … I was making really almost no money, and I heard about the WAVES. I didn’t want to go into anything that was kind of just an auxiliary with people jumping around in uniforms and not really doing very much. And (the secretary to the Dean at Vassar College) assured me it was going to much more than that.
The Navy put out newsletters to keep the WAVES up to date. The newsletters at first started out quite simple – just a copied sheet or two of paper with a few sketches – but ultimately the publications became quite polished, featuring in-depth articles, photographs and even comics.
This newsletter was published in January of 1945. It was a national publication that was designed to go out to all WAVES regardless of where they served. The photo on a cover shows a WAVE working with sailors who are learning how to use pressurized masks for high-altitude flying.
The national newsletter focused on news of interest to any WAVE. But individual bases also put out newsletters, with location-specific information.
Homefront Heroines director Kathleen Ryan and producer David Staton are at the Rose Bowl today. So in honor of the game and parade, we’re showing not roses but… cherry blossoms. After all, in the Tournament of Roses Parade everything on the floats is made of natural materials: flowers, seeds, leaves, etc.
This is WAVE Liane Galvin, an aerographer’s mate (weather forecaster) based in Washington, D.C. smelling the cherry blossoms during a D.C. spring in World War II.
Yesterday, we mentioned the idea of showing an image a day through 2012. Today we’re starting out with something festive.
During WWII, messages supporting the war effort were found in all sorts of interesting places. Including in fans.
This fan, found in the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, shows a woman dressed in patriotic clothing (note the braid and “overseas” hat she’s wearing), drawings of ships in battle at sea, and a copy of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Here’s the exciting news: the rough edit of the film is done (!!!) and our fabulous composer Andy Forsberg should have our music composed by mid-February.
So what’s up in the New Year for the Homefront Heroines crew?
Champagn and celebration with Navy WAVES at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel.
We have some resolutions in place.
Blog a WAVES picture a day for 2012
Submit the film for ITVS and American Documentary Film Fund financing in January. Then, on to American Experience, who we’re hoping will agree that the story of the WAVES is worth a place on PBS. The funding will help us with our other resolutions.
License film footage and archival music
Find a firm to do color correction
And, find a narrator. We love the idea of :
Zooey Deschanel – because of her work with Hello Giggles advocating strong storytelling by women
Geena Davis – she’s a huge advocate for strong female role models, was a part of the film Women, War and Peace and was a speaker last year at the Joint Women’s Leadership Symposium, where we’ll be talking about the film in March
Mila Kunis – The Black Swan and Friends with Benefits star made news this year for going to the Marine Corps Ball after being asked out on Twitter. How about supporting the accomplishments of military women?
What do you think?
Here’s to a fabulous 2012 and the debut of Homefront Heroines both for the WAVES at the WAVES National Annual Conference and (ideally) at a film festival or on a television screen near you!
The U.S. National Film Registry announced its latest selections late yesterday, and included on the list is a World War II-era documentary propaganda classic. The film is called The Negro Soldier. It follows soldiers from pre-enlistment through basic training.
What was remarkable about the film wasn’t that it included African American soldiers in training (though that was indeed unusual at the time). But what was really incredible is that the filmmakers were specifically instructed to avoid Hollywood stereotypes about African Americans. So the men featured were shown coming from a variety of jobs (lawyers, musicians, athletes). According to film historians Thomas Cripps and James Culbert, the cautions included to:
Avoid stereotypes such as the Negroes’ alleged affinity for watermelon or pork; also avoid strong images of racial identity (‘play down colored soldiers more Negroid in appearance’ and omit ‘Lincoln, emancipation, or any race leaders or friends of the Negro’).
While initially intended for African American military audiences, people who saw the film thought the film should be shown to African American and white audiences, civilian and military, a response which surprised the filmmakers.
The Negro Soldier was directed by Frank Capra, who also directed the famous “Why We Fight” series of propaganda films (1942-1945). These films were designed to raise morale in the U.S. film audience and help people understand the complexities of the war. Capra began working on the films shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Capra saw them as the American answer to German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s powerful Triumph of the Will. He used footage mostly produced by the U.S. Office of War Information to craft his seven-film series.
The first film in the “Why We Fight” series, 1942′s Prelude to War, won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 1943. The “Why We Fight” series became part of the National Film Registry in 2000. With the addition of The Negro Soldier, this means that another important part of World War II-era domestic propaganda will be restored and preserved in the Library of Congress for future generations.
World War II women didn’t get the Capra treatment. However, this OWI film Glamour Girls of 1943 does show how the government was trying to get women to participate in the war effort as well.
In case you missed our series of holiday pin-ups on Facebook, here they all are (and a few more), put to the tune of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” sung by Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redborn. Have a wonderful wonderful Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice or whatever winter holiday you celebrate!
The plan was to not blog until after Christmas. After the holiday season. After the rough edit of the film was done. A few blogs were stashed to release between now and Christmas (all done, like our Christmas shopping, thank you) and on Christmas Eve-eve there would be a link to the YouTube channel clip of our holiday card.
Then came this post from Feminist Frequency on the creepiest Christmas songs of all time:
Wait – Baby It’s Cold Outside is creepier than Santa Baby (which is about crass commercialism but fun in a campy sort of way when sung by Eartha Kitt)? And it’s rapey? Really????
But it’s not even as if there is any clear cut consensus on in the feminist trenches. There are arguments that since she says “the answer is no” and he continues to try and convince her otherwise, that means the guy is a predator. Or that the line “say, what’s in that drink” means that he’s slipped her a date rape drug (uhm, sorry, Rohypnol was developed in the 1970s; the song dates back to the 1930s). Or that we’re all misunderstanding things and need to take the lyrics in their entirety and not excerpt phrases here and there. Or that while the Dean Martin version is fine, it’s the Zooey Deschanel duet with Leon Redbone that is REALLY creepy.
So since our plan is to post our holiday greeting not only using Baby It’s Cold Outside but featuring pin-ups, we though we’d need to explain a bit.
Let’s start with the notions of flirtation and sexuality in the 1930s and ’40s. While in 21st-century America “no means no,” we’re also living in a time of extreme freedom for women in terms of sexuality. Tabloids speculate if America’s favorite (unmarried) Friend is pregnant. Teen Mom follows the travails of unwed teenage mothers. An episode of Glee is all about the virgins in the club loosing their virginity.
In other words it’s not a taboo for a woman (or even a teen girl) to have sex outside of marriage.
That wasn’t the case in the 1940s. It wasn’t that women didn’t have sex – it was that they didn’t talk about it. Or admit (at the time) that they liked it. “Good” girls needed to be “convinced” by their boyfriends to stay the night, and worried if they did what might happen to their reputation afterwards. Slay Belle offers a very compelling argument to this point in her post on Persephone.
Assessing the “rapey-ness” of the song outside of its temporal context is ignoring something academic-types call “historicism”: the idea that you need to judge something within the cultural and social context when it was created. In other words, we can’t call Baby It’s Cold Outside rapey in the 21st century because by 1930s standards it may not be. It may be a song about a flirtation ritual with its own rules and expectations – a ritual we have abandoned in our modern world.
Ditto the idea of pin-ups. As Maria Elena Buszek has persuasively argued, pin-ups were seen by women in 1940s culture as not some over-sexualized representation, but rather as a way to express their (forbidden) sexuality. Women made their own pin-ups and shared them not with their boyfriends but with each other. They read Esquire and appreciated the Petty and Varga-designed centerfolds.
A far cry from the world of Rudolph where the men (human and reindeer) need to “get the women back to Christmastown.”
So yes, we’re using Baby It’s Cold Outside with 1940s-era pin-ups for our holiday greeting – not as a way to reinforce sexual stereotypes (man as predator, woman as victim; man as “beholder of the gaze” and woman as the one gazed upon), but rather as a way to challenge those very norms. To make us think if a woman can seemingly relinquish control to a man – while actually being very much in control of what is happening and when. To celebrate the season as well as the powerful women we’ve come to know as Homefront Heroines.
Can a pin-up be a form of sexuality and female empowerment? We’d love to know what you think.
Oh, and Zooey, we personally love your duet and think you’d make a fabulous narrator for the film. Have your people call our people.
Hinges of History 