Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front during World War II

This volume is a portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. This volume re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews and previously unpublished letters and diaries, the author shows what went on in the hearts and minds of the real women behind the female images of World War II -- women working in war plants; mothers and wives sending their husbands and sons off to war and sometimes death; women joining the military for the first time in American history; nurses operating in battle zones in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific; and housewives coping with rationing. The author also delves into lesser-known stories, including: tales of female spies, pilots, movie stars, baseball players, politicians, prostitutes, journalists, and even fictional characters; firsthand accounts from the wives of the scientists who created the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, African-American women who faced Jim Crow segregation laws at home even as their men were fighting enemy bigotry and injustice abroad, and Japanese-American women locked up as prisoners in their own country. The author explains how Wonder Woman was created in 1941 to fight the Nazi menace and became the first female comic book superhero, as well as how Marilyn Monroe was discovered in 1944 while working with her mother-in-law packing parachutes at a war plant in Burbank, California. This volume gives center stage to those who might be called "the other American soldiers."