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✴ ✴ ✴ Chapter 7 ‘‘Wear This Uniform Proudly, Mrs. America!’’ Rosie the Riveter in the Kitchen ‘‘Wear this uniform proudly, Mrs. America!’’ declared a World War II advertisement for Stokely’s tomatoes. ‘‘It’s just a kitchen apron. Not a bit dramatic. Yet you who wear it perform a service without which this war cannot be won. . . . Planning good meals with rationed foods. Keeping everyone on the job. Holding home together, no matter what’’ (Stokely’s Finest Foods, 126). In a similar vein, a 1943 advertisement for Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti dinner observed: ‘‘Not just in overalls or a uniform—but even more in an apron—the American woman is serving her country today as never before. . . . If you are one of the millions who share this essential job, you are serving where you are needed most’’ (Chef Boy-ar-dee, 174). These are two examples of the flood of advertisements, cookbooks, and magazine articles published during the war that emphasized the importance of the American woman in the kitchen. According to the media, she played a vital role by feeding the millions of men, women, and children caught up in the war effort; without her labor in the kitchen, the war could not be won. At a time when millions of women were working outside the private home, frequently in nontraditional jobs making steel, airplanes, and bombs, how were these Rosie the Riveters simultaneously persuaded by the media to keep up their kitchen tasks as well as their other domestic responsibilities? Cooking literature instructed women that kitchen work and other domestic tasks came before labor outside the home, but it also promoted the idea that during the war women should be both housewives and workers in war-related industries across the United States. Finally, cooking literature suggested that women should continue to be responsible for cooking and other traditionally feminine domestic tasks after the war ended. To lure Rosie the Riveter back to the kitchen, the postwar kitchen was depicted as a pleasure palace to which any woman would yearn to return. Of course, wartime media images of women did not necessarily reflect the lives of real women during the war, as historian D’Ann Campbell notes in Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (1984): Doubtless the image of Woman that was presented to the public bore some relation to the experience of American women, whether as distorted reflection or prescription or ideal, and few people were unaware of those images. Yet studying the image of the American Woman, whether that projected by the movies, soap operas, novels, billboards, women’s magazines, daily press, or government propaganda, only offers a very indirect access to American women’s actual experiences. (10) Although the American woman as depicted in popular cooking literature was not necessarily a realistic representation of millions of women’s lives and experiences of the war, it is important that we recognize the tremendous influence of such media-created visions of womanhood in swaying public opinion. Even if many women might not have followed these dictates, it is difficult to question the influence that such ideals have on any society in any historical epoch. Women as War Workers Before turning to popular cooking literature, we must first understand the wartime conditions that made it necessary for such literature to address woman’s place both in the home and in the workplace. World War II caused an upheaval of social and gender roles greater than any seen before in American history. The shifting of roles and responsibilities was profound, affecting every class, racial, and ethnic group of women who were called to perform wartime responsibilities, from folding bandages for GIs to wielding Rosie the Riveter in the Kitchen ✴ 125 rivet guns at the local shipyard.1 Chester W. Gregory notes that war gave ‘‘American women new training programs, new jobs, new experiences, new responsibilities, and practically a new way of life’’ (xxi). Historian Karen Anderson concurs with Gregory, writing that ‘‘no war in American history has had as profound an effect on American society and American women’’ (4). World War II dramatically altered the lifestyles of millions of women, but this change did not come without profound cultural anxiety about women’s shifting roles. Many Americans worried that it might be difficult to send women back to their quiet homes and domestic responsibilities after the excitement (and paychecks) of working in wartime factories. Yet, it was felt that they...

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