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

Our Mothers' War is an insightfully researched account of what women from all walks of life were doing, writing about, and feeling during World War II. The journalist Emily Yellin found wartime letters and journals written by her mother, who at the time was working with the Red Cross in Saipan, and these inspired Yellin to produce a book about American women's vast array of responsibilities during the war. Our Mothers' War contains first-person histories through interviews, letters, and journals that highlight the roles women were called on to perform—working in defense plants, joining the military, serving as nurses in war zones all over the world, and sending their men to war. Although this reviewer was familiar with many women's roles overseas and in the United States, the depth of research and the wide-ranging experiences discussed in Yellin's book were enlightening.

Readers will find tales of female spies, pilots, movie stars, baseball players, politicians, prostitutes, journalists, and fictional characters created just for the war effort in this all-inclusive record of American women's lives during the war. Among other sources, Yellin draws on first-hand accounts from the wives of scientists who created the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos. She discusses the experiences of Japanese-American women locked up as prisoners in their own country and the frustration and pride of African-American women who joined the segregated Army.

Rosie the Riveter was the name coined for women who were building ships and airplanes and producing ammunition needed for the war. Yellin shows how economics and patriotism were the motivation behind many women's first entry into the workforce. Recruiting housewives was a delicate prospect, reports Yellin, who notes that women hoping to work often had to contend with doubting husbands. Eventually almost 50 percent of all adult women were employed in the United States, not only in wartime industrial jobs but also in traditionally male jobs in agriculture, sales, and clerical work.

When World War II ended and the men returned to find jobs, women were asked or in some cases forced to move aside. In wartime, Yellin states, "women taking war jobs raised many issues that persisted through to the next century: equal pay, child care, equal job advancement opportunities, juggling home and work obligations" (p. 65). The book contains numerous examples of how these women had tasted a kind of freedom not known before, and "now the genie was out of the bottle" (p. 70).

Military life changed dramatically when women were admitted into the Army and Navy. Staunch opposition to non-nurse women in the military gave way, but not without strict limits on women's options and status. Yeltsin contends that "the sort of acrobatics of compromise those paradoxical opportunities demanded required a special strength of character and state of grace, which seemed to be at the essence of every early military woman" (p. 112). The Army Nurse Corps and Navy Nurse Corps had been formed at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they suddenly found their roles greatly expanded and changed. During World War II the first flight nurses were assigned to take part in the rescue and healing of wounded American servicemen in all theaters of war. Nurses and Red Cross volunteers, more than any other groups of women, often came closer to the rigors of battle, even going to Great Britain before the United States entered the war. In the Philippines, which was attacked a day after Pearl Harbor, Army and Navy nurses were captured by the Japanese. During the three years they were imprisoned, the nurses continued to perform their duties by caring for other prisoners, both civilian and military, who were sick and dying from disease and starvation. Emaciated and weak, they all were rescued in February 1945.

Many individuals in Our Mothers' War are credited with important roles and influence, but one...