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100 / Custodians of Memory however, the legion could not remain entirely aloof from the dramatic impact of the First World War on American gender roles, and in many respects the organization showed flexibility in the face of changing times. For example, the legion welcomed into its regular posts all women who had served as naval yeomanettes or as army nurses, switchboard operators, or truck drivers. Such veterans enjoyed the full rights and privileges of any other legionnaire. in addition, while legion magazines tended to either deify or caricature the fairer sex, they sometimes included cartoons and articles that celebrated female power and independence. A cartoon from 1920, the year of the nineteenth Amendment, shows a formidablelooking woman, equipped with soap and water and the ubiquitous rolling pin, stomping up to the doorway of a house labeled “politics” while terrified male faces appear at the windows.111 Although playing to domestic stereotypes, the cartoon asserts that women voters will bring about a much-needed housecleaning in Washington, DC. even more striking is Joanna W. harting’s article “The Girl Who Took a Soldier’s Job,” which appeared in a 1919 issue of the Weekly. in her lengthy analysis of the wartime sexual revolution and the unwillingness of many young women, such as those employed in munitions factories, to return to their pre-1917 lives, harting asserted the following: “The girl who was left behind, who kept the hearth fires burning and the pot a-boiling and all the rest of it, while the American man was over there, is not trying to usurp his place in the industrial world but she is certainly determined to find one of her own. if search proves it to be nonexistent she is ready to create one.”112 needless to say, these are not the sentiments that one expects to find in the main news organ of a notoriously conservative and overwhelmingly male organization. however, in the late 1920s, at the height of the international boom in First World War literature and film, a now-forgotten literary controversy revealed a dangerous gap between the legion’s masculine construction of memory, within which direct exposure to violence remained central, and a new, broader definition of war experience endorsed by feminists and upheld by modernist writers of both sexes. A product of the ongoing gender reorientation introduced by the war itself, the latter decentered combat (that ultimate male proving ground) and conferred the privileged status of participant upon both soldier and civilian, combatant and noncombatant—an expansion of meaning regarded by most legionnaires as an anathema. ironically, in 1929 the American Legion Monthly found Custodians of Memory / 101 itself essentially forced to publish a serialized novel shaped by this new definition of war experience and written by a woman to boot. As a result , the organization would indulge in a less-than-flattering form of payback , an ethical low point in its defense of collective memory. The story of how this strange situation came to pass begins one year earlier with the announcement of a literary prize competition cosponsored by the American legion and the houghton Mifflin publishing company. Open to anyone writing in english, the competition promised twenty-five thousand dollars—more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s currency!—to the author of the best new novel “dealing with the period of the World War.”113 And the prize didn’t end there. To sweeten the pot even more, houghton Mifflin promised to publish the winning novel, at a lucrative royalty rate of 25 percent, while the American Legion Monthly pledged copious advertising in the form of full or partial serialization . Five distinguished judges were recruited to make the selection: Alice Duer Miller, a member of the head council of the Authors’ league of America; Ferris Greenslet, houghton Mifflin’s literary director (and Willa Cather’s editor until 1922); Richard henry little, a prominent journalist with the Chicago Tribune; Maj. Gen. James G. harbord, former commander of the AeF’s Service of Supply; and John T. Winterich, editor of the American Legion Monthly. Fifteen hundred writers from around the world declared their intention to participate in the competition; of these, approximately five hundred sent in manuscripts before the deadline of May 1, 1929. Staff members at the American Legion Monthly and houghton Mifflin forwarded the best of these submissions to the judges, whose final decision, reached only after “protracted debate,” appeared in the August 1929 issue of the Monthly. in a surprise...

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