“I have Worn Out Another Pair of Shoes for My Country”: Gender, Sexuality, and World War II

On October 1, 2008, then-President George H. W. Bush told a crowd at a United Services Organization (USO) gala, “The moment things began to turn around in Iraq is when the USO deployed Jessica Simpson.”¹ One might reasonably wonder how a pop singer could influence the course of a war, but to the military, women’s bodies have long been understood to be a crucial part of morale and even of soldiers’ performance. Meghan K. Winchell’s engaging history of the USO’s World War II domestic club and canteen program illuminates the context for Bush’s claim that displaying women’s bodies boosts military morale—and also the expectation that women owe such sexualized service to the state.

In Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II, Winchell describes the USO’s mobilization of women to work as senior and junior hostesses in clubs and canteens throughout the country. At the height of its efforts, the USO staffed more than three thousand facilities and provided recreation for one million people daily. The clubs and canteens provided games, conversation, and food for servicemen in an effort to distract them from other activities deemed less wholesome by government and military officials. In particular, as public health officials expressed concern about soldiers and sailors being tempted by prostitution and threatened by venereal disease, the USO hoped to offset such dangers by providing respectable women who could offer men the comforts of home and the opportunity for cordial female interaction. Additionally, the USO envisioned the clubs and canteens as domestic, feminine spaces that would temper the masculine military environment in which soldiers and sailors operated.

The USO’s desire to provide enticing, yet respectable recreation for servicemen proved a complicated task, and Winchell effectively analyzes the nuances of the organization’s efforts to balance these two seemingly conflicted goals. While the military, government, and USO all wanted women to operate the facilities and serve as the appeal that would attract men to the clubs and canteens, they also wanted hostesses to maintain a sexually chaste image that would ensure the USO’s reputation as a provider of wholesome entertainment. This combination of allure and respectability positioned the hostesses in a delicate situation as they sought to balance their work, reputations, and personal lives.

Moreover, while the USO officially encouraged recruitment of hostesses from all social and economic groups, the cultural equation of sexual respectability with white middle- and upper-class status introduced complicated matters of race and class. As USO volunteers relied on common assumptions that “young white women with middle-class cultural values best embodied the beauty and femininity required to meet servicemen’s basic recreational needs,” they frequently excluded women whose sexuality they believed suspect simply because of the women’s race or class (p. 45). Some clubs even banned the popular dance the jitterbug, which was widely seen as an African American dance and thus deemed too sexualized for respectable places of entertainment. As women who were excluded from these definitions of respectability pressed for integrated clubs, they fought not only for their right to serve as representations of idealized respectable American womanhood, but also for the claim to equal citizenship that such wartime work conferred on hostesses. Similarly, as many servicewomen discovered, clubs and canteens either did not know what to do with them or excluded them outright, in part because of public fears about their sexual respectability and in part because USO officials believed these women to be inadequate representations of femininity simply because of their military status. As designed by the USO, idealized femininity was white, middle-class, nonmilitarized, and sexually respectable.

Even as the USO carefully regulated the women who could become hostesses...