The home front during World War II was a wonderful arena for gender reassignment. As we explored via E. Simms Campbell’s quick-witted and curvaceous “Cuties,” women adopted new roles with so many American men overseas, and this helped shake up, if for a while, a number of longstanding stereotypes across popular culture. Just as women were ready, willing and able to fill vacant jobs from the assembly line to management, they were just as ready to become adventure heroes.
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The role of WWII in the history of women, equality and feminism in America is widely known and usually mythologized in Rosie the Riveter tales. With many men abroad, women filled roles in industry and management that they traditionally had been denied. According to the thumbnail version, newly empowered women then suffered a kind of cultural whiplash with the post-war return of men to the States. Industry, government and pop culture generally openly discouraged women from enjoying their newfound role outside of the home in a range of unseemly ways.
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Panels & Prose 