Riveting for Victory: Women in Magazine Ads in World War II

An examination of the portrayal of women in popular magazine advertising from 1942 to 1945 suggests that the mass media played a major role in calling women out of the home and into the factory and machine shop to assist in the war effort. Discouraged from working during the Depression years when jobs were scarce, in the 1940s women were eagerly invited to join the labor force to help mobilize for global war. With "Rosie the Riveter" as their national heroine, wartime magazines proclaimed women's capability to perform almost every kind of theretofore "male" task. With the closing of war industries and the return of job-hungry soldiers, however, the magazines began to tell women to go home. In the late 1940s, popular magazines featured aproned housewives once again content in a completely domestic role. (Author/MKM)