Monthly Archives: May 2022

The Hello Girls

Women at the Front During WWI

Let’s talk technology, shall we? I’m not talking about ‘recent’ technology, like the ability to use WhatsApp, TikTok, or even Facebook. I’m not thinking about satellite radio, television, or even CD players. I’m talking about the telephone – not the cell phones that are ubiquitous these days. No, I’m talking about the plain old landline. 

Honestly, does anyone even have one of those anymore? 

During World War I, a telephone was cutting edge technology – especially when it came to communicating between officers and troops that were spread out over the European front. At the time, radio existed, but it could only be used to transmit Morse code. Furthermore, the radios were so heavy that transportation was a major issue. The solution? Bringing in linemen to run telephone wires throughout the front, extending for hundreds of miles. 

There is a backstory here about how small the Army Signal Corps was on the day the United States entered World War I. It takes an awful lot of manpower to lay the telephone cables necessary to wage a war. But that’s a story for another day. This story – THIS STORY – is the story of The Hello Girls, the women who were recruited “into” the Army Signal Corps to help serve their country. 

Notice that I put “into” in quotes. That’s going to become relevant here in a minute. 

At the time, the majority of telephone operators in the United States were women. In her history of The Hello Girls, Elizabeth Cobbs (2017: Harvard University Press) noted that these operators back at home were “diligent and quick, the best of them efficiently manipulat[ing] cords and plugs while fielding requests for the time and other information.” 

Hello Girl Enid Pooley.
Hello Girl Enid Pooley. National Museum of the United States Army, For Belvoir, VA.
Photo by Mary Hallock Morris (July 24, 2021)

According to the U.S. Army Signal Museum: 

During WWI, General “Black Jack” Pershing advertised in all the major newspapers in America the need for female telephone operators. These telephone operators must meet certain criteria. They needed to speak French, have a college degree and be single. Over 7,000 women applied and 450 were selected. The women were recruited from the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). The women received military and Signal Corps training. They trained in basic military radio procedures at Camp Franklin Maryland (now Fort Meade). After training, the women purchased their Army regulation uniform complete with “U.S.” crests, Signal Corps crests, and “dog tags.” Arm patches designating positions were issued. In the spring of 1918, the first thirty-three operators were on their way to Europe. They were issued gas masks and steel helmets. The operators voices were a welcome sound to the men who used the Signal Corps telephone system.

The Women in the Army website adds that “The Army Signal Corps women traveled and lived under Army orders from the date of their acceptance until their termination from service. Their travel orders and per diem allowance orders read ‘same as Army nurses in Army regulations’.” 

The first 100 Hello Girls arrived before most of the American troops landed in Europe. And, they were there during the thick of the battle. A story from Cobbs’ book illustrates how tough and persistent these Hello Girls were:

Choking smoke poured into the switchboard room, where Berthe Hunt and the others were working. Shouts rang out above the quiet voices coming over the wires. “Of course we sat at the board & operated— there was nothing else we could do,” Hunt wrote. “We knew our things were going.” But they also knew they could not break contact with embattled frontline troops. A bucket brigade tried to save the switchboards. Colonel Behn climbed onto the roof over Berthe Hunt’s head and emptied pails of water that others handed up.

Here’s the sad part: Even though these women served their county, connecting more than 26 million calls during the war, when they came home from the war they were not considered to have been “in” the military after all. [See those quotation marks above were important!] Because of an Army ruling after the Civil War – when women had enlisted disguised as men – all Army members were required to be male. 

Thus, the Hello Girls, who had worked through some serious battle conditions did not receive any of the benefits extended to veterans after the war. Writes Cobbs: “The U.S. government denied them bonuses, Victory Medals, honorable discharges, and a flag on their coffins.” 

Speaking of persistence: These women continued to petition the various U.S. presidents for decades to gain recognition as veterans. After all, that wasn’t really outlandish, seeing how the Navy used female yeomen during the same war. In 1977, during the Carter administration, these “girls” were finally recognized as military members.

Next Time: The Radium Girls

Source

Cobbs, E. (2017). The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers [Kindle Android version]. Harvard University Press. 

Other Useful Websites

June 11, 2021: Over 200 Years of Service: The History of Women in the U.S. Military

November 9, 2018: 100 Years On, The ‘Hello Girls’ Are Recognized for World War I Heroics

September 29, 1918: Brave Girl Soldiers of the Switchboard, The Sun

PBS Documentary: The Hello Girls

Library of Congress: Topics in Chronicling America (Hello Girls)

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The Forerunners

A Quick Introduction to Women Warriors

This week, I’m going to talk a bit about women’s war efforts prior to World War II. Consider this a bit of an introduction – I have way more material in ye ol’ research files about women in the Civil War and in World War I. So, let’s get started!

In its History of Wartime Nurses, Duquesne (Dew-Kane) University’s School of Nursing points out that women have nursed wounded warriors all the way back to the Revolutionary War. Other sources tell of women protesting tea, melting pewter dishes to mold bullets, and acting as couriers. Some women went to war with their husbands. And, as Susan Casey writes in her author’s note to Women Heroes of the American Revolution, “In many cases, women didn’t have to rush to war. The war surrounded them, engulfed their lives.”

There’s a reason why little girls learn the legend of Molly Pitcher and the story of a female Paul Revere. They may be myths, exaggerations (or not), but they are stories that inspire.

Then we come to the Civil War. In her book Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, popular historian Karen Abbott writes: 

There was work for everyone to do, even the women— especially the women. They had to adjust quickly to the sudden absence of fathers and husbands and sons, to the idea that things would never be as they had been. They had no vote, no straightforward access to political discourse, no influence in how the battles were waged. Instead they took control of homes, businesses, plantations. They managed their slaves in the fields, sometimes backing up orders with violence. They formed aid societies, gathering to darn socks and underwear for the soldiers. To raise money for supplies they hosted raffles and bazaars, despite widespread resistance from the very men they aimed to help (protested one general, “It merely looks unbecoming for a lady to stand behind a table to sell things”). They even served as informal recruiting officers, urging men to enlist and humiliating those who demurred, sending a skirt and crinoline with a note attached: “Wear these, or volunteer.”

Karen Abbott (2014)

Abbott tells the stories of four women who served both the union and the confederacy: three as spies, and one as a union private. Take for example, Rose O’Neal Greenhow, who ran a confederate spy ring in Washington, DC, who had been recruited into this position by confederate President Jefferson Davis, through his emissary Captain Thomas Jordan. Later, Union Colonel Erasmus D. Keyes called her “one of the most persuasive women that was ever known in Washington”— persuasive enough to wheedle classified information from him in between their alleged trysts. Or how about Emma Edmondson, who posed as Union private Frank Thompson, one of the 400 estimated women who served as men during this war between the States. Edmondson served at great risk to herself, knowing that if she was found out that she could be arrested for prostitution.

And then there was Mary Edwards Walker who became the first female Army surgeon during the Civil War. Walker often crossed battle lines and in April 1864 was arrested by Confederate troops as a spy – after helping a Confederate doctor with a surgery. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by President Andrew Johnson, but was stripped of the medal in 1917 because she “did not meet the requirements to qualify for the award” (i.e., she was a woman). She refused to return the medal and wore it for the rest of her life. The honor was later restored in 1977.

Liberty engines manufactured for government use. 165-WW-582-A1
from: The Women of World War I in Photographs, The Unwritten Record, National Archives

Women continued their contributions during World War I, working as homefront volunteers, overseas nurses, factory laborers, and support personnel. They formed what historian Lynn Dumenil labeled “the second line of defense.”

In an article for Time Magazine, author Pamela Toler noted that “increasing manpower demands … made it easier for women to make official contributions [during World War I] … Women signed up as ambulance drivers, telephone operators, munitions workers, members of various service auxiliaries, and even as soldiers in Bolshevik Russia’s all-female units.” In the United States, women served openly as Navy “Yeomanettes” thanks to a loophole in the law that did not state that only men could enlist in the Navy. By the end of World War I, 11,000 American women had become yeomen (F). Originally, these women were recruited to take over clerical duties, but by the end of the war, the female yeomen were also working as “radio and telegraph operators, supervisors for naval shipments, commissary stewards, draftsmen, pharmacists, torpedo assemblers, and camouflage designers.”

Next Time: The Hello Girls

Sources

Abbott, K. (2014). Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War [Kindle Android version]. Harper. 

Casey, Susan. (2015). Women Heroes of the American Revolution: 20 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Defiance, and Rescue. (Women of Action Series). Chicago Review Press. [YA Nonfiction]

Dumenil, L. (2017). The Second Line of Defense: American Women in World War I. University of North Carolina Press. 

“The History of Wartime Nurses.” (nd). Duquesne University School of Nursing. https://onlinenursing.duq.edu/history-wartime-nurses/ [Last accessed July 18, 2021]

Toler, P.D. (2019, February 26). “Not Every Woman Who Served with the U.S. Military During World War I Got the Same Treatment. Here’s Why.” Time Magazine. Last accessed October 9, 2021. https://time.com/5537784/wwi-us-military-women/

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On Intersectionality

A Brief Note about the 6888th:

Before we move onto other ways that women contributed to war efforts throughout the centuries, I’d like to briefly highlight the issue of intersectionality, a concept introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 1980s. The basic idea is that “when it comes to thinking about how inequalities persist, categories like gender, race, and class are best understood as overlapping and mutually constitutive rather than isolated and distinct.” 

Four members of the 6888th Postal Battalion in Europe with an Army Jeep.
Members of the 6888th Postal Battalion in Europe.
Source: United States Department of Defense, reposted at the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

In her memoir, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC, Charity Adams Early highlights the extra burdens that faced African American Women in the military – primarily the problems associated with racism and segregation. Yet, this woman showed an amazing amount of grit and ended up leading the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. The battalion of African American WACS were first stationed in Birmingham, England, and later in France with one mission – get the mail to our boys at the front. According to the US Army Center of Military History, the women created a new tracking system, processed an average of 65,000 pieces of mail per shift, and cleared a six-moth backlog of mail in three months. 

Stories of Racism

Just to whet your appetite for more stories of the Six Triple Eight, I want to share this snippet from an article from the National World War II Museum entitled “The Six Triple Eight: No Mail, Low Morale” (February 10, 2021).

Imagine you’re a black woman leading a black platoon – the only platoon of African American women to be sent overseas. You’re in England and a visiting general decides he wants to see the women under your command march. What do you do when this general gets on his high horse with you? Do you stand your ground? Adams did. Read the following excerpt from “No Mail, Low Morale:”

It seemed like every weekend her troops were marching for one general or another. On this one occasion, a general arrived, but only 300 of her women were ready for inspection. The general wanted to know where the rest of the women were. Adams explained that one-third were on duty and the other third were resting. The general did not find that answer satisfactory. ‘I tell you what I’m going to do, Major Adams. I’m going to send a white first lieutenant down here to show you how to run things.’

Adams recalled that ‘there are times when the human mind must respond like a computer. That statement seemed like a scream.’ She did not remember which word triggered her response, but she was certain that her officers and soldiers in formation had heard the exchange. Adams realized that she might not be able to effectively lead her troops if she did not give the proper response, so she blurted out, ‘Over my dead body, Sir.’

The general assured her that she would hear from him. As she prepared for a court-martial, her staff found a memorandum from SHAEF headquarters that cautioned commanders about using language that stressed racial segregation. The general relented.

— James William Theres (2021, February 10)

And that, my friends, takes grit.

I am going to come back to these amazing women later in this blog after I have organized my thoughts a bit more. For those of you who want to know more about the Six Triple Eight, I recommend this article from the National World War II Museum (dated September 15, 2021). 

Sources

Earley, C. A. (2021). One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (Texas A & M University Military History Series, #12) [Kindle Android version]. Texas A&M University Press.

Theres, James William. (2021, February 10). The SixTripleEight: No Mail, No Morale. The National WWII Museum. Last accessed October 6, 2021. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/the-sixtripleeight-6888th-battalion

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Upcoming Entries: Women’s war contributions that pre-date World War II

The Housewife

The Housewife:

Our second story is not about a countess, but rather a British housewife.

Book Cover: The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace.

Meet Nella Last. Nella was a diarist for Mass Observation, a social research organization launched in January 1937. Billed as the “anthropology of ourselves,” Mass Observation had a national panel of volunteers who replied to regular questionnaires on a variety of questions. Approximately 480 of these diaries were written during World War II. Nella’s diary has been much studied, with scholars releasing four volumes of her writings. In addition, her diaries were the basis of Housewife, 49, a British movie released in 2006. 

Reading Nella’s diaries, one can see how her life grew to embrace the war effort. The mother of two grown sons, her life had been rather limited by her husband’s cranky personality. However, once she joined the Women’s Voluntary Services, things changed for her. Now, the WVS was an organization that was originally focused on training women to help with air raid precautions in the lead up to World War II. By the end of the war, this organization was running emergency rest centers, feeding people and administering first aid, and assisting with the evacuation and billeting of children. According the BBC, one in every 10 British women was a member of this organization, the so-called “army Hitler forgot.”

Nella’s work in her community of Barrow-in-Furness included organising raffles to raise money, working for Central Hospital Supply Service and providing ‘comforts’ and other goods for the Sailors’ Home. She worked on both the “Jolly Roger,” a mobile canteen, and later in a stationary canteen. As the war progresses, she helps set up a Red Cross shop in Barrow, the proceeds from which were intended to raise money for its Prisoner of War Fund. She does all this even though she is tired and scared, even though she has to stand in line waiting for rationed food, even though she’s sick of having a bomb shelter in her living room. 

According to the editors of The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace (2012), her war work “[G]ave her a sense of purpose; it helped her to feel worthwhile – and to be acknowledged by others. It had been a sort of anchor; it liberated her from the constraints of domesticity –‘the cage of household duties alone’, as she once put it (15 August 1945). In many ways the war changed her life.” Nella, writing in March 1943, writes: ‘My job – or rather jobs – are all volunteering but I love them and the Red Cross shop is a great pleasure to me even if a great deal of work. I don’t feel I could ever settle down entirely to be a housewife again.’

Nella is another example of perseverance and grit. 

Source: Last, Nella. (2012). The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace. Malcolmson, P., & Malcolmson, R., Editors. [Kindle Android version]. Profile Books.

See also: The BBC’s archived page about Nella’s diary. I’m not sure how long this will still be available.

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The Countess

The Countess

Let me begin this blog with the stories of two women, both British – one a countess, the other a housewife. Today’s story is about our Countess, a woman who managed to fluster the British military during World War II in an effort to serve her country while spending time with her new husband. Our countess is Hermoine Ranfurly nee Llewellyn who had moved to Australia at the age of 24 to become the personal assistant of the Governor of New South Wales. While in Australia, she met Daniel Knox, the 6th Earl of Ranfurly, and subsequently married him. When World War II broke out, her husband’s Yeomanry unit, the Notts Sherwood Rangers (part of the 1st Cavalry Division, later the 10th Armoured Division) was shipped to the middle-east. Hermoine wants to do her part, finding a job in London where her boss was – in her words – “too fast for me in every respect.” 

Desperate to be near her husband, she goes to a small travel agency and books herself a one-way passage to Egypt, in her attempt to get to Palestine. She lands a job as a secretary to the head of the regional Red Crescent in Haifa, but despite her best efforts, Brigadier Brunskill of the General Headquarters in Jerusalem says she cannot stay. To quote her diary: ‘You will go,’ he said, ‘on the first evacuation ship, very soon. You may stay in South Africa or proceed to England. You can’t expect me to believe that a Countess can type.’

By the end of September, our Hermoine finds herself with the other illegal wives, under military guard, on the S.S. Empress of Britain. Don’t worry, though: She slips off the ship in South Africa, writing in her journal on October 11, 1940: “I am going back to Dan.” She walks into a passport office in South Africa, obtains a 3-month visa for Egypt, secures a small loan from a bank, and gets on a flying boat back to Cairo, where – having spent the last of her money – shows up a friend’s house where she cannot pay the taxi driver. In her October 31 entry, Hermoine reports: 

Today Pam returned from GHQ to lunch in the flat. She was loaded with news: ‘Dan is coming with his General to Cairo tomorrow for two nights; the news of your return is out at GHQ and there is much gossip– some think it very funny but the authorities concerned are furious and suspect you must have used someone else’s passport as such care had been taken that you should not return. They are determined to ‘‘ make an example’’ of you and throw you out again. My girlfriend in the Provost Marshal’s office says the Military Police have been told to find you.

Hermoine, however, is incredibly resourceful. She finds a job working for the SOE in Cairo, and even then the military wants her deported. The Ambassador refuses to pull her passport, saying: ‘As you do not appear to be a white slave trafficker or involved with drugs, I cannot remove your passport.’ The Brits still want to send her home, appealing to General Jumbo Wilson. As her husband has been taken a prisoner of war, they were no longer in the same theatre of war, making the original order moot. At this point, Wilson adds: ‘This lady has outmanoeuvred every General in the Middle East and I do not myself intend to enter the arena.’

By November of 1942, General Jumbo – as she calls him in her diary – has taken Hermoine on as his own secretary. Her posts take her from Cairo to Algiers to Caserta (Italy). In late November 1944, her General is notified that he will be transferred to Washington, DC as the head of the British Joint Staff Mission. At first Hermoine is to go along to America, but the General’s wife objects and she is left behind in England. But, does this stop Hermoine from serving her country? No. She gets herself to back to Italy and secures a job with Air Marshal Slessor, continuing in this position after Slessor is moved to London towards the end of the war. 

Now, that’s grit.

Source: Ranfurly, H. (2014). To War with Whitaker: Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939-45. [Kindle Android version]. Bello. [Primary Source: Diary] 

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Grit, Guts, & Glass Ceilings

Or: How Dr. Hallock Morris Picked Her Theme

Photo by Chelsi Peter on Pexels.com

Before we go too much further with this blog, I need to define the parameters of our “theme” of gritty women. I’ve named my blog Grit, Guts, and Glass Ceilings for a particular purpose. As I noted on the about page for this site, two summers ago, I proposed to do a presentation on women’s contributions to the war effort for The Albert H. Small Normandy Institute, a competitive program for talented high school students. Each year, fifteen student/teacher pairs are selected from around the country to participate in an eight-month program about World War II with its primary focus on the D-Day landings at Normandy. The highlight of the program – in most years – is a trip to Normandy, France. 

Unfortunately, Covid came along and cancelled the trip in 2020 so this particular class of scholars studied for well over a year before meeting in Washington, DC, and Bedford, VA. This extra year allowed me to read broadly (and deeply) into the lives of many women who helped with the war effort. Not only did I learn personal stories like the ones I shared in my opening entries to this blog, but I also had a chance to develop a theme. Originally, I had planned to write about Rosies, Land Girls, and military women. But, over these past two years, I realized several things, including:

  • Women made great spies and resistance workers because they were unexpected participants;
  • Women’s home front contributions were a form of war work which we often discount; and
  • Women’s work had an impact on the social norms of the day.

Most importantly, however, I found an underlying theme in all of the diaries, memoirs, oral histories, letters, and secondary sources that I’ve read: These women were good at their jobs because they all shared a commonality – they had grit. Like Elizabeth Warren (who you may not agree with politically, but I digress), “Nevertheless [they] persisted.”

So, what exactly do I mean by grit? In a nutshell, grit is a combination of spirit, guts, and courage. These are all things women showed during World War II, whether they joined the services, worked the land, assembled airplanes and ships, built bombs, or – in the case of British women – preserved through everyday life, figuring out how to feed and clothe their families while living through the Blitz and other bombings. But perhaps we need a more “scholarly” definition of this term. This comes from McArthur Genius grant winner and psychology professor Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016). According to Duckworth, grit can be defined as “Passion and sustained persistence applied toward a long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades.” 

Women must have grit – guts, courage, and persistence – to break through what is commonly called the glass ceiling. A typical definition of the term sounds something like this: an unofficial limit which prevents some, especially a woman, from advancing to a top position in a company or organization. In political science, we talk about glass ceilings when we look at elected officials: Nancy Pelosi, becoming the first female speaker of the House, Kamala Harris, becoming the first female vice president in the United States, or Margaret Thatcher becoming the first female British Prime Minister. This June, Linda Fagan became the first female vice commandant and first female four-star admiral in the United States Coast Guard. As these barriers continue to fall, it’s hard for modern women to remember that there were significant cultural barriers in place to the women who wished to serve in the war effort during World War II. 

Keep these concepts in mind as you continue to follow along here at Grit, Guts, and Glass Ceilings. Although my early focus in this research has been on the World War II era, I am expanding my storytelling to include other conflicts and social movements, as well as political women’s history from the founding First Ladies to our current Vice-President and Speaker of the House. 

Upcoming entries: The Concept of Intersectionality.

Sources

“Admiral Linda Fagan Becomes USGC’s First Female Four-Star Admiral. (2021, June 21). The Maritime Executive. https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/adm-linda-fagan-becomes-u-s-coast-guard-s-first-four-star-admiral?fbclid=IwAR1wdJON-2_U0oUQwUFJUe5a0m2dCGt3NzdBBmYnHnjfPvr3YgSD4Ux05V0 [Last accessed July 18, 2021].

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. [Kindle Android version]. Scribner. 

Fessler, L. (2018, March 26). “You’re no genius:” Her Father’s Shutdowns Made Angela Duckworth a World Expert on Grit.” Quartz at Work. https://qz.com/work/1233940/angela-duckworth-explains-grit-is-the-key-to-success-and-self-confidence/ [Last accessed July 18, 2021].

“Glass ceiling.” (2021). Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/glass-ceiling [Last accessed July 18, 2021].

See Also (for Fun): True Grit in the Urban Dictionary.

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This is a Man’s War?

Let’s talk about the Gutsy Women of World War II! I’m back with resources, lecture notes, reading annotations, and all the other materials you need to build your own class about the role of women in WWII. — MT Hallock Morris

Video: It’s Your War, Too! Produced by the US Army Signal Corps and distributed under the auspices of The War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry. Available on YouTube courtesy of The Best Film Archives.

The Gutsy Women of World War II

During the 2022 Spring Semester, I taught a nifty Honors Seminar entitled The Gutsy Women of World War II. This class was an outgrowth of the research I had conducted for a talk at the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute. [You can read the backstory here!] Although I am an associate professor of Political Science, I am a huge proponent of interdisciplinary research. Why stay in our individual academic silos when there is so much to learn out there? My research has since expanded to include other gutsy women – suffragettes, female politicians, and environmental activists. All of these women have a story, with a common theme: Grit. More specifically, they persisted when the odds were against them. 

What you are seeing here is a hodgepodge of ideas. You’ll see links to the sources I used to develop my course, annotations and summaries of readings about gutsy women, and my thoughts as they have continued to develop. My goal is to share what I found, to help support others as they delve into teaching the stories of these women. 

The Seminar: A Basic Description

If you’re a high school teacher, a college professor, a homeschooling parent, a student looking for information to write a paper, well, you probably want to know what I taught in this course. Here are a few excerpts from my course syllabus:

The Course Description

Land Girls, Leaders, Soldiers, Spies: The Gutsy Women of World War II. What did you do during the war, Grandma? From simple things such as rationing and planting victory gardens to serving as WACs and Marines, from being a nurse on the beach at Normandy to serving donuts behind enemy lines, from working as a “Rosie” to spying behind enemy lines, women played an essential role in helping the Allies win the war. Our focus will be on issues of gender, intersectionality, and leadership, as well as the “Grit and Guts” it took to survive the darker aspects of war – surviving the Holocaust, hiding Jewish children in convents, and flying night raids over the enemy. As a part of our work, you will learn how to use USI’s archival resources to help build a popular history podcast on the Gutsy Women of World War II. 

Note: This course was offered as a 1-hour honors seminar at the 100-level. The course met in person one day a week for 50 minutes. We had two weeks where the meeting was online (I was at a conference one week, I was out with COVID symptoms the second time). We also had one day that was cancelled due to inclement weather. We had a speaker during one class session who talked about the practicalities of developing a podcast and/or radio documentary. We also had one class period where we toured the University’s archives and special collections.

Honors Program Student Learning Outcomes

Connections among Disciplines. Students will demonstrate an understanding of interdisciplinary inquiry into complex problems.

Research and Creative Skills. Students will demonstrate the skills necessary to do independent research or creative projects and present their work to faculty and peers.

Community Engagement. Students will demonstrate leadership and active membership in various communities, including the Honors Program, USI, and the Evansville community.

Ethics and Morals of Citizenship. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the ethical and moral obligations of being an informed and engaged citizen in a diverse and global community.

Course Learning Objectives

Students will demonstrate understanding of the role of women in World War II from the perspectives of political science, history, and women’s studies.

Students will demonstrate strengthened skills important to success in Honors and undergraduate education, including reading skills, critical and creative thinking skills, and communication skills (written and oral) by using both primary and secondary materials to develop script materials for popular history podcast.

Students will demonstrate understanding of the impact of the topic on current global issues by examining the historical issues of intersectionality and exploring the roots of modern societal expectations of women.

The Textbook & Other Materials

Yellin, Emily. Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. New York: Free Press, 2005. 

Note: This is an older book and it didn’t cover all of the topics I wanted to cover in the class. I augmented the book with various articles and videos that I linked through our course website. Furthermore, because one of the goals of the class was to look at Evansville’s (IN) contributions to the war effort, I also had two public history books on reserve at the campus library. These were:

MacLeod, James Lachlan. 2015. Evansville in World War II. Charleston, SC: History Press. 

Bingham, Darrel. 2005. Evansville: The World War II Years. Charleston, SC: Arcadia. 

Our Weekly Topics

Week 1. Precursors
Week 2. Unearthing Our Mothers’ War Years
Week 3. Soldiers Without Guns – The Rosies
Week 4. Putting Up a Good Front – Entertainers, Fictional Characters, & Icons
Week 5. This Man’s Army, Part I – WAC, WAVES, SPARS, WASPS, and Marines
Week 6. Save His Life and Find Your Own – Volunteers, Land Army, Red Cross Girls, and Nurses
Week 7. Jane Crow and Questions of Loyalty – African American and Japanese American Women
Week 8. More on Intersectionality – Mexican American Women War Workers
Week 9. British Women on the Homefront – Victory Gardens, Jambusters, and Make Do and Mend
Week 10. British Spies, American Spies
Week 11. France, Belgium, and the Philippines – Resistance Efforts and Freedom Lines
Week 12. The USSR – Night Witches and Snipers
Week 13. Bad Girls – Red Light Districts, Social Mores, and Sexuality
Week 14. Victims and Survival – Comfort Women, Rape, and the Holocaust
Week 15. The Aftermath – Backlash, the Roots of Feminism, and Iconic Visions

Note: I issued a trigger warning for Week 14 because these can be uncomfortable topics. Here is what I stated:

This discussion may be uncomfortable for some students. Descriptions of the rape of Nanking, the forced prostitution of Korean women, and the treatment of women in concentration camps may be graphic. Please see me if you need an accommodation for this week.”

— HONS 129.H04 Syllabus | Spring 2022, University of Southern Indiana

About Week 13: I’m a college professor and my class was filled with individuals who were 18+. I’m also pretty open when it comes to talking about sex because I feel that honesty is the best policy. However, I am also married to a high school social studies teacher — and he has adamantly stated that he would never cover these topics in class. I suspect that your comfort level with these issues depends on where you live and teach in the USA.

So What’s Next?

Stay tuned. We’re going to start our journey with the tale of a countess and a housewife, followed by a short story about the 6888th Postal Battalion. Next week, you’ll be introduced to the women warriors of years past and to the Hello Girls. If you’ve been here before, these are reposts from last fall. All new material starts next Wednesday!

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