MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Military necessity compelled the Armed Forces of the United States to recruit women during WWII. The public often showed little to no support for this, perceiving it as “a radical inversion of the traditional roles of women …whose ultimate mission was to wait for their virile menfolk to return from their masculine mission of fighting and dying.” Many, feeling threatened, labeled women in uniform comical, promiscuous, or mannish. Hollywood failed to use its considerable clout to change public opinion. While 374 of the 1,313 feature films released in the three years after the U.S. entered the war directly addressed some aspect of the conflict, and 95 of those directly depicted the “fighting forces,” the large majority of those 95 films focused on men in uniform. Just 5.3 percent focused on women. Those films that did feature women in uniform stereotyped them horrendously. Many films attempted “humor” in doing so, consequently reinforcing the belief that service women were comical, petty, vain, and ineffective, and sending the clear message that they did not belong in uniform. For example, the title of Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), a film about women adjusting to life in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), manipulated the word “powder.” Did it refer, literally, to gunpowder, to general preparedness, or perhaps to a female penchant for makeup? Apparently the latter, as one critic lamented, “Metro’s cheap and undignified fiction about the WAC had [actresses] perpetually appearing as though they spent all their time in the beauty parlor.” Another complained, “This manifest indignity…makes the distaff members of our Army look like cats in a Hollywood boarding school.” Hollywood’s wartime portrayals of service women often irresponsibly reinforced the public’s most serious misconceptions about women in uniform, misconceptions potentially detrimental to the American war effort if they threatened recruitment.