摘要：

Making War, Making Women begins with fictional airman Don Corbett hoping to find the ideal American Girl among the flesh-and-blood women on a train. My story ends with a less glamorous character but a real one—an airplane mechanic who left the U.S. Army Separation Center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in late 1945. On the train home, the twenty-four-year-old veteran wrote, "When I get my $200 mustering out pay I'll buy a piano and take lessons. I'll buy paintings for the house, and go to concerts and ballet, and take Mama and Daddy and William. Occasionally a cold thought squelches my joyful anticipation—am I unrealistic? At Ellington all we talked about was the Utopia awaiting us in civilian life. If I'm honest I admit that life was no Utopia before. Will it be different now? I hope with all my heart to make it better at least." Having realized a few weeks earlier that the GI Bill would not sufficiently fund her dream of owning a small farm, Private Aileen Kilgore had already adjusted her sights on more manageable goals and faced her future with tempered optimism.1 It is impossible to know how many American women entertained similar dreams forged from the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and opportunity . Many no doubt chose to fulfill Don Corbett's vision of them by mimicking what he and others claimed they wanted "to come home to."2 They had read and seen plenty of ways to work on it. Between 1941 and 1945 the United States fostered a political culture where women's bodies and minds could be used in the service of the war effort. Thousands of government officials, artists, designers, and writers shaped and molded their images of ideal American women for millions of posters, billboards, leaflets, car cards, and print advertisements. They also depicted dangerous , immoral, and dishonest women, warning Americans against those who would weaken the body politic by pursuing their own selfish interests rather than the collective good. Women responded to the government's demands and the culture's requirements in myriad ways. Perhaps women in the Greatest Generation should be heralded not because they took jobs in heavy industry but gave them up at the end of the war; not because they put on military uniforms and carried out official duties but took off their stripes and chose not to brag about their military service in the postwar years; not EPILOGUE E P I L O G U E · 215 because they challenged the culture's expectations and restrictions but played by the official and unofficial rules and grew into the archetypes created for them. But that would oversimplify both the war years and the postwar era, spawning even more grand narratives of extraordinary battlefield courage while rendering almost everyone else invisible. Anniversaries and commemorations of the Second World War will no doubt continue in the United States, the seventy-fifth anniversary beginning in 2016, the centennial in 2041. What will be the place in these celebrations for American women who built and typed, laundered and bathed, primped and dieted, scrimped and saved, grew Victory Gardens and bought war bonds, painted their faces and posed for cameras in the 1940s? To what extent will the women of the Greatest Generation be remembered as archetypes: the figures imagined and created in corporate boardrooms and at artists' drawing tables, in agency committee meetings and editors' planning sessions, in landladies' boardinghouses and other places where ideas about what women should be overshadowed who they were? To what extent will they be overwhelmed by the chimera of nostalgia, turned into relics for contemporary generations to look back on wistfully? In the last few years, as acquaintances and strangers learned that I was writing a book about American women on the home front, the common enthusiastic response was, "Oh, Rosie the Riveter!" Occasionally I just nodded and smiled, but more often I felt compelled to mention other women, both real and imagined , to complicate the conversation and challenge the customary reactions. Posters , photos, and slogans

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