Women's Involvement During Word War II - Research Paper Example

The importance of this lay in the immense economic and sexual changes that then gave way to new formations in the family and the workplace. This paper shall look at these and the role that women had to play in the Second World War that led to the changes that have been talked of. The creation of the fictional character James Bond can be seen in the light of the wound that the collective masculinity of the British suffered following the Second World War. This can be seen in the hyper-masculine rhetoric that Ian Fleming employs in this series of novels where he builds up the British agent as a super-male.

After the loss of colonies following the war, British soldiers returned home to find that many of their jobs had been taken up by the women who had till then been a part of the home and the family. They had, during the war, since many frontline positions had been taken up by the men, taken up the posts of office workers that had been left vacant. This shows that the women were a part of the war that created a void in the land where the war was not an everyday reality as it was on foreign land.

This shows that the records of bravery that have been recorded regarding the war have been masculine accounts that have been made to suit the male needs of history. There are also accounts that say that women, especially those women who are a part of lower class backgrounds, have always worked for a living and to supplement their family’s income. In the cases of people of African American communities, it has always been the case that women have contributed a significant part to the economy of the land (“The Image and Reality of Women who Worked During World War II”, n.d.).

Such commentators look at the recruitment of women during the Second World War as nothing but a channelization of the energies that women had directed towards other fields towards that of the war. This direction of energies towards the war resulted in an increase in the social status that was enjoyed by women and women of all races. A lot of the women were a part of the Nurse Corps that was instrumental in the reduction of the number of the casualties during the war. They were also sometimes a part of the army that fought at the frontline.

Apart from this, there were women who were a part of the communities that stayed at home and created items that were necessary for the victory in the war. This included those women who worked in factories so as to keep the war a well-oiled machine and also those who would collect blood and roll bandages so as to keep the work of the nurses going. This led to great improvements in the way the war was fought and was also a great morale booster for the people who were at the frontline of the war (National Women’s History Museum, 2007).

Despite these changes, even during the war, women were seen as secondary to the larger idea of serving the interests of the men who were at the forefront of the war. They were mostly paid lesser wages than the men and they were also viewed with a great deal of suspicion. This can be seen from the fact that they were not a significant part of the trade unions that came up following the war. They were also laid off by many employers or were forced to work at lesser wages than the men who returned from the war.

This was very different from the attitudes that were adopted by the people who had employed them when there was an acute shortage of labor in the industries. What the women felt following the euphoria of the victory of the war was a sense of betrayal