American History - 9 - Essay Example

fact that this extra labor was a necessity and had to be provided from somewhere; hence, it was logical to turn to women in order to accomplish this task. Although there exist many images within the mind of the American history student with regards to the level and effect of this mobilization, one thing that should be carefully noted the fact that many of the jobs that have been typified and stereotyped with regards to women like Nancy the Riveter and others were more or less rare. Rather than such situations being the norm they were the exception.

However, such a fact does not seek to delegitimize the fact that women participated heavily in sectors of production and the economy that they previously had not. This led to many things both before during and after the war’s conclusion. One of these was the fact that for the first time in American history women were able to actively pursue work outside the home as a means of both developing their horizons and pursuing a career. Although the topic of wartime propaganda has often been discussed in history courses and in society as a function of how governments seek to establish the idea of the “enemy” in the minds of their populace, the way in which segment 24-7 brought home the realization that the wartime machine actively sought to portray the Japanese (and to a lesser extent the Germans) as subhuman rapists and animals was especially striking.

As such, equally captivating was the fact that topics as unrelated as venereal disease could be related somehow to the Axis Powers. In this way the populace can quickly form a strong and lasting link between every negative aspect of the current world and seek to attribute this in some way to “the enemy”. Although a great deal of academic ink has been expended in seeking to understand how Nazi Germany performed a similar effect within its own populace with relation to seeking to ascribe all of society’s ills upon the Jewish populations of Europe, fairly little