To discover how war can affect the status of women in industrial countries, Leila Rupp examines mobilization propaganda directed at women in Nazi Germany and the United States. Her book explores the relationship between ideology and policy, challenging the idea that wars improve the status of women by bringing them into new areas of activity. Using fresh sources for both Germany and the United States, Professor Rupp considers the images of women before and during the war, the role of propaganda in securing their support, and the ideal of feminine behavior in each country. Her analysis shows that propaganda was more intensive in the United States than in Germany, and that it figured in the success of American mobilization and the failure of the German campaign to enlist women's participation. The most important function of propaganda, however, consisted in adapting popular conceptions to economic need. The author finds that public images of women can adjust to wartime priorities without threatening traditional assumptions about social roles. The mode of adaptation, she suggests, helps to explain the lack of change in women's status in postwar society. Far-reaching in its implications for feminist studies, this book offers a new and fruitful approach to the social, economic, and political history of Germany and the United States. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

American women did more than pursue roles as soldiers, doctors, and nurses during World War I. Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War reveals women's motivations for fighting for full citizenship rights both on and off the battlefield. The war provided chances for women to participate in the military, but also in other male-dominated career paths. Intense discussions of rape, methods of protecting women, and proper gender roles abound as Kimberly Jensen draws from rich case studies to show how female thinkers and activists wove wartime choices into long-standing debates about woman suffrage and economic parity. The war created new urgency in these debates, and Jensen forcefully presents the case of women participants and activists: women's involvement in the obligation of citizens to defend the state validated their right of full female citizenship.

The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.