Women on the Home Front

This is a transcript of an earlier broadcast of this episode; there may be slight changes in wording in the rebroadcast.

ED: So Mary brought up the struggles faced by women service members in World War II. These days, of course, there are a lot more women in uniform. But in all of America’s wars, it’s probably fair to say that women’s biggest role has been on the home front.

BRIAN: There’s a historian named Rebecca Jo Plant at the University of San Diego. And she’s spent a lot of time looking at the ways that role shifted between the two World Wars. She says it was a big change and one that left a lot of war wives feeling downright confused, especially those whose husbands came home was psychological wounds. Take, for example, this letter written by the wife of a traumatized war vet in 1947.

REBECCA JO PLANT: As one of the millions of war wives, I am repeatedly told that my husband has just been through a terrible ordeal, that he is nervous and confused, and that it will take time and infinite patience and understanding from me to help him return to normal. Then again, I am told as a wife and a mother that our servicemen suffered from a new disease called “momism.” And it is up to we mothers to teach our children to be independent, to help them stand on their own feet and think for themselves. These two attitudes contradict one another.

BRIAN: So on one hand, this woman feels like she’s just supposed to be patient. On the other hand, she’s worried about this new disease that’s called “momism.” The idea was that overbearing mothers could be blamed for everything that was ailing America, including what was then being referred to as combat fatigue. The term “momism” had been coined five years earlier in a best seller by novelist Philip Wylie. Plant says he was lashing out against a certain kind of mother– conservative, frumpy, disapproving, schoolmarmy.

REBECCA JO PLANT: The argument that Wylie made was that these mothers were overly possessive with their sons. And sons, in particular, were the heart of the concern here and that they tried to dominate them in the guise of mother love and sentimentality. So they overprotected them. They coddled them. They effeminized them. And he’s saying we’ve created this nation that is not manly enough and that lacks the fortitude to stand up to the threat of fascism.

BRIAN: Let me stop the tape here and point out that moms weren’t always seen as a threat to democracy. During the First World War, being a mama’s boy was just about the most patriotic thing you could be. Soldiers overseas didn’t yearn after pinup girls. They pinned up mom.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

REBECCA JO PLANT: I think that it’s best to understand this just by looking at the way that boys were raised in the 19th century versus the 20th century. In the 19th century, the notion of how you make a moral man was very much that you internalized the maternal figure, that the boy needs to basically have his mother’s voice as his conscience. And for all kinds of complex reasons, that’s changing in the 20th century, where people, their sense of how they operate as individuals, is becoming much more focused on autonomy and strict ego boundaries and defining oneself really in opposition to family members rather than almost as extensions of family members.

BRIAN: So what did this new 20th-century version of manhood mean for all those traumatized war vets trying to readjust to civilian life? Well, it wasn’t entirely clear.

REBECCA JO PLANT: You have all this anxiety about mothers and how mothers might encourage sons, returning sons, to enter this regressive state in which they come back. And they expect that society should just provide them with all of these benefits without actually becoming hardworking, contributing citizens themselves.

BRIAN: Leading to that age-old phrase, what’s a mother to do?

REBECCA JO PLANT: Get out of the way was the answer that a lot of these experts said at the time. So it was the girlfriend and the wife who really bore a lot of the pressure to reintroduce men, re-civilize them, and make them functioning members of society.

BRIAN: So if moms were the problem, were wives the solution?

REBECCA JO PLANT: Yes. Basically, that’s right.

BRIAN: So Rebecca, today the neuropsychological illness that comes from war and other situations is called post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d be really curious to know where are moms and where are girlfriends in the causes and the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

REBECCA JO PLANT: Well, I think they’re, as always, bearing a very heavy burden, because it often falls to mothers and to girlfriends to absorb a lot of the emotional trauma that initiates on the battlefield. I would say though that in the past when people thought about an injured veteran or certainly a deceased veteran, their thoughts immediately went to the mother, the maternal figure, the gold star mother who was seen as and assumed to have suffered the greatest loss, even if the soldier was married.

And now, I don’t think that’s as true. I think that our thoughts go first to the wife and the children. There’s much more of an emphasis now on gold star families and not simply the gold star mother per se as the person who, in a sense, has given up something she created. Motherhood was thought of in very civic terms. So she showed her citizenship by rearing a citizen, by rearing a citizen soldier that she then sacrificed.

BRIAN: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Rebecca.

REBECCA JO PLANT: Thank you.

BRIAN: Rebecca Jo Plant is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California– San Diego. She’s the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, we’ll look at PTSD in the age before the concept of psychology even existed.

PETER: More BackStory coming up in a minute.

[MUSIC PLAYING]