Wartime Images in Popular Culture

In class, we have discussed how women during war have, until recently, been largely left out of scholarly narratives. Even more concerning, perhaps, is how wartime women are perceived by the general consciousness. Outside of academic circles, where scholars have been dedicating greater attention to wartime women, popular memory trails far behind. Romanticized, victimized, rendered invisible—popular culture has distorted the wartime woman beyond recognition. This is especially concerning within a culture that has made a practice to venerate and celebrate wartime heroes and veterans but has yet to produce a clear, accurate, and complicated portrayal of women during war. Instead, media’s construction of women during wartime relies heavily on one-dimensional interpretations and stereotypes.

The Invisible Woman

The first challenge of this investigation was finding examples of female representation in popular memories of war. Largely, the overwhelming narrative of the wartime woman is…the absence of a narrative. In other words, popular memory tends to first think of war as a male-dominated affair—and why would we think differently, when movies show us nearly all-male casts? For better or for worse, movies often shape how we view historical events, and wartime movies have not been doing women any favors.

ThoughtCo identified the Top Grossing War Movies of All Time:

1. American Sniper ($547 million)
2. Saving Private Ryan ($481 million)
3. 300 ($465 million)
4. Pearl Harbor ($449 million)
5. Gone With the Wind ($400 million)
6. Captain America: The First Avenger ($370 million)
7. Schindler’s List ($321 million)
8. Inglorious Basterds ($321 million)
9. Rambo First Blood Par II ($300 million)
10. Lincoln ($275 million)

 

An entire dissertation could be written about the role of women in each of these movies, but to put it succinctly, if there are female characters at all, they often play minor and one-dimensional roles.

In fact, if you are curious how many female characters there are in each of these films, I counted. The results, while not surprising, expose the male-dominated wartime narrative.

*Numbers were retrieved from IMdB.

The first obvious conclusion from the graph is that there are far more male characters than female, but there is more going on here. Not only is there are a lack of female characters, but there is an even smaller number of named female characters. As I was counting, most of the female characters were listed simply as “Frantic Woman,” “USO Dancer #12,” or “Woman Shouter.” The gray part of this graph represents the female characters that were given a name (which suggests they had a more relevant role). Saving Private Ryan, for example, only had two named female characters—and even that was stretching the definition—they are listed simply as “Jean’s wife” and “Jean’s daughter.” Overall, all female characters represent 14% of the cast list in the top grossing (could also be interpreted as the “most watched”) war movies of all time. And if you are only counting named women? A nearly invisible 0.03%.

What does this tell us? Some may argue that proportionally, there were far more men than women who served active duty and this accounts for the percentage difference. I would argue, however, that women were far more involved in wartime America than movies and public memory recall. Women’s roles, perhaps, were slightly more complicated than the stereotypical combat soldier and more difficult to depict. Not only have women been active duty soldiers, they have also been nurses, mechanics, powerful organizers of formidable home front movements, wartime factory workers, intelligence workers, secretaries, coders, accountants, and many other roles. There are thousands of stories of wartime women, but movies like Saving Private Ryan have overtaken the public’s consciousness to the point where the wartime woman is erased almost entirely.

The Romanticized Woman

Another prevailing stereotype of wartime woman is the idea of a romanticized, sexualized woman who uses her sexual powers to gain traction in a wartime male-world. Characters like Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, from arguably one of the most popular television shows of all time, M.A.S.H, emphasize female desirability. While there are some breakthroughs in Major Houlihan’s character (at the very least, it is a three-dimensional, flushed-out character), the dialogue surrounding her constantly remind the viewers not only of the Major’s gender, but specifically her sexuality. For example, we see how Major Houlihan was constantly fighting gender battles in the following excerpt:

Hawkeye Pierce: Sorry, baby.

Margaret Houlihan: That’s Major to you!

Hawkeye Pierce: Sorry, Major baby.

Hawkeye Pierce: That’s a woman all over.

Trapper John McIntyre: Best place for them to be.

 

Not all portrayals of sexualized women are inaccurate. In fact, as scholar Page Dougherty Delano points out in her essay “Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture,” sexual power could be a “sign of female agency” that was “disruptive of wartime’s masculine codes of power” (33). Delano goes on to assert that during World War II, women purposefully overthrew and reinvented public concepts of “woman’s virtue [lying] in her domestic confinement” and replaced them with images of “glamourous women with exhortations about patriotic duty” (35). However, popular memory of sexualized images often loses the complex meanings of why and how women were portrayed in these ways during wartime.

 

The Victimized Woman

Finally, the third most common misrepresentation of women during wartime is women as passive victims. Women are painted as mothers worrying for their sons at home, or as sweethearts who need to be “protected” by men who go out to fight, or as victims assaulted by male soldiers. Looking at the lyrics of some of the most popular patriotic songs in the United States, there is a common theme of praising men for protecting the country. Moreover, maleness engulfs these songs—worrying, considering these are the tunes we use to teach patriotism and national identity to our children.

My Country ‘tis of thee: “Land where my fathers died…”

Star spangled banner: “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore / That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a country should leave us no more! / Their blood has washed out their foul footstep’s pollution.”

God Bless the USA: “And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free / And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me”

Yankee Doodle: “Yankee Doodle keep it up / Yankee Doodle dandy/ Mind the music and the step / And with the girls be handy / Father and I went down to camp / Along with Captain Gooding / And there we saw the men and boys / As thick as hasty pudding.”

Conclusion

In the following essays, I will try to provide alternate analyses of wartime women during the major wars in United States’ history. I will not be able to generate a single definition of the “wartime woman,” as women’s experiences differed across generations, race, age, class, and individual encounters with war.  However, I hope to at least explore a more in-depth examination than popular culture stereotypes often provide.

 

Sources:

Delano, Page Dougherty. “Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture.” Feminist Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 33-35. Accessed September 29, 2018.

https://www.thoughtco.com/highest-grossing-war-films-3438701

www.imdb.com