"Loose lips sink ships": Women and citizenship in wartime culture.
Item
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Title
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"Loose lips sink ships": Women and citizenship in wartime culture.
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Identifier
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AAI9630455
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identifier
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9630455
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Creator
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Delano, Page Dougherty.
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Contributor
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Adviser: John Brenkman
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies | History, United States
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Abstract
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Representations of American women in World War II reveal that the concept of citizenship is at least temporarily refashioned. Women's involvement in the nation's public life permits a shift in images of female virtue outside of the domestic, sexually confining sphere. Yet this woman faces restrictions, especially when her "national face" does not fit racial or political norms. Her effervescence is tied to national mobilization; limitations imposed on her show ongoing or re-emergent restrictions of gender relations. In the first half of the dissertation, I move from discussing women identified with the nation, to women with a critical identification, to women excluded from the national face. Working with the trope of lips, images of cosmetics, and the loose-lipped woman, I read memoirs by women, including Japanese Americans, and films which present a critical woman citizen. Fiction by Ann Petry and Chester Himes shows an ambivalent citizen, for whom race and gender are complex constellations. In the second half of the project, I turn to political conversations about citizenship and gender in images and fiction. The conversation of the female citizen, explored in the "loose lips sink ships"/security poster campaign, reveals a restriction on women's public speech, implicating as well her sexual freedom. National conversations encouraged attention toward the war, and promoted a sexual, assertive, and virtuous woman. Yet "contaminating" sex was also designated enemy activity, so that female agency was deemed sinister. In conclusion, I read fiction of the Occupation in Germany by Kay Boyle, William G. Smith and Gertrude Stein, which resist a revitalized American nationalism. Fraternizing creates an American 'brotherhood' that writes women out of public discourse except as homebound and sexualized, undermining the sexual and political agency which women require in claiming access to public life. Independence is depoliticized, and the private sphere and domesticity are restored as the essential realm of virtue for women.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
