1. Fort Lipstick and the Making of June Cleaver

2. Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley as Ward and June Cleaver, 1950s
From Rosie to June
World War II remade American social, economic, and cultural life. Between 1940 and 1945, the civilian labor force expanded from approximately 55 million Americans to more than 65 million. Women’s employment rates rose by more than 50%. At the height of the war, over 19 million women worked outside the home. They formed more than 35% of the total work force. The number of women in civil-service jobs jumped by 540%.
Rosie the Riveter, Saturday Evening Post, 1943
New opportunities for women accompanied these rapid changes. However, alongside these new opportunities came renewed traditionalism. Advertisements from the war years demonstrate the length to which the U.S. government and private corporations went to reinforce gender-specific roles, acceptable femininity, and social regulation of female freedom…even while seeking to draw women into wartime employment.
By 1955, the Cold War had replaced World War II in American consciousness as the greatest potential threat to American life. In the wake of astounding postwar economic growth, consumerism and capitalism became tools to fight communism within national discourse. Within this narrative, hierarchical family life and complementary maternal and paternal roles became important parts of being “good” Americans. Advertising emphasized traditional gender roles and docile femininity as desirable, acceptable, and patriotic.
Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley as Ward and June Cleaver, 1950s
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the government and advertising firms presented women in narrowly defined ways. Ads and propaganda utilized femininity first to draw women into the workforce and then to push them out of it. Meanwhile, American women continued to live varied and complex lives along the spectrum between Rosie and June.

3. Women, War, and Advertising

4. War, Advertising, and the Government
General Motors ad, 1942
War, Advertising, and the Government
During World War II, the U.S. government had a much closer relationship with the advertising industry than it does today. President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942.
The OWI filtered the war information released to the media and the public. In 1942, leaders in the advertising industry formed the War Advertising Council (WAC) to enlist corporations, advertising firms, and the government into a team effort to present and sell the war to the American citizenry.
This partnership produced most of the advertisements, propaganda, and recruitment media of the war. The Advertising Council saved the government money and profited advertising firms and the companies for whom they worked. Advertisers sought to sell patriotism. This served the government’s goals of preventing American complacency toward the war, swaying public opinion, and enlisting women into the workforce. Advertisers’ new focus on selling the war also made up for their losses at the beginning of the war, when production and consumption suffered. This joint effort created a ready-made public information machine that immensely influenced the war effort at home.
Artist Crandall Bradshaw created this poster for the Recruiting Publicity Bureau of the U.S. Army in 1943.

5. Femininity and Patriotism
Advertising and propaganda from the war years clearly illustrated the link between femininity and patriotism. These images portrayed good mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts as eager to aid the war, willing to sacrifice their male loved ones, and symbolic of all that is sacred and worthy of protection.
Three types of women appeared over and over in 1940s advertisements and posters: mothers, sweethearts, and military girls. Femininity defined each of these stereotypes. Mothers were nurturing,
Cover of The American Magazine, 1945
hardworking, and sacrificial. Sweethearts were fresh-faced, beautiful, and loving. Military girls were a variation of the sweetheart: spunky and strong, they still looked like potential girlfriends or wives. They had only ventured away from traditional female roles out of necessity and patriotism.
All of these characteristics formed parts of traditional femininity. None of these women seemed aggressive, forceful, or domineering. Instead, they were submissive, romanticized, and extremely feminine. They represented something worth fighting for. Femininity, then, became patriotic in and of itself. Femininity also motivated masculine patriotism. Manhood and masculinity revolved around the need to protect and provide for such women.
Artist Lawrence Wilbur created this poster for the War Manpower Commission
Artist Valentino Sarra created this poster in the mid-1940s

6. How Sexual is Too Sexual?
Dangerous Women:
How Sexual is Too Sexual?
Corporate advertisements and propaganda posters sexualized women and objectified the female body. Yet, advertising “socially tamed” images of desirable women. Ads and propaganda depicted women as beautiful, shapely, and alluring. Still, these women also fit within socially acceptable parameters. Advertisements containing desirable women almost exclusively painted them as beautiful and wholesome. This means that their smiles hint at mischief, yet they remain aloof. They are flirtatious, yet not vulgar.
Images of women deemed undesirable or unwholesome look remarkably different. These women are often dark-skinned, shadowy, or harsh. Their lips are over-sized or overly dark. They contain an aura of danger, as if coming too close might end in disaster. Most importantly, they convey overt sexuality, rather than simple flirtatiousness.
Many terms and references further demonstrate this cultural link. Language surrounding beautiful women began to include words like “bombshell” and “knockout.” Nose art on World War II bomber planes contained images of scantily clad, nude, or aggressive women. The string of Pacific islands where the U.S. military tested nuclear bombs provided the name for a new kind of swimwear—the “Bikini.”
Sexualized women played—and continue to play—a vital part in the advertising industry’s success. In the social and cultural upheaval of the war, however, both the government and advertising companies sought to rein in female sexuality and tame it to suit their purposes.
Ad for the General Tire and Rubber Company, 1943
“Juke Joint Sniper,” 1942

7. …and Female Reputations
Loose Lips Sink Ships
…and Female Reputations
Cultural and social tensions often translate into collective fears. Dangerously sexual women emerged as one fear. Other cultural anxieties manifested elsewhere.
Wariness of careless talk and spilled secrets materialized in many advertisements and posters. During World War II, the U.S. government took these concerns seriously. The government engaged in the largest censoring effort in American history to that point. Politicians and military officials created entire divisions to keep sensitive material out of the hands of the media, the public, and the enemy. The “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships” propaganda poster has translated into an American idiom that stays with us to this day.
Advertisement for Lux Soaps, 1942.
This Lux soap advertisement demonstrates how fears about indiscreet gossip and its possible destructive nature seeped into public discourse. Additionally, the “Wanted for Murder” poster further illustrates Americans’ fears of dangerous and indiscreet women. These fears might be most clearly depicted in advertisements and posters, but they persisted in the minds of many Americans.

8. WACs and WAVES: Women in the Military
Before the war, laws specifically prohibited women from military service. Therefore, proponents of female military service took legislative measures. In 1942, President Roosevelt first authorized the WAC (Women’s Army Corps) for the U.S. Army and then the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) for the U.S. Navy.
Over 150,000 women would eventually serve as “WACs.” In 1942, over 30,000 women applied for 1,000 spots in a coveted officer’s training program. The program admitted 960 white women and 40 black women into the program. The Army first em-
ployed WAC women in mostly secretarial positions, but eventually placed them in more challenging jobs. Within a year of the new bill, over 27,000 women wore WAVES uniforms. By 1945, over 8,000 WAVES officers and 80,000 enlisted women had signed up for naval service.
As numbers indicate, women eagerly wanted to serve their country in military capacities. While their applications came rushing in, the military worried about the WACs’ and WAVES’ image. Male GIs and servicewomen’s loved ones in particular often vehemently opposed female service. Many saw military service as synonymous with promiscuity and lack of integrity. One GI stated, “You join the WAVES or WAC, and you are automatically a prostitute in my opinion.” One article referred to women’s divisions in the military as a “Fort Lipstick.” .
Members of the WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots)
The military required servicewomen to always give extra care to their appearance and warned women not to appear in public in their uniform. Public relations personnel went out of their way to portray servicewomen in a favorable—and more importantly, feminine—light in advertisements and posters.

9. The Reality of Female Wartime America
Behind the Romance:

10. The Realities of White Womanhood
Despite the impressive number of women who joined the military, not every woman in America served as a WAC, a “WAVE,” or a riveter. Hundreds of thousands of women continued to work in non-military supporting jobs or to support their families as housewives. Advertising and government propaganda presented a stereotype of the average war worker that simply was not statistically true. Images portray war workers as young, white, and middle-class. In actuality, the female workforce largely consisted of working-class wives, widows, divorcees, and students who needed to work in order to survive.
Additionally, women in war-supporting jobs seldom worked as Rosie the Riveters. Women made up only 10.6% of steel production workers and 34.2% of ammunition workers. Despite the stereotypes, employers still overwhelmingly relegated women to what came to be known as “pink-collar” jobs.
Four Texaco Attendants, 1941
The wartime male labor shortage did allow some women to branch out into higher-risk, higher-paying, and more challenging jobs. Many women filled previously masculine jobs. Thousands worked as gas-station attendants, truck drivers, and postal workers. Additionally, wages for women rose significantly during the war. Despite these advances, gender discrimination in the workplace continued throughout the war.
Contrary to advertising messages, other concerns besides patriotic duty persuaded many women to enter the workplace. Women workers were not always well-coiffed, fresh-faced, middle-class ladies, nor were they always motivated by ideology. Lastly, at the height of the war, only 37% of women worked.

11. Black Women on the Homefront
White women were not the only ones to join the armed forces. Over 6,500 African American women served in the Women’s Army Corps. The Army selected a disproportionately small group to serve as officers. The military and the advertising industry underrepresented black women.
Black women disappeared entirely from advertising in the 1940s. Prior to the war, black women appeared in some advertising as either maids or mammies, but wartime brought even that to an end. Some historians theorize that advertisers cast the emphasis on patriotic, white, middle-class women because many Americans perceived African Americans as inferior. During wartime, therefore, advertisers likely considered black Americans inappropriate subjects for images conveying inspiration or national pride.
Despite the advertising industry’s refusal to portray black women, the War Manpower Commission paid some scant attention to women of color. The WMC highlighted and normalized African American women in wartime industry. Unfortunately, it almost always stuck to racial stereotypes of black women.
War industries employed a significant number of black women. The proportion of black women in industrial occupations rose from 6.5% to 18% during the war. However, racism and segregation confined black women to the lowest paying jobs in manufacturing; black women made 50% less than white women and only 25% of what white men made. Some few gained work in federal agencies, nursing positions, and the apparel industry. Yet black women lost many of these gains when the war ended.
African-American war workers, 1940s
Black women worked outside of the home in much higher proportions than white women. Racial discrimination and poverty often made employment necessary. However, they were extremely underrepresented in the public eye.

12. “Mother, When Will You Stay Home Again?”
When it came to war work, many women dwelled on more personal concerns than generating income and demonstrating patriotism. Public opinion in the 1940s asserted that mothers were the most important influence on their children and that child rearing should remain a woman’s first priority. Public opinion also theorized that children left with other women or who were deprived of their mother’s presence would quickly become delinquents. Society harshly judged women who “neglected” their children by leaving the home and entering the work force.
Aside from psychological concerns, women often had little recourse when it came to childcare. Because many people considered non-maternal childcare harmful to a child’s development, the government did not allot public funds for day care centers until Even then, day care centers provided care for only 10% of mothers who needed it.
Absenteeism and high turnover became common among women workers. Often this happened because women struggled to keep a job and to care for their families in the way society, their husbands, and they themselves required. Women faced censure and guilt for working outside the home.
Advertisements such as this one for Adel Manufacturing used motherhood and women’s duties in the home to prepare women for their departure from the workforce upon the return of male GIs. They also reminded them of their “true” feminine and maternal place.
Ad for Adel Manufacturing, 1944

13. Social, Economic, and Sexual Freedom
Many members of the U.S. government and advertising firms worried over how to present women in uniform and female workers as feminine and patriotic. However, other anxieties arose with the upheaval of the war. As we have seen, black and white working-class women had worked for years. Yet, advertisements and propaganda encouraged white, middle-class, married women—the women whose lives and virtue had historically been most strenuously policed—to join the workforce.
White women’s wages doubled during the war, allowing them more spending power and more social mobility than ever before. The war brought high levels of migration and overseas service as women took jobs as military personnel, nurses, and USO performers. This meant that women traveled, often “unsupervised,” or in the company of men. The military’s dispersal of condoms among servicemen (but not among servicewomen) added to growing social anxiety over loosening “morality” and sexual mores. The phenomenon of “Victory Girls”—women who expressed their patriotism by having sex with soldiers and sailors before the men went off to war or while they were on leave—only exacerbated concerns.
Unmarried men and women were likely not having any more or any less sex during the war than in the decade before or after. However, in times of chaos and uncertainty, societies often return to traditional values or beliefs, including the policing of sexuality. These fears made their way into the media and advertising largely in the form of anti-STD campaigns. Because women pushed against acceptable boundaries, issues of social, economic, and sexual freedom rose to the forefront of American discourse.

14. Out of the Factory and Into the Kitchen

15. “For When It’s A Souvenir”
Because female freedom generated social fears, many sighed in relief when the war ended. Peace meant homebound GIs. It reunited women with their husbands, provided single women with prospective grooms, and gave male employees back to employers. Despite the fact that between 61% and 85% of women workers wanted to keep their jobs after the war, advertising and propaganda campaigns mobilized to push women out of the workforce and back into the home. Even before the war ended, multiple campaigns gently reminded women of their “true” place.
Many women hoped that the freedoms of wartime would translate into lasting social change in the 1950s. However, the war underscored women’s roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers just as much as it expanded female labor. The government urged women to return home not only to provide work for the GIs returning from their patriotic duty, but also because family life was quickly becoming the “foundation of democracy.”
The concerted effort of advertising and government propaganda to push women back into the home was just as much about preserving a place for men as it was keeping women in theirs. Economic and social insecurities about masculinity and men’s roles as leaders and providers reinforced the traditional gender roles pictured in advertisements and propaganda.

16. “Beauty Is My Business”
As World War II came to a close, and the Cold War entered full swing, the American government and the public increasingly saw consumerism and materialism
as weapons in the fight against Communism. American citizens had a duty to support their country and, in the process, embrace consumerism. Thousands of Americans took advantage of the GI Bill, new government-subsidized suburbs, and the economic boom to enter the middle class. With this upward mobility, Americans spent money like never before. After years of personal deprivation from the Depression and then the war, Americans became wholehearted consumers. In the midst of this process, things like female beauty truly became a “business.”
During the postwar years, men embraced their roles as providers and women in turn embraced homemaking. In the suburbs, new status, new amenities, and newly disposable income meant that products like cosmetics and haircare became more popular. Advertising companies capitalized on these circumstances and marketed female beauty products as what women “deserved”…or perhaps what they desperately needed.
As experts, newspaper columnists, and magazine writers dispensed advice to women on how to “please” their men, maintaining beauty became part and parcel of being a good wife. Dorothy Gray Salon went so far as to imply that if you did not maintain a skincare regimen, you
would begin to look older than your husband, and consequently lose him to another woman. A shampoo ad advertised that “tonight, you can be his dream girl.” In the 1950s, beauty meant successfully catching and, more importantly, keeping a man. In turn, feminine beauty worked as a foil to bolster masculinity.
Ad for Palmolive, 1952

17. The Cold War, the Housewife, and the Kitchen Debate

18. Harnessing Sexuality
Contrary to popular belief, society during the 1950s did not repress sexuality. Instead, it sought to contain it, much like American foreign policy sought to contain Communism. Overwhelmingly, Americans supported early marriage as a way to control premarital sex. Most Americans believed that both men and women
should enjoy healthy, frequent, marital sex. However, while Americans did not stigmatize sexual urges, those urges did have to be harnessed to strengthen the nuclear family and create new little Americans.
Although white, middle-class suburban Americans set the moral standards and expectations of the 1950s, Americans from all economic, social, and political backgrounds contributed to what has come to be known as the Baby Boom. The average number of children per woman rose from 2.4 to 3.2 between the 1930s and 1950s.
As this new demographic of young people continued to grow, advertisers increasingly reoriented their campaigns around the “teenager, “a term that entered public vocabulary during this time. Advertising firms marketed sodas, beauty products, and music to young people. New magazines targeted teenaged and young adult women. These magazines’ editorials and advertisements showcased what it meant to be a woman in 1950s America.

19. The Glorification of Family Life
During the postwar years, Americans began to see the nuclear family as an entity capable of meeting the needs of all its members. Americans elevated childbearing to a near-spiritual duty. Much of society viewed men and women without children as pitiable, selfish, or even deviant. Advertising and media images of men and women during the 1950s overwhelmingly portrayed them as mothers and fathers.
Advertisements portray “good” mothers and fathers in interesting ways. Fathers are hard-
Ad for Capital Airlines, 1952
working capitalists. They often leave home for their jobs, but when they return home, they are authoritative, overtly masculine, and attractive. Mothers work as dedicated homemakers. They live at the beck and call of both their children and their husbands. They are patient, docile, and pretty. This society defined women by their relationship to the other people in their home. Even their beauty serves as a foil to a handsome husband
or pretty children.
In many advertisements lie undertones of affluence. Mother and Father seem “well-off” and translate this wealth into opportunity and support for their offspring. Consumerism and materialism affect parenthood. The family exists as a contained entity to be protected, revered, and fed—monetarily, emotionally, and physically. Containment, in all its interconnected meanings, became the mantra in more than one part of American life.
Ad for Ivory Snow, 1951

20. Raising Daughters
During the 1950s, Americans elevated homemaking to an art form. Popular culture saw motherhood as the ultimate goal and fulfillment of female sexuality. It was also supposed to be the primary source of a woman’s identity. Marriage acted simply as the vehicle one took to arrive at appropriate motherhood.
Ad for Trix Cereal, 1957
This shift in popular opinion changed how women
raised their daughters during the 1940s and 1950s. Games, toys, and advertisements designed to train young girls early in the art of homemaking abounded. Additionally, girls who did not wish to be homemakers or to submit to a husband one day clearly had “neurotic tendencies.” The Trix cereal ad above demonstrates concerns about female psychology. It also emphasizes that all girls are future women…and therefore future wives and mothers.
As these daughters grew up, their experiences as young adults differed from that of their mothers. In the postwar years, white women were twice as likely to enter college as their mothers, but were much less likely to complete their degrees. Instead, they often found husbands in college and then dropped out to be housewives and mothers. Likewise, the very nature of female education changed. The number of home economics courses offered at colleges surged. Vocational guidebooks and college counselors echoed the message that college provided opportunity to enter an affluent marriage.
Black women, on the other hand, completed their degrees 90% of the time. Black women expected to be employed—like their mothers and grandmothers—and could not depend on a middle-class marriage to save them from lives as working women.
Dow Chemical ad, 1952

21. The Cold War, the Housewife, and the Kitchen Debate
The consumer-oriented dream of suburbia played a large part in Cold War politics. In his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon argued that American superiority and eventual victory would be accomplished not by military supremacy but through the secure, abundant life capitalism could offer.
The portrait Nixon painted looked like an attractive one. However, when Americans began identifying the American dream as one built on
Ad for Dodge-Chrysler,
1949
the unequal partnership between a providing husband and a home-making wife, they made erroneous assumptions about women. Advertising, propaganda, and public opinion portrayed independent women as somehow “un-American.” Women supposedly now no longer had to dabble in the affairs of men and could instead cultivate their beauty in the hopes of attractive a capitalist, hard-working husband. Women could be fulfilled as housewives, now that modern appliances lightened their workload.
As the Cold War progressed, consumerism became the antithesis of communism. Americans believed “virtuous” consumerism would defeat communism, enrich their family life, and make husbands and wives happy. Advertising played to these dreams by equating consuming with suburban success, Cold War victory, and female domesticity.
Unfortunately, this trifecta of the American Dream remained inaccessible to many Americans. While white, middle-class America set
the standards and expectation
of the 1950s, they by no means
formed the majority.
U.S. Cold War propaganda poster. This poster was meant to assure Americans that, should the war become “hot,” Americans would survive and—more importantly—prosper.

22. Beyond June Cleaver
1961 and Beyond

23. Change is in the Air
However iconic 1950s culture was, it would not maintain its cultural power forever. By the end of the 1950s, the beginnings of several movements were percolating in the background. The generation of women who wholeheartedly embraced domesticity, traditional gender roles, and homemaking lived an aberration rather than a norm. The daughters of the 1950s generation, the Baby Boomers, acted far more like their grandmothers than their mothers.
These Baby Boom children grew up amid 1950s affluence, but they reached adulthood during the 1960s and 1970s. These years proved tumultuous times that brought serious questions about the 1950s American Dream and the Cold War. The sons and daughters of the 1950s generation would create a counterculture and a new women’s liberation movement.
The women of the 1960s and 1970s questioned the images that flooded over them on the radio, on the television set, and in print media. They redefined what womanhood could mean and interrogated assumptions about beauty, marriage, femininity, labor, and female politics.
Demonstration against Chemical Weapons, ca. 1960s
African American women at a Women’s Liberation march, ca. 1960s
Virginia Slims ad, ca. 1970s

24. No Longer A Man’s World?
In 1963, a Massachusetts woman sent a letter to Betty Friedan. In it, she wrote: “My undiluted wrath is expended on those of us who were educated, and therefore privileged, who put on our black organza nightgowns and went willingly, joyfully, without so much as a backwards look at the hard-won freedoms handed down to us by the feminists.” By 1961, housewives were mobilizing for peace in Vietnam. By the end of the decade, hundreds of thousands of female activists were questioning gender assumptions and Cold War policies. Many more began to attack sexism in all its forms.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, women like Lois Rodgers, Diane Nash, and Rosa Parks were participating in, and leading, civil rights protests and movements. White, middle-class women were not the only ones engaging in social activism and questioning cultural assumptions.
Van Heusen ad,
circa 1950s
The 1960s and 1970s brought new strides for women in advertising. Ads more often portrayed women as strong, fierce, and independent. However, an ad from the late 1960s reads “Keep her where she belongs” and shows a nude woman on the floor. A Chevrolet ad from 1988 depicts a sultry woman striding across a parking lot and declares, “Because the one who gets there first, wins.”
Advertising shaped—in a very real way—how Americans viewed women, wives, mothers, and homemakers. It also changed how Americans talked about the American Dream, the Cold War, and suburbia. It engaged in a concerted effort with the U.S. government throughout World War II and the Cold War to shape, contain, and channel femininity and womanhood into socially acceptable boundaries.