Resources
Want more information about the WAVES and SPARs, women in the military, women’s history, oral history, or the World War II era?
Here are some suggestions.
Resources
WAVES and SPARs
Akers, Regina T. 2000. Doing their part: The WAVES in World War II. Ph.D. dissertation, Howard University.
Alsmeyer, Marie B. 1982. Old WAVES Tales. Conway, AR: Hamba Books.
Angel, Joan. 1943. Angel of the Navy; The Story of a WAVE. New York: Hastings House.
Cha, John. 2002. Willow Tree Shade: The Susan Ahn Cuddy Story. Seattle: Korean American Heritage Foundation.
Collins, Winnifred Q. 1997. More Than a Uniform. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press.
Department of the Navy. “Women in the U.S. Navy,” Naval Historical Center.
Ebbert, Jean, and Mary Beth Hall. 1993. Crossed Currents: Navy Women from WWI to Tailhook. Washington: Brassey’s.
Gilbert, Helen Edgar. 2006. “Okay, Girls — Man your Bunks!” Toledo, OH: Pedestrian Press.
Gildersleeve, Virginia C. 1954. Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs. New York: Macmillan.
Grymwade, Billye. 2003. MATS and me: WAVES Flight Attendants on Military Aircraft. Ventura, CA: Puma Press.
Gunter, Helen C. 1992. Navy WAVE: Memories of World War II. Fort Bragg, CA: Cyprus House Press.
Hancock, Joy Bright. 1972. Lady in the Navy: A Personal Reminiscence. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute.
Harris, Mary Virginia. 1944. Guide Right, a Handbook of Etiquette and Customs for Members of the Women’s Reserve of the United States Naval Reserve and the United States Coast Guard Reserve. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Here Come the WAVES. 1944. DVD. Universal Studios, 2006.
Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II. TaylorCatProductions, 2013. DVD and streaming on Amazon and Vimeo.
Horton, Mildred MacAfee, and Helen K. Sargeant. 1982. Reminiscences of Mildred McAfee Horton: Oral History. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.
Jacobs, Helen H. 1943. “By Your Leave, Sir”. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.
Lander, Grace Skagen. 2003. Wave Goodbye: a Navy WAVE’s Memoir. Edina, MN: Beaver Pond Press.
Lutz, Margaret “Peggy.” 2003. Never Salute with a Broken Garter: WWII with an Oregon WAVE. Prineville, OR: Margaret P. Lutz..
—–. 2005. It’s Hard to Salute Standing in a Wall Locker: a Collection of WWII Memories “In their own Words.” Prineville, OR: ORWAVE Publishing.
Lyne, Mary C. and Kay Arthur. 1946 Three Years Behind the Mast, the Story of the United States Coast Guard SPARs. Washington.
Mason, John, and Etta Belle Kitches, eds. 1979. Recollections of Women Officers who served in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, including WAVES Director Mildred McAfee, Joy B. Hancock, Jean Palmer, Dorothy Stratton, Elizabeth Crandall, Etta Belle Kitchen, Frances Rich, Eleanor Rigby, Louise Wilde, Tova Wiley and Senator Margaret C. Smith. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute. Also find it online at the WAVES Oral History Project.
The Navy Way. 1944. DVD. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video Distribution, 2004.
Park, Yoosun, Ick-Wahn Lee, Qwihee Lee, Anna Charr and Andrew Kim, and Phillip Char. 1998-1999. “KAHS Oral Histories: A Conversation with Susan Cuddy,” Korean American Historical Society Occasional Papers 4:1-62.
Ryan, Kathleen M. 2015. “Beyond Thick Dialogue: Oral History and the ‘Thickening’ of Multimedia Storytelling.” Visual Communication Quarterly 22-2 (Spring), 85-93.
Ryan, Kathleen M. 2014. “Military Life: Coordinating WWII Magazine Publicity by the U.S. Naval Women’s Reserve.” Journalism History 40:4 (Winter), 227-238.
Ryan, Kathleen M. 2014. “Uniform Matters: Fashion Design in World War II Women’s Recruitment.” The Journal of American Culture 34-4, 419-429.
Ryan, Kathleen M. 2012. “Augmenting the Voice of Oral History: One Step Beyond the Screen and Web.” Words and Silences: The Journal of the International Oral History Association 6:2 (December), 12-22.
Ryan, Kathleen M. 2012. “‘Don’t Miss Your Great Opportunity’: Patriotism and Propaganda in World War II Recruitment Posters.” Visual Studies 27-3, 248-261 .
Ryan, Kathleen M. (2011) “From Propaganda to the Personal: WAVES, Memory, and the ‘Prick’ of the Photograph.” Oral History and Photography. Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, editors. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 133-148.
Ryan, Kathleen M. (2010) “Beyond Kinship: Constructing Family Through Military Service.” Oral History Forum d’histoire Orale (Special Issue: Remembering Family, Analyzing Home: Oral History and the Family).
Ryan, Kathleen M. (2009). “‘I Didn’t Do Anything Important’: A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview.” Oral History Review (Spring), 25-44.
Tars and SPARs. 1946. DVD. Columbia Pictures.
Thorngate, Margaret. 2011. When Flags Flew High, A Novel of World War II Based on Actual Events Both Home and Abroad, December 1941 – September 1945.
Thomson, Robin J. 1999/2002. “SPARS: The Coast Guard & the Women’s Reserve,” U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office. http://www.uscg.mil/history/h_wmnres.html (accessed November 13, 2007).
Tilley, John A. 1999. “A History of Women in the Coast Guard.” U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.
Wingo, Josette Dermody. 1994. Mother was a Gunner’s Mate : World War II in the WAVES. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
Yarouch, Betty G. 2000. Cleared for Takeoff. Atlanta: Wings Publishers.
Resources
Women in the Military
Beringer, Robin M. 1997. Looking Over vs. Overlooking Historic Contributions: Women Veterans’ Experiences of WWII (World War II). Ph.D. diss., California School of Professional Psychology.
De Pauw, Linda G. 1981. “Women in Combat: the Revolutionary War experience.” Armed Forces and Society 7 (Winter): 209-226.
Diedrich, Maria, and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, eds. 1990. Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1970s. New York: BERG.
Holm, Jeanne. 1982. Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution. Novato, CA: Presido Press.
Litoff, Judy Barrett, and David C. Smith, eds. 1997. American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
Massey, Mary. 1966. Bonnet Brigades. New York: Knopf.
Maurer, Audrey. 1999. No One Asked: Testimonies of American Women Interned by the Japanese in World War II. New York: City University of New York.
Meyer, Leisa D. 1996. Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. New York: Columbia University Press.
Office of War Information. 1944. Women in the WAR: For the Final Push to Victory. Washington, DC: Office of War Information.
Poulos, Pauline N. 1996. A Woman’s War too: U.S. Women in the Military in World War II. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration.
Sims-Wood, Janet L. 1994. “We served America too!”: Personal recollections of African American in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II” Ph.D. diss., United States Army: The Union Institute.
Upson, Cyd, and Anse Wieling. 2005. War Stories with Oliver North: The Women of World War II. DVD. New York: Fox NewsChannel, 2007.
Vining, Margaret, and Barton C. Hacker. 2001. “From Camp Follower to Lady in Uniform: Women, Social Class and Military Institutions before 1920,” Contemporary European History 10 (3): 353-373.
Winchell, Meghan K. 2003. Good Food, Good Fun and Good Girls: USO Hostesses and World War II. Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona.
Yellin, Emily. 2004. Our Mothers’ War : American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. New York: Free Press.
Yesil, Bilge. 2004. “‘Who Said this is a Man’s War?’: Propaganda, Advertising Discourse and the Representation of the Woman War Worker During the Second World War.” Media History 10 (2): 103-117.
Resources
Women’s History
Addams, Jane. 1910 Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Co.
—–. 1916. The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1974. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Buszezk, Maria Elena. 2006. Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Clark, Anna. 1995. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hartmann, Susan M. 1982. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Hawes, Elizabeth. 1942. Why is a Dress? Who? What? When? Where? New York: Viking Press.
Hawes, Elizabeth. 1948. Fashion is Spinach. New York: Random House.
Honey, Maureen. 1984. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1982. Out to Work : A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kimble, James J., and Lester C. Olson. 2005. “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (4): 533-570.
McKelvey, Thelma. 1942. Women in War Production. New York: Oxford University Press .
Milkman, Ruth. 1987. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Renov, Michael. 1988. Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology. Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1997. A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States. London: Viking,
Scharf, Lois. 1980. To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Sochen, June. 1999. From Mae to Madonna: Women Entertainers in Twentieth Century America. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Wandersee, Winifred D. 1981. Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920-1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Zox-Weaver, Annalisa. 2003. “When the War was in Vogue: Lee Miller’s War Reports.” Women’s Studies 32 (2): 131-164.
Resources
Oral History
American Folklife Center. 2015. Oral History Interviews. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.
Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Meyers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds. 2006. Handbook of Oral History. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press.
Dunaway, David King, and Willa K. Baum, eds. 1996. Oral History: an Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai, eds. 1991. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge.
Grele, Ron J., ed. 1975. Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory, and Practice of Oral History and Oral Testimony. Chicago: Precedent Pub.
Meyeroff, Barbara. 1992. Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual Storytelling, and Growing Older. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Oral History Association. 2018. Principles and Best Practices.
Riordon, Michael. 2004. An Unauthorized Biography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Terkel, Studs. 1984. “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War Two. New York: Pantheon Books,.
Thompson, Paul Richard. 1988. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Resources
The Great Depression and World War II
Atkins, Jacqueline M. 2005. Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931-1945. New Haven, CT: Culture by Yale University Press.
Braverman, Jordan. 1996. To Hasten the Homecoming: How Americans Fought World War II through the Media. Lanham, MD: Madison Books; Distributed by National Book Network.
Brennen, Bonnie and Hannah Hardt, eds. 1999. Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photogaphy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Brokaw, Tom. 1998. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House.
Creel, George. 1920. How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. New York; London: Harper and Brothers.
Doherty, Thomas P. 1993. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ellis, Robert. 2005. “Getting the Message Out: The Poster Boys of World War II,” Prologue Magazine 37 (2-Summer).
Erenberg, Louis A., and Susan E. Hirsch, eds. 1996. The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Frisch, Michael H., and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds. 1983. Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Furer, Julius Augustus. 1959. Administration of the Navy Department in World War II. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office.
Fussell, Paul. 2002. Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Fyne, Robert. 1994. The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
German, Kathleen M. 1990. “Frank Capra’s Why We Fight Series and the American Audience.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (Spring): 237-248.
Gordon, Colin. 1999. Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945: Documents and Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,.
Guimond, James. 1991. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
Hendrickson, Paul. 2004. Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-43. New York; Washington, D.C.: H.N. Abrams; in association with the Library of Congress.
Holsinger, M. Paul, and Mary Ann Schofield. 1992. Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Kennedy, David. M. 1999. Freedom from Fear the American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
Koppes, Clayton R., and Gergory D. Black. 1987. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: Free Press.
Leff, Mark H. 1991. “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American home front in World War II.” Journal of American History, March:1296-1318.
Martingette, Charles G. and Louis K. Meisel, eds. 2002. The Great American Pin-Up. Kóln: Tashcen.
McElvaine, Robert. S. 1984. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times Books,.
McLaughlin, Robert L., and Sally E. Parry. 2006. We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Meerse, David E. 1976. “To Reassure a Nation: Hollywood presents World War II.” Film and History 6 (4): 79-98.
National Archives. 1994. “Powers of Persuasion: Poster Art from World War II.” Washington, DC.
Olson, Lester C. 1983. “Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetorical Analysis of Norman Rockwell’s Icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ Campaign.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69:15-24.
Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.
Stryker, Roy E., and Nancy C. Wood. 1973. In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as seen in the FSA Photographs. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society.
Warren, Mame. 2005. “Focal Point of the Fleet: U.S. Navy Photographic Activities in World War II.” The Journal of Military History, 69 (October): 1045-1080.
Westbrook, Robert B. 2004. Why we Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II. Washington: Smithsonian Books.
Widowski, T. H. 2003. “World War II Poster Campaigns: Preaching Frugality to American Consumers.” Journal of Advertising, 32 (1): 69-82.
Wiebe, Robert H. 1976. The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America. London: Oxford University Press.
Winkler, Allan M. 1978. The Politics of Propaganda: the Office of War Information, 1942-1945, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Woll, Allen L. 1983. The Hollywood Musical Goes to War. Chicago, Nelson-Hall.
Resources
Useful Archives
American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress. “Veteran’s History Project.”
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Archives. Northampton, MA.
Library of Congress. “Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.”
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.
Women’s Veteran’s Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
World War II Rumor Project Collection. American Folklife Center (1945-001), Library of Congress. Washington, DC.