On being a woman and a war historian

I’ve been away from the blog for a while. But this has me thinking about what it means to be a woman military historian again.

On being a woman and a war historian.

 

Back to the Beginning Again

I’ve been busy pushing forward on my dissertation. I’ve spent the last few weeks completing databases, though that’s still ongoing. I’m still trying to get through my reading list, but because so little I read in the last few months stuck, I’m re-reading several books. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many spoons in each hour. Though I ‘m getting better, sometimes I overestimate how much I’m able to do and run myself into the ground. Then I spend several weeks coming back up from the crash. It’s never fun, but that’s just how it goes. I try to manage it as best I can, and I’m getting better, but still. The trick is to manage my guilt about needing time to rest. I had such big plans for this past semester but life got in the way. Again. I need to temper my expectations for what I can do, and do the best I can. I also need to get more sleep, so I can THINK.

The lack of thinking time and space is what brings me back to the blog. I recently finished Gillian Dyer’s Advertising as Communication, which is a basic theory book for advertising and marketing majors. It’s a bit old, but some of the basic theories are still helpful, and several were in common use in the 1940s. She uses a lot of ads from the 1940s as examples, so it’s easy to relate them to the recruiting posters and ads I’m studying.

The main thesis is that advertising has become almost the official art of industrialized nations. It is ubiquitous and a part of popular culture. Advertisements sell us social aspirations as well as present products – they sell the idea of achieving a lifestyle through consumerism. Advertising tells us we are not materialistic enough, because if we had all the things in the ads, we’d have the lifestyle in the ads.

Dyer further argues that women were crucial to maintaining a robust economy during the war, though their household management. Therefore, advertisers changed depictions of women. Women became more active in decisions and more clearly controlled the household economy. Household and national economies were closely linked.

Next, I’ve been reading Signs in America’s Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place, by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle. This is a cultural geography and history of public signage, both advertising and directional. While I’m still early in the book, I am connecting it to Dyer’s discussion of sign systems.

Sign systems come in two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the material object, and the signified is the intellectual concept or reference invoked by the material object. Both are important parts of the sign system, and work together to present a story or argument. Values that are attached to an abstract concept are then linked to a material object that represents the concept.

I don’t even know if this is important for me, or relevant to my larger project, but I’ve been stuck here for a week. There’s something going on between the two books, and with my project. I hoped that I could work it out in a blog post but that didn’t happen. I’ll have to keep chewing on it.

Frustrating. Really, really frustrating.

 

Confirmation in a Coffee Shop; or, When I Almost Hugged My Laptop

It’s no secret, at least on this blog, that I’ve been feeling stuck and a little dejected about my progress on my dissertation. Despite moments of real progress (several pages written!), I end up tempering them (they still need footnotes!) so I don’t really feel the joy fully. I know it’s a sign of burnout, or at least a sign of burnout for me. It’s long past time to reduce stress and anxiety and find a way to reenergize myself. While my stress load gets lower every month, my exhaustion with my sources doesn’t.

I’m going to be presenting an aspect of my research this week at a conference. It’s taking the article I wrote and advancing the argument. But the problem with the article was the small sample size I had to work with. I ended up doing a lot of extrapolation. I have realized the Marine Corps chapter either has to be smaller or requires more research – more varied source material. Now, I could find there’s no more source material (which I think is the case, actually), in which case I have to adjust my thesis accordingly. There’s a different rationale when the same 5-10 images are used over and over again, rather than dozens. Be that as it may, that’s a question for this summer.

The conference has pushed me to pick up the thesis of the article and push it. See where it gives, find the weak points, reinforce or restructure as needed. To do that, I’ve needed to both boost my theoretical understanding and use another batch of sources – bring another branch into the discussion. The theoretical aspect is bogged down because I’m spending a lot of energy elsewhere, so I needed to move on to the other sources.

Tonight, I opened the folder of Army posters I pulled from NARA the same time I got the Marine Corps images. I have 111 images (including duplicates, I still have over 100) of all kinds of Army specialties. I have several distinct campaigns directed at women that are different from those directed at men. And yet…then I looked into the Navy folder and it’s even clearer:

THE MESSAGES ARE THE SAME. It’s “You’ll become a MAN” versus “You’ll still be a WOMAN.”

HOT DAMN. I’M RIGHT.

I’M FUCKING RIGHT.

It’s time to write the dissertation. For real.

 

Ow My Back

Spring break is this week. Normally, this would be a week of heading to archives downtown and spending HOURS poring over microfilm, bound magazines, and posters. Instead, we’re moving. And we’re doing it in a hurry. We started looking for a new place at the end of January, found it by mid-February, got the keys 2 weeks ago, and started packing. Today we had movers come in to move the furniture. The wonderful gentlemen also moved the boxes we’d packed but hadn’t had room to transport (since all we have is a small compact sedan). They even loaded up the boxes we packed while they loaded furniture! Now, I have a dining room full of boxes, an unmade bed in the bedroom, some freaked out cats, and a very sore back.

The good news? I’ve managed to write several pages of my dissertation anyway.

Now I’m going to take another bath and see if I can find the heating pad.

 

So This is How It Works

So this is how it works: You’re going to need support, a lot of it. And if you can’t get it from the expected source, find a different one. Find several different ones. Your friends and colleagues are invaluable for telling you what’s messed up, what’s going right, and what’s you just running in circles in your own head. They’ll encourage your navel gazing to a point, and then they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms you’re stuck and you need to move on, and if you can’t move on alone, to get the help you need to move on. And those are the friends that will be cheering you on through the whole healing and moving on process.

So this is how it works: When you get the rejection and dismissal you expected but hoped you were wrong about, turn to your friends. Don’t wallow in your misery. Or, wallow for a little while – but don’t get stuck. Don’t drop anchor there, because if you do, you’ll never leave.

So this is how it works: You’ll learn you can’t do everything. Once you’ve learned that, you’ll learn that you can’t even do most things. You’ll have to prioritize and be ruthless about it.

So this is how it works: You will find your breaking point. You’ll break. And then you’ll get back up, put yourself back together, and keep going. You might find a new breaking point and break again. And if and when that happens, you’ll get back up again, put yourself together again, and keep going. Because that’s what you do.

So this is how it works: One day, you’ll realize you’ve prioritized the wrong things. One day, you’ll have to decide what is most important – really, honestly, truly what is most important. And you’ll do what it takes, sacrifice what you need to, to make those things work, to make those things happen. Sometimes, even at astronomical cost.

So this is how it works: You’ll learn the meaning of struggle, hard times, isolation, all over again. But this time, you’ll have a support network that truly cares and wants to help. And you’ll take the support they give without shame, because you would do the same for them.

So this is how it works: You’ll learn who you are, how you think, where you make your stand, and where you’ll fall on your sword. You’ll decide if this degree is what you truly want, if it will take you where you want to go.

So this is how it works: You’ll learn who your 3 A.M. friends are. You’ll find your friends are made of sterner stuff than any of you imagined.  You will find you are made of sterner stuff, too.

So this is how it works: You’ll learn that some tiny victories aren’t tiny at all. You’ll learn that a conversation over ribs and potato salad can snap your amorphous ideas into focus. And you’ll take all of these lessons you’ve learned, and trust your instincts, your intuition, your gut, and your friends and colleagues that THIS is the way to go, that THIS is important.

So this is how it works: You won’t be done with research, you won’t be “ready” like you expected to be, but when you find THE IDEA, you’ll know. You’re never going to think you’re ready. You can do archival research for years, and still have other avenues worth exploring. But you have to decide it’s time, even though you’re not “done.”

So this is how it works: Start writing, even if you know you still have more archival work to do. You’ll inevitably realize you need to do more research while writing, and without the structure of the dissertation, you’ll fall down rabbit holes.

So this is how it works: You’ll find that once you have THE IDEA, you resent every other claim on your time. And you’ll understand that the rules you set when you were rebuilding yourself after a breakdown have meaning and are an important part of keeping you going through the process.

So this is how it works: You’ll understand the phrase “the hardest thing I’ve ever done” on so many more levels, and you will never use it lightly again.

 

Another Highly Anticipated Book was a Flop, but This Time it Made Me Angry

I was so excited to read Jean Kilbourne’s Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. She produced “Killing Us Softly” in 1979, a short documentary about the power of advertising and the gendered assumptions and influences therein.* Instead, it was another very promising thing that turned out to be a great big flop. An even bigger flop than Winkler’s The Politics of Propaganda. Winkler was more helpful than Kilbourne turned out to be. Winkler’s book was a well-crafted historical monograph, and the reason it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped is because my dissertation is going somewhere else. Deadly Persuasion isn’t even that.

I confess, I found this book very difficult to read, which is surprising, because the prose is engaging and conversational. However. However. Kilbourne stated from the beginning the book would be more about addiction than advertising, more about how advertisers push their audience’s buttons and guide them toward types of products and specific brands. In fact, the book is about Kilbourne’s addiction and recovery process. Writing a book about one’s own journey through addiction and recovery is a good and noble thing – when that’s what you tell your reader you’re doing. Don’t write that book and then tell me it’s a deconstruction of advertising tropes using gendered and historical lenses. Because I will be ANGRY at you for that bait and switch.

I am not judging her for this choice, I’m really not. But that is the kind of book I need to be prepared to read. I often opt out of those books when I have the choice. I opted to keep pushing through the book in the hopes that it would become what she’d promised, though, and that’s what made me angry. I could have just passed on this as a memoir more than anything – a memoir of growing up female in the 1950s and 1960s, early and multiple addictions, learning how her addictions were fed by the larger culture around her, and eventually learning to counter the messages. If that was what I needed to read for my dissertation, I would have done so happily. It wasn’t, and I didn’t.

She doesn’t just talk about her addictions, alcoholism and nicotine. But she relates everything back to her personal experience. When she brought up the use of sex in the advertisements, it was a great opportunity to discuss how those images interacted with the culture at large. Instead, Kilbourne started there and very quickly, if not immediately, moved to her own story.  The result is that the multiple levels and ways the advertisements interacted with broader culture and the many subcultures were glossed over or outright ignored.  The intense focus on her own experience disguised as a scholarly dissection of the issues read as an insidious kind of White Feminism ™: the kind that doesn’t even realize that there are other oppressions that intersect with gendered oppressions. The kind that focuses on the problems of upper middle class white women, and ignores the problems facing working class women, women of color, disabled women, queer women – and women with more than one of those identities.** I can’t say one way or the other what her politics really are, but the intense naval gazing and self-involved focus not only damaged her argument, it damaged her credibility.

*I don’t believe “Killing Us Softly” is available online, but it is referenced in “Miss Representation”, which is available without a Netflix membership here.

**I recommend Flavia Dzodan’s blog post “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit” for a powerful explanation of why intersectionality is so necessary…and, well, in general, really.

 

When the Much Anticipated Thing Is a Great Big Flop

Another day, another book. I have been meaning to read this one for a while now, but something always had a sooner due date or had been recalled or was taking too much shelf space. And I confess, I was underwhelmed, considering how often it showed up in bibliographies and footnotes of other books I’ve already read. This one is important, but less so than I expected.

Allen M. Winkler’s The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945 has been on my radar for a while now. It’s a commonly cited book in many of the propaganda and advertising histories of World War II I’ve already read. It appears to be the definitive history of the Office of War Information, though Winkler cites an official history in the OWI (Office of War Information) record group held by NARA (National Archives and Records Administration. Either way, this book is important enough to have been cited repeatedly, and in several disciplines. However, it was published in 1978. A search for a more recent history is in order, if for no other reason than to determine if relevant records have been declassified in the last 35 years.

Winkler’s argument is more about propaganda itself than the OWI in particular. He argued that the discipline and field of propaganda was solidified and came of age during World War II, and that the OWI was an integral part of that process. He does a good job of supporting that argument in the last half of the book, with his discussion of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD)* and its actions in Europe. However, he shorts its work in Japan, where it was arguably the most effective and most potent – its shining moment, if you will. On Okinawa, leaflets and broadcasts recast surrender as a way of preserving Japan’s future, rather than dying futilely in battle, leaving no legacy and doing more damage to the Empire. While many Japanese soldiers and civilians still committed suicide, tens of thousands surrendered, many with leaflets in their possession when they did so.

The first chapter of the book outlines the damage done to propaganda’s image during World War I, when the propagandists of the Creel Committee told outright lies and fomented not just righteous anger but absurd and often destructive hatred. As a result, the OWI was under much tighter control than the Creel Committee had ever experienced. The second and third chapters discuss the organization’s structure and the challenges it faced in the early years of the war. Winkler’s secondary, unspoken thesis was that the OWI was unjustly fettered by a hostile Congress, indifferent president, and paranoid public. He supported this thesis far more clearly than his stated thesis. Because the first three chapters of a four chapter book focused on the bureaucratic maneuvering in Washington, the military applications of the agency, which Winkler claimed were its most important and effective actions, received short shrift.

The book lays out a recruiting material production timeline. Initially materials were produced by the military branches themselves, then they were produced by the OWI, and finally the OWI worked as a coordination board only. The shifting responsibility for producing materials is a key factor in understanding their messages. I now need to find the OWI record group at NARA and organize a trip to take a look to figure out what happened when and who was in charge. I finish one part of the project only to have another piece expand dramatically.

 

*Every time I read this acronym, I first translated it into the Papers of the War Department, a project by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to reconstruct the materials lost when the United States War Office burned in 1800. Talk about historical whiplash.

 

Historiography and This Space

I keep meaning to use this blog as a place to deposit my thoughts on books I read for my historiography in the first chapter of my dissertation. Instead, I have notes all over creation. So I’m starting fresh. I just finished Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s by Inger L. Stole. I don’t know how useful it is, but I want to start a system where every book I review is in the same space, no matter how useless or important. After several months of reading books that weren’t helpful, I have very little record of what they were about and why they were so not helpful. I need to not have that…I need to know precisely why they’re not the good fit I thought they would be. So here’s the first shot: not a review, not by a long shot, but a summary of the book and a precis of my thoughts on it.

This is a history of the Advertising Council, though it starts out as though it were a history of the Consumers’ Union. Stole argued that the advertising industry as a whole used World War II as a route to widespread respectability. From the beginning of advertising as a field to the 1930s, advertisers were considered little more than con men. the lack of regulation helped fuel this perception among the US consuming public, as advertisers could say whatever they liked with little consequence. the development of consumer protection groups, most notably the Consumers’ Union (a pro-labor, anti-corporate group with socialist roots), forced advertisers to regulate their statements. Many moved to brand-based advertising: attempts to convince consumers to focus on a specific brand rather than the qualities of the product. There was little space to compare products and brands, and lack of packaging regulation meant that pricing was obscure at best. Advertising revenues paid for 75% of newspaper revenue and 100% of radio revenue, making it difficult for consumer protection groups to gain a national stage.
With the onset of World War II, the manpower needs of the military, government, and industry led them to advertisers and corporations. The government requested free advertising space for Victory advertising, and advertising for war aims. When smaller publications, with smaller budgets and less room for loss, demanded payment for government advertising, the pro-free-advertising argument inadvertently echoed the Consumers’ Union’s argument against private advertising: that it led to bias. Stole emphasized this point, and used it to explore his wider thesis: that no party in the battle was neutral, that they all had their biases that needed support.
Stole argued that the Advertising Council came into its own during World War II. The development of standardized language and a unified goal for advertising, along with OWI oversight, kept them at the top of the advertising hierarchy. They became the governing body of advertisers as an industry, and used the premier trade publication as a vehicle for testing their policies before announcing them. The Ad Council also created guidelines for types of advertisements, and expressed clear preferences for certain types. Recognizing the benefits of working with the government, the Ad Council promoted types of ads that promoted war aims along with products without offending men in uniform. The use of multipurpose ads and the clear voice of the Ad Council helped create a positive image of advertising in the wider public consciousness.
Stole argued that the Ad Council used World War II’s government advertisements as a public relations campaign for the industry as a whole. His focus on the Consumers’ Union and their battles against the Ad Council in the early part of the book derails and obscures the larger argument, which only becomes clear in the last 50 pages. This is a good piece of the advertising puzzle, mainly for its discussion of the Ad Council’s activities during the war and for its bibliography. What is really great is the number of books he used that I’ve either already read or tagged as need to read. It tells me I’m on the right track there, and to keep moving forward.

 

Redefining Failure

I have to remember how powerful failure actually is, and that it can be a positive part of my process. For the last several weeks, I’ve had three tasks: edit the article for resubmission, review and catalog the images from the Library of Congress into the database, and read through books I found over the summer to see how useful they are.

The three tasks all have the potential to be mind-numbing and spirit-crushing. In fact, they did crush my spirit for a while. While editing and revising my own work, I was also editing my boss’ manuscript – essentially doubling the time I spent editing. To be clear, I feel that Dante missed a circle of hell on his tour, and that circle is endlessly editing manuscripts that will never be completed.

I made a lot of progress on my database, but because it was so mind and butt numbing, I only required myself to work on it 15 minutes per day. It kept me from throwing my laptop out a window in frustration, but it also meant the job dragged on for most of the semester, since I really can only manage 20 – 30 minutes at a shot. I had roughly 3500 images to get through. As of Tuesday, I’m under 600 to go.

And going through the books I found this summer, and some that have been on my to-read list for longer, was the biggest exercise in frustration. I’m averaging a book every two days, and the vast majority has fallen into the category “interesting, but not immediately helpful.” Eight books in a row were there, and I had several which were interesting but won’t be helpful ever. I eventually had to say I wasn’t going to read a book from the library unless it was fiction for a week. I needed to clear my brain.

Writing this out, I can see that I have actually accomplished a lot. And even though I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, I am making progress with every flameout. I have to remember that failures are progress. Each book that doesn’t pan out can be removed from the list. Every sentence that I write, delete, rewrite, delete again, and rewrite one more time is better because of that process. Every 15 minute chunk means 5 more images have been analyzed, plugged into the database, had metadata attached, and sorted to the proper folder. It’s hard, in the middle of the slog, to see progress, or to see any positive outcome. But. There are fewer library books on the shelf. There are less than 600 images to go through. The manuscript has been submitted. I have done well. For now, I’m going to remember that what I perceive as failure is a good thing. These things may have failed in what I intended, but the end result is still moving me toward my goal of a completed dissertation.

 

Clearing Space in My Home and My Head

I’m feeling distracted and blocked lately. I haven’t been working nearly as much on my dissertation as I’d like. I’m trying to make the adjustments to the article that were recommended, and that’s taking all my spare energy. The real time suck is the new gig. I’m in admin now, and I was completely unprepared for how much energy it would take up. That’s not all. There are also life issues getting in the way. The biggest was that we cleared out our storage unit this past month. It’s empty, we won’t get charged for another month, but it was a huge investment of time, energy, and mental space. It’s also been a huge investment of physical space. Seriously, we don’t have five square feet of unused space in the condo right now. It’s a disorganized mess, boxes everywhere, things haphazardly crammed in whatever cranny we could find, and now stuff I need is buried behind boxes that require thoughtful review. More mental and emotional energy. So frustrating. I know there’s a light at the end of all of this, and we’ll see benefits immediately – next week, when the payment would have posted, to be precise. But all of that combines to me feeling so lost.

I have an admin job now. It’s interesting, engaging, and I work with wonderful people, but I’m getting distracted by it. I’m having a hard time focusing in my schedule dissertation time. It doesn’t help that, for this semester, I work three 12 hour days in a row – so I have 36 hours of work in by the time I wrap up on Wednesdays. So I hit my time limit very quickly on Thursdays. I’ve adjusted my rules a bit as a result. I am allowed to stop at 40 hours a week now. I can continue for another 5-10 if I like, but I have to honestly check in with myself at the 45 hour mark to make sure I’m not pushing myself into a hole. I can FEEL a clock ticking behind me. I feel disorganized, and I feel like I’m flailing wildly in the dark when I try to work. I have half completed spreadsheets that are yelling at me to finish them RIGHT NOW, except I know I only have a few hours a day of good data control work in me, so even though it’s slow it’s still better progress than when I pushed through for 8 or 10 hours. I have photos to tag and organize for analysis, which has the same limitation as the spreadsheet. I need to get back to the archives, but emails to collections and librarians were eaten by the shutdown and I’m starting to think I’m paranoid – that if I email again the government will close again? (Saying these things out loud, or writing them down, helps deflate them – I just realized how weird and unfounded that feeling is.) And I have all kinds of reading to do, and without the ability to hunker down with a book for 8 hours and chew through it, I’ve made almost no progress on that front.

But I found the information I need to complete the revisions requested for my article draft. I have a plan to get help with my plan to revise the article for scholarly publication. I have a real shot at a usable workspace in the next few weeks at home, and I’m finding them at school and in the big old world in general. I have good friends, old and new, that I get to see, and I’m making a concerted effort to participate as much as possible without burning myself out. I am also giving myself permission to say no to invitations, and to take the days I need to watch bad movies and cross stitch. I am getting back to making meaningful cross stitches for myself and my friends, and I’m trying to not have that be a job, too. (Despite the birth records, wedding gifts, and Christmas gifts I keep adding to the list. But those are fun because I’m letting myself be creative and I’m forcing myself to roll with small mistakes.) I can do this, I just need to buckle down and do it. I guess I’m feeling overwhelmed, despite giving myself October off to get the storage unit situation squared away. I guess I couldn’t convince the timekeeper in my head to pause the clock.

My perfectionist side is really pushing hard, too, wanting everything to be just so. I recognized that paralysis a while ago, but it was hard to get around the block. I took to publishing fan fiction to just unblock myself. That’s worked pretty well, actually. I published seven or eight little fics in a few days and the gates have opened. And it wasn’t just writing it, it was publishing it that was the key, because some of those fics are about 3 months old. Just little things, ideas I had sitting on my hard drive. I started writing them because the idea, the plot bunny, or even a phrase would pop to the front of my brain and get stuck. Writing it got it out and my work got moving again. This latest round of stuck wasn’t solved by writing it down, though. I guess it had to get to an audience. Given my recent musings on audience, I’m not surprised. I didn’t realize that getting feedback is an important part of my process. There’s hope for my dissertation process yet, since a goodly bit of time will be spent in back and forth revisions and critiques.

I can convince myself to see the benefits of anything if I just work at it. I have to remember that, and remember to keep working at it. My biggest obstacle is self-doubt, honestly, and if I can see the silver lining to the roller coaster ride this process really is, then I can keep going.