The United States Department of State’s Take at World War II Recruitment

The United States Department of State ran this controversial ad during World War II. Observing this poster’s content, we can see that the underlying message the department is trying to say is that women or as they say “gals” were not useful in any manner until it came to factory work needing to be done at home during the war. Looking back at this poster, we can clearly see that this is not an effective way to encourage American women to work at home (the United States) when a war is occurring overseas. The poster is very offensive and honestly, I am surprised how it was even approved to be run nation-wide. The poster is downgrading women and their abilities to do pretty much anything. We know that women are capable of doing pretty much anything men can do unless it has to do with something like biological differences (jobs that require heavy lifting). If this ad was run today, it would cause chaos amongst many communities. In today’s world not only are women capable of doing work, but there are many women enlisted in the army. As of 2018, women represented 15% of the active duty United States Army. Analyzing this, we can see that times have definitely changed, and people understand that women are just as capable as men.

We can clearly see there is a problem with this poster. Now maybe when this was run (75+ years ago) it might have been acceptable. However, in my mind messages like this are and were never acceptable. The problem here is that the United States Department of State thinks that men are the only gender that can get work done prior to factory work being needed during the war. They think women only need to step in and help since men are not available as they are overseas and can’t complete the work themselves. We know that this isn’t the case and that any gender besides males can successfully complete whichever work they put their mind too and this poster needs to be altered to say so.

Observing the altercations made to this new poster, we can see that it is much more appropriate and is more encouraging towards all genders to participate in the efforts to win the war. The writing was changed from “Turns out you gals are useful after all!” to “Together we are unbeatable!” This poster demonstrates that together all genders are much for powerful than males by themselves. As we have seen in history, winning a war is a joint effort whether that be referring to overseas versus domestic efforts or male versus female efforts. When we look at creating any sort of advertisement, the first question is how is it going to make people feel and how are they going to react? The first poster was very discriminative and was one sided towards male dominance when it came past history. In a sense, it was saying that women are only needed now because men are busy overseas fighting other soldiers. This new poster demonstrates that the strengths and efforts of all genders combined is much more productive and capable than males alone.

However, we have to look at changing times when analyzing advertisements. Non-males might have been okay with the original poster being published in the past. Now times have changed, people understand that gender equality is important because besides for biological differences the differentiations between genders in terms of capabilities is slim to none. It all depends on each individual person. Looking at this particular altercation made to the poster, the idea was to create a version of the original poster that all American people during World War II would look at and think, “Wow, with our joint efforts our capabilities really are limitless!” The idea was to invoke that all people are amazing, and we all have a place in society to make it a better place. It had to be stated that selling the line “Turns out you gals are useful after all,” isn’t appropriate and that type of language isn’t acceptable, nor will it bring out women to participate in any actions that belittle them.