Domestic America had also changed. The returning GI might have sensed a difference in women’s attitudes, but nothing like a call for equal rights. Women, for the most part, quietly put down the rivet gun and resumed traditional roles as homemakers. They were generally glad the men had returned and looked forward to the domestic life the Depression denied them.

But the war years had given women a closer look at attitudes that shaped their lives and destinies. They thought about it, long and hard. And while they continued the model of femininity their mothers had instilled in them, they raised their daughters with different expectations.

Three articles from 1944 give an historic view of attitudes that shaped women’s post-war thinking. The first, “Paper Dolls” [May 20, 1944 - PDF download], reported on women journalists who had proven they could do the jobs left vacant by men in service.

Women have invaded such hitherto inviolate masculine precincts on newspapers as finance, politics, sports, and the police beat. Paper dolls are reading copy, working on the rewrite desk, taking pictures. They are covering riots, crimes of purple passion, train wrecks, fires and suicides without swooning.

Much to the astonishment of the misogynists who work alongside them, the paper always appears on time, it is reasonably free of errors and there has not yet been a deluge of libel suits or indignant readers canceling their subscriptions.

The authors, who were [ahem] both men, grudgingly conceded:

It pains die-hard newshounds to admit it, but the newspapers would have been in an awful jam in the last two years if women had not been ready, willing and sometimes [sic] able to step into vacancies on staffs depleted by the draft.

While ignoring the condescension in their article’s title, the authors wrote about the outspoken, unapologetic contempt that newspaper editors felt toward women.

"Typical copy desk today. That skirted reporter at the left chats sociably between puffs while two female copyreaders struggle with dispatches and a copy girl does her best."

All things considered, the recommendations in favor of newspaperwomen outweigh the objections against them, but the ancient prejudice still holds firm. Managing and city editors are suffering the dames under protest; chivalry impels them to throw the ladies a few words of good cheer and encouragement, but candor compels most editors to admit they will take a dumb man of erratic social habits over a smart gal every time.

According to the city editor of a major paper, “No matter how able they are, all are given to chattering among themselves and with personable male staff men,” Bodin broods. “They are coy and warm by turns; they clutter and clatter endlessly. Every afternoon, just after the home-edition dead line, the local room presents the sight and sound of a meeting of neurotic clubwomen. The atmosphere demoralizes the men. I have to restrain myself violently from installing a samovar and serving tea and ladyfingers at three o’clock.”

The girls write well enough, they have a deft touch on descriptive stories, human-interest yarns and interviews—provided they don’t gush over the interview. Yet it is rare to see a woman write the lead story on a news break of major importance. Most editors believe women have a constitutional inability to gather up all the loose ends of a complicated story and weave them into a compact, well-rounded piece.

Fortunately, the authors were aware of some basic truths of the situation:

A few words in defense of the girls should be offered at this time. All the faults found with them can be applied to inexperienced men: editors are prone to forget that the majority of their paper dolls were secretaries, file clerks, telephone operators, receptionists or copy a girls a short time ago.

They have been thrown into jobs demanding special technique and know-how without the basic training given men reporters in normal times. Veterans had to serve a long apprenticeship of dreary leg-work, and they were promoted slowly as their knowledge of the craft expanded. The girls have been plunged into the whirlpool of news without the breaking-in process that teaches them how to keep their heads above water. Newspaperwomen further are laboring under strains men do not have to contend with.

Many are married and some have young children; there are households to maintain and, if husbands are in the service, there is a constant pressure for money.

Read “Paper Dolls” [PDF download]

Next: You Just Can’t Get Decent War Workers These Days

War, Work, and Women The Saturday Evening Post

Written by Lewis Lapham “The Secret Life of Walter (Mitty) Cronkite,” was published in the March 16, 1963, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

A generation of Americans must be wondering about Walter Cronkite, who made his last regular newscast in 1981. Why is he remembered so fondly by many Americans? Why was he once voted “the most trusted man in America,” and who has won that title in recent years?

Lapham’s article on Cronkite probably can’t answer these questions. However, it offers some interesting details about the man and hints at why many Americans came to trust what he said.

“The Secret Life of Walter (Mitty) Cronkite”

“Over the past 20 years, as a correspondent for the United Press and for CBS, the 46-year-old Cronkite has been present at innumerable historic events. In one recent year, in the line of duty, he traveled 300,000 miles by plane, auto, submarine and even dogsled. He has landed with invading troops on hostile beaches, conversed with queens and dictators, lived under the polar ice for a week, seen governments fall and atomic bombs exploded. …

“Cronkite is renowned among journalists for his prodigious if sometimes erratic, memory. He can recall offhand, for instance, what happened at Smyrna in 1922 [the city was nearly destroyed by fire]. Yet he seldom can remember people’s names. Once he talked at fond length to an interviewer about his newborn daughter, “Judy.” His daughter’s name is Nancy. Judy was the name of the family’s cocker spaniel. …

“He frequently takes part in road rallies in Westchester County and could have been killed in 1961 when the Triumph TR-3 he was driving in an international rally skidded off a road in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The car pitched over an embankment and fell end over end into a lake 100 feet below. Cronkite emerged wet but unhurt. …

“He is … determined to make his show as estimable as possible, even though he is conscious of the weaknesses inherent in TV news. ‘It can’t be anything but a front-page service,’ he said, looking out the window. ‘There just isn’t time enough to give more than a few headlines and then hope that people will read the next morning’s paper. Compared to a newspaper the fifteen-minute broadcast, mine or anybody else’s, is a paltry sideshow.’ He proposed the hypothetical example of two men locked inside windowless rooms for a year, one receiving a newspaper every day and the other a daily television broadcast. ‘At the end of that time,’ Cronkite remarked, ‘the guy who had been watching television would come out with a damn strange idea of what had happened in the world.’ …

“Cronkite’s detractors usually criticize him for this unwillingness to advance an outspoken opinion. They complain that he is too polite, too bland, too dull. He considers the criticism unreasonable. ‘Probably if I made a few more acerbic remarks, 1 might win a few more viewers,’ he concedes, ‘but I don’t feel like being funny with the news; 1 don’t think that’s my place.’ …

“Was there anything he hadn’t done that he still would like to do? ‘I’d like to see Hong Kong, Oslo and Addis Ababa,’ he answered. ‘For some damn reason I’ve never managed to get to those cities.’ But just then … another idea captured Cronkite, and he smiled wistfully, as Walter Mitty is said to have smiled, ‘Or maybe, it might be possible, you know, to go to the moon. Can you imagine how great it would be to say to an audience, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Walter Cronkite, reporting for CBS direct from the surface of the moon”?’ ”

On July 21, 1969, he was able to do the next best thing.

And that’s the way it was.

Read on, click here to read the PDF.

Walter Cronkite: A Few Last Words The Saturday Evening Post