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Alcove Gallery
We change the Library's displays each month. Talented staff members
and local businesses often donate their time and lend materials to set
up displays on different themes for each month. Please come in to the
Library and admire them in person.
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See Larger Photo |
Celebrate Women's History Month
Our Mothers' War :
American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II
by Emily Yellin
 About
the Author
Emily Yellin is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her
work has also appeared in Newsweek and other publications. She
currently lives in Memphis, Tennessee. |
From the Publisher
"Our women are serving actively in many ways in this war, and they
are doing a grand job on both the fighting front and the home
front."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt, 1944
Our Mothers' War is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women
during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women
participate in American society.
Never before has the vast range of American women's experience
during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our
Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life
were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad.
Like all great histories, Our Mothers' War began with an
illuminating discovery. After finding a journal and letters her
mother had written while serving with the Red Cross in the Pacific,
journalist Emily Yellin started unearthing what her mother and
other women of her mother's generation went through during a time
when their country asked them to step into roles they had never
been invited, or allowed, to fill before.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews
and previously unpublished letters and diaries, Yellin shows what
went on in the hearts and minds of the real women behind the female
images of World War II -- women working in war plants; mothers and
wives sending their husbands and sons off to war and sometimes
death; women joining the military for the first time in American
history; nurses operating in battle zones in Europe, Africa, and
the Pacific; and housewives coping with rationing.
Yellin also delves into lesser-known stories, including: tales of
female spies, pilots, movie stars, baseball players, politicians,
prostitutes, journalists, and even fictional characters; firsthand
accounts from the wives of the scientists who created the atomic
bomb at Los Alamos, African-American women who faced Jim Crow
segregation laws at home even as their men were fighting enemy
bigotry and injustice abroad, and Japanese-American women locked up
as prisoners in their own country. Yellin explains how Wonder Woman
was created in 1941 to fight the Nazi menace and became the first
female comic book superhero, as well as how Marilyn Monroe was
discovered in 1944 while working with her mother-in-law packing
parachutes at a war plant in Burbank, California.
Our Mothers' War gives center stage to those who might be called
"the other American soldiers." |
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