Our Mother's War Summary

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For my outside reading assignment, I choose Our Mother's War, by Emily Yellin. This was a book composed of real accounts from the research Yellin did on the roles women played in World War II. She had touched base on women on the homefront, battlefront during this time period. Since this was the WWII era, at least the time of American involvement in the war, so so it was set from 1940 to around 1945.
When it was first announced that America was joining the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, many women feared of losing their husbands, boyfriends, and brothers to enlistment or the draft. This led many young couples to get married during this time, incase the man would not come back. Once thousands of men had enlisted or been drafted, many
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I was just browsing and found it, and after reading all the great reviews from critics and reading the summary, I thought it would be a great book to use for this outside reading assignment. The detailed writing about the lives of women during the World War II era was just astounding. I learned quite a bit about the lives of women not just during WWII, but also a little about what their lives had been like before the war. Prior to this book, I did not know that much about the roles of women in WWII; all I had really known about was how they started working in industry and agriculture. I had never really given much thought about what they did on the homefront besides that. So many women had begun working and making their own money with so many men being drafted and so many leaving jobs behind. “Of the more than six million women who joined or rejoined the workforce from 1940-1945, a little more than 2.5 million worked in defense production...But more than 2 million new female workers went into clerical jobs.” (Yellin, 66). I was just amazed at how women’s lives had to change over the course of the war. They went from having their place be in the home, to being allowed by society to get their own job and earn their own money. Although many lost those jobs once men started returning from war, they had still made big strides to being treated more as equals.