U.S. Soldiers After World War II
U.S. Soldiers After World War IIThe accounts from soldiers describing combat in general
present an image of a hellish nightmare where all decency and humanity
could be lost. For men who fought under these conditions, coming home
was a very difficult transition. Above all, these men wanted to return
to "normalcy", to come back to a life that they had been promised if
the war was won. This would turn out to be harder to obtain then first
expected, problems ranging from the availability of jobs in the work
force to child raising and post-traumatic stress would make this
return to "normalcy" very troublesome. This laborious task of
reintegrating into American culture would eventually lead to problems
in the gender relations in post war America.
One of the major problems that G.I.'s faced upon there return
to the States was the availability of jobs. During the war, the U.S.
government encouraged women and minorities to enter the industrial
work force due to labor shortages and increased demand for war goods.
By 1944 a total of 1,360,000 women with husbands in the service had
entered the work force. This, along with the a migration of
African-American workers from the south, filled the war time need for
labor. This attitude toward women in the work force changed
dramatically at the end of the war. The propaganda promoting "Rosie
the Riviter", suddenly changed, focusing on the duties of women as a
homemaker and a mother. Even with these efforts and those of the G.I.
bills passed after the war, returning soldiers had a difficult time
finding jobs in post war America. This independence given to women
during the war and its removal with the advent of the returning men,
had a definitive effect on gender relations in American society and
which one of the seeds of the womens rights movements in later
decades.
Another hardship encountered by returning soldiers was the
reactions of the children they left behind. Most of the fathers that
returned from the war concerned with how they would fit into the
family system. Some fathers were determined to take an active role in
the family and they did by becoming the master disciplinary. Returning
fathers came to home to find undisciplined and unruly children, a far
cry from ordered military life they had lead during...
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