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ON THE HOME FRONT

The Family in Wartime

World War II spurred enormous changes in family life. First, wartime industry and the military draft caused massive migration: more than fifteen million people moved, searching for defense jobs or following family members to the next military base. Americans poured into major defense centers, especially cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mobile, and Wichita. The war and the booming economy that accompanied it also impacted patterns of marriage and childbearing. Couples had delayed marriage and childbearing during the Depression; men and women rushed to the altar after 1941 and had record numbers of children.

Marriage and Babies

While these marriages typically followed long engagements, many others were more spontaneous. When actor Mickey Rooney was a private stationed at Camp Siebert, Alabama, he proposed to a seventeen-year-old girl on their first date, and they were married seven days later. As Rooney later explained, "I married Betty Jane because I was determined to marry someone. I'd had some drinks, was hurt and lonely, reached and grabbed." Other young soldiers married in haste to have a secure image of a sweetheart to hold on to in the midst of battle. If marriage rates had continued at 1930s levels, there would have been three million fewer marriages than actually took place in the United States between 1940 and 1946. Many of these newlyweds had a "goodbye baby" before the husband went overseas. Others quickly conceived the babies they postponed during the Depression. By 1943 the birthrate had risen to a sixteen-year peak, and it remained high throughout the postwar Baby Boom of 1946-1964.

Prosperity and Shortages

The war years brought prosperity to all segments of the population: indeed, the income of the poorest one-fifth rose 68 percent, the greatest increase for any group. Yet the war also brought higher prices and shortages of housing, food, clothing, electricity, and transportation that eroded the standard of living of most families. Homemakers made up for these shortages by growing vegetables in backyard victory gardens, by cooking meatless casseroles, and by conserving everything for the war effort, including kitchen fat for lubricating machinery.

Wartime Rationing

To an American public unused to any kind of wartime deprivation, wartime rationing of food and gasoline came as a great shock. The Emergency Price Control Act, signed by President Roosevelt on 30 January 1942, established the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which had the authority to ration and fix price ceilings on goods and commodities sold on the retail market. A rubber shortage had already caused the rationing of tires on 21 December 1941, and soon everything Americans liked to eat most was strictly rationed as well. Ration-coupon books for sugar and coffee were issued in early 1942. In early 1943 the OPA began a point-ration plan that applied to meat, fats and oils, cheese, and processed foods. Shoes were later rationed under the point system as well. The OPA issued books of ration stamps with numbers of points printed on them and then assigned specific point values to rationed items. To replenish their stock grocers sent the stamps to the wholesaler. The wholesaler then turned the stamps in at the local bank and got credit to buy more food. The system proved to be complicated and impractical. The average grocer had to handle some 3.5 billion tiny stamps each month. Sometimes they ran out of the gummed sheets on which they were supposed to stick the stamps. One wholesaler had to haul loose stamps to the bank in bushel baskets. In spite of rationing, however, Americans ate better during the war than before. In 1943, despite the rationing of meat, meat consumption rose to 128.9 pounds per person per year. The Department of Agriculture reported that in 1945, Americans ate more food than at any other time in history. By the end of 1945 rationing of everything except sugar had ended. Sugar rationing continued until 11 June 1947.

Gasoline Rationing

Gasoline rationing, instituted along with fuel-oil rationing on 1 December 1942, was particularly unpopular. A sticker-and-coupon system established gasoline allotments for civilian vehicles in four categories: "A" for cars used only for pleasure, "B" for those driven to work, "C" for those driven at work, and "E" for emergency vehicles. Many drivers who received "A" stickers, which limited them to only three gallons of gas per week, managed to get extra coupons, and some stations were willing to sell gas at higher prices to drivers without coupons. Cheating on gas rationing became a national scandal by late 1942.

Absentee Husbands

World War II also separated husbands and wives, fathers and children. Sixteen million men were separated from their families by the military, and nearly one family in five lost at least one or more relative to the war. Servicemen's wives endured loneliness and the stress of raising their children without their husbands. One wrote, "I try not to worry and if I can't sleep at night I just take a sleeping pill. Life seems more like existing to me than living." The federal allotment check of fifty dollars a month with twenty dollars extra per child was inadequate for many families, forcing wives to move in with their parents or other relatives. This doubling up created its own stresses, even in the best circumstances. As one woman wrote, "I get along well with my mother, but I had my own home long enough to develop my own methods of keeping house, so Mother and I have altogether different ideas of how a house should be run."

Children in Wartime

Young children also felt the pains of the wartime dislocations. Too young to remember fathers long absent overseas and raised by grandparents or neighbors while their mothers worked, these children coped with instability and uncertainty. One mother noted the difficulty in disciplining her children alone: "The kids don't seem to mind as much as they did when he was home." The demands of the war relaxed schoolattendance requirements as well as child labor laws, and children shared both wartime excitement and anxiety. Though adult observers expressed characteristic alarm over the lack of supervision and authority figures in their lives, many children adjusted well.

Youth

Many teenagers deferred or left school to enter the labor force during the war. By 1943 legislators had reacted to the military state of emergency by relaxing child-labor laws. Sixty-two acts relating to the employment of minors were passed in twenty-seven states. Most of these laws were in force for the duration of the war only. According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey in April 1944, one in five schoolboys aged fourteen and fifteen, and more than two in five boys aged sixteen and seventeen, were gainfully employed. Though fewer teenage girls worked, by 1944 a third of sixteen to eighteen-year-old girls surveyed had jobs. By that date 35 percent of teenagers in these age groups had left school altogether and gone to work. This wartime employment briefly reversed the overall twentieth-century trend toward the prolonged economic dependence of young people on their parents because of longer time in school and lack of opportunity for employment.

Teenagers in Factories

Most of the wartime jobs for young people were in manufacturing. The nature of such production jobs had important implications for the way they grew up. A manufacturing job made strict demands on a youth's time and offered little opportunity for continued academic training. While some boys dropped out of school at fifteen or sixteen to take these jobs, most chose to stay in school and endured the long combined hours of employment and school. Working teens surveyed at three Michigan high schools in the spring of 1944 said they enjoyed their jobs and found them educational and added that work did not interfere with their schooling. Moreover, families with more than one worker enjoyed greater prosperity.

The Temptations of Prosperity

Wartime employment for young people may have been patriotic, but as in any disruption of the typical pattern of adolescent development, it provoked adult fears of increased juvenile delinquency. Some adults blamed teenagers' increased prosperity for creating greater temptations. A U.S. Department of Education pamphlet, Guidance Problems in War-time (1942), claimed that it was "obvious that there was an unfortunate effect of young people's sudden prosperity: their opportunity to have a good time; to enjoy elaborate food, clothing, automobilies." School guidance counselors encouraged prudence and frugality among "suddenly prosperous" young people, urging them to buy war bonds and save for the future, lest they develop expensive tastes they would be unable to meet in the future.

Juvenile Delinquency

A perceived rise in juvenile crime paralleled an actual increase in youthful autonomy in the war years; many aspects of adolescents' lives were free from adult scrutiny for the first time. As the demands of the war brought teenagers into the labor force, they also weakened the influence of family and community over their behavior. Juvenile delinquency supposedly increased sharply during the war, particularly sexual promiscuity among young girls who sometimes confused sex with patriotism. According to a young man facing the draft in 1942, "a guy ought to have something to remember when he's facing submarines and death. Something more than a few hugs and kisses." The U.S. Children's Bureau denied any moral decay among youth and explained away the increase in girls' cases in juvenile courts as the result of greater legal vigilance. But some moral reformers in the war years noted the appearance of girls known as "khaki-wackies": "The new type is the young girl in her late teens and early twenties, the young woman in every field of life who is determined to have one fling or better." The problem was not prostitution but sexual excess. Charges of disorderly conduct increased almost two hundred percent in the war years, and charges for so called moral offenses increased markedly as well. Observers explained that these young people were "channeling" their youthful emotions "into a burning feeling of patriotism" that had no legitimate or immediate outlet. Wartime young people were simply more agitated than the typical youth in peacetime. There were reports of increasing restlessness, emotional instability, and hostility to adult authority figures among teenagers every-where. Yet wartime peer culture oriented most young people toward social involvement, loyalty, and individual achievement.