Poster Saturday: Jenny on the job; Eats man sized meals.

Jenny on the Job was a World War Two series of work posters aimed at women who hadn't occupied industrial jobs prior to the war.

A poster like this reveals more about the era, to an informed viewer, than we might at first suspect suppose.

To start with its important to know that women had in fact worked in industrial occupations during wartime before.  The idea that this was a novelty during World War Two is completely erroneous.  Women were employed in large numbers in industry during World War One and it may be argued that they were at least as important, and even perhaps more important, in the First World War in that capacity as compared to the Second.  So why would any sort of reminder about how to eat be necessary?

As we've discussed here previously, a huge change that started occurring between the wars, but which was retarded because of the Great Depression, was the introduction of domestic machinery.  It was really that change that brought about the massive change in the role of women in regards to work that occurred after the Second World War, not World War Two itself.  The real impact of the Second World War, in regards to this evolution, was to cause of a massive boost in consumer spending when the war ended, which prevented the resumption of the Depression and which brought in over twenty years of development in domestic machinery nearly over night.

Okay, so what's that have to do with this poster?

Well, while the war did put an end to the Depression with finality, and the post war spending spree brought in floods of domestic machinery into the household, greatly reducing the labor that had been associated with maintaining a household almost overnight, some of this change had started to come in, slowly, after the Great War.  As we've also noted, World War One did cause a leap in technological advancement that saw a lot of technologies that were coming into their own prior to the war really advance during it.  Domestic machinery wasn't really part of that but what did occur was a social development that is somewhat associated with technology that had a direct impact on women and young men, introducing for the first time the concept of a sort of late teenage, early 20s, youth period in which individuals of that age weren't immediately burdened with adult responsibilities.  That really came into the forefront in the 1920s, but it was also heavily arrested by the Great Depression.

Be that as it may, these small beginnings were enough of beginnings that by the 1930s not all American women were as fully dedicated on a daily basis to heavy domestic labor as they once were. We can't go too far with this, but we can say that this was occurring.  So really for the first time we start to have middle class women, and for that matter a significant number of middle class men, whose daily tasks were not as physically demanding as they only recently had been.  And that sort of introduces the modern era, in a very early way, of appearance.

If we think of it, particularly in the case of women, we'll note that fashions, as we've already addressed, for women have always changed exceedingly rapidly, but we'll also note that its really the 1930s when women's fashion's begin to be recognizable to us.  This isn't to say that if a woman wore a typical daily wear type dress from the 1930s today it wouldn't look odd, it would. But if a woman wore a dress from the 1920s, she'd appear to be in costume as opposed to attempting to affect a bit of an old fashioned look.

With this a sort of modern standard of female beauty, roughly speaking, also started to come in.  This is so much the case that the pinup girl of the 1940s really remains with us and on odd occasion you'll see people still attempting to duplicate that appearance in artistic depictions of one kind or another.  Perhaps most oddly, 1940s and 1950s style pinup girls, which are not the same, show up quite a bit in modern tattoos including tattoos sported by women. That's a sort of homage to the appearance standards of the 40s and 50s in a really odd way, as by those standards of course a woman would never have been tattooed.

Anyhow, as part of all of this, including the move by large numbers of people from rural life into town life, we started to see the introduction of an era when eating, and in particular eating lunch, wasn't what it was.  Farm workers had typically eaten three large meals a day, and on a lot of farms and ranches they still do.  Industrial laborers had up until the 1920s typically walked to work carrying their lunch . . and their tools, and they also consumed three pretty substantial sized meals.  But office workers usually didn't do that, i.e., eat three big meals, and if they did, they'd soon find themselves gaining a substantial amount of weight.  So in came light lunches, by the standards of the day.

When the war came in, a lot of people found themselves in industrial occupations that were unlike they work they'd done before.  This included a lot of young women who had no doubt worked in at least their parents' homes, but who may not have done any kind of really routine heavy labor.  By 1940 these new workers were used to what was becoming or had become the new American standard, which for many of them meant a very simple cereal based breakfast and a really light lunch.  It didn't provide enough caloric intake for industrial occupations that still involved a lot of heavy labor.

Hence the poster.