Post war news items were getting a bit weird.
Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a freak show star for a brief period of time.
Life magazine featured a black and white cover photo of a UAW worker. The contents of the magazine were:
Pg… 29 The Week's Events: U. S. Occupies Japan
Pg… 42 The Week's Events: Editorial: Peace in Asia
Pg… 45 The Week's Events: King Leopold's Family
Pg… 51 The Week's Events: Black Markets Boom in Berlin
Pg… 127 The Week's Events: Lilly Dache Packs for Paris
Pg… 63 Articles: Nijinsky in Vienna, by William Walton
Pg… 112 Articles: As We May Think, by Vannevor Bush
Pg… 103 Photographic Essay: United Automobile Workers
Pg… 57 Modern Living: House for Texas
Pg… 90 Modern Living: The French Look
Pg… 61 Art: Portrait of Sylvia Sidney, by Fletcher Martin
Pg… 82 Art: Hudson River School of Painters
Pg… 75 Movies: "Uncle Harry"
Pg… 97 Sports: Grownups Spin Tops
Pg… 138 Science: Plant Cancer
Pg… 2 Other Departments: Letters to the Editors
Pg… 12 Other Departments: Speaking of Pictures: Germany's Fantastic Secret Weapons
Pg… 16 Other Departments: LIFE's Reports: "Bottoms Up" in China, by Lieut. Thomas P. Ronan
Pg… 132 Other Departments: LIFE Goes Swordfishing
Pg… 142 Other Departments: Miscellany: Seabees Give Waves a Party
Life is often remembered as a great magazine in its heyday, but it featured some pretty vapid articles. This issue's feature on The French Look informed readers that young French women had small breasts and often went braless, depicting a typical bra (on a young French woman), for those occasions in which les mademoiselles wore them. Doing that in the US, UK, or Germany would have been regarded as shockingly indecent, although it was not uncommon in the Southern European Slavic and Romance language speaking countries, which in turn contributed to the American and British views that the Italians were really primitive, and the German view that the Yugoslavians were.
In case you wonder, I ran across the Life magazine item searching this date on Twitter. I haven't pulled up the article.
I'm clueless on the truth or accuracy of that claim and not going to investigate it, but French living conditions were definitely different than American ones, with a significantly different diet. Most people and cultures today are significantly thinner than Americans are and in the 1940s the French had suffered years of near starvation conditions, so they were likely overall less bulky than Americans in every manner. A 20 year old French woman in 1945 had lived her teen years in starvation conditions and had been on pretty thing rations throughout the 1930s. She would have been smaller in every way.
Also, French clothing had been severely rationed during the Second World War and you can't wear clothes you just don't have. Americans have largely forgotten, indeed never appreciated, the extent to which World War Two causes massive food and material deficits during the Second World War.
Added to that, Americans for some reason think of the French as being Parisians, which most are not. Paris had been the center of the fashion industry since at least the mid 19th Century, but that didn't apply to most of the French. About 50% of the French were rural in 1940, down from 64% in 1920, but still a very large percentage. As late as 1960 about 40% of the French were rural.
This oddly ties into this topic as rural life isn't like urban life, including in terms of the clothing people wear. Starting in the late 19th Century French and British artists began to glamorize the agrarian life and left a fair number of romantic, but fairly realistic, paintings of it. Some British paintings of rural life show farm women working fields in the hot summer months flat out topless, something you would not associate with either the UK or British farming today. French paintings can be a shock to run across while as they're often very well done and beautiful, they also make it relatively apparent that French farm women in hot months were wearing light cotton blouses with nothing underneath them.
European agriculture was much slower to mechanize than American agriculture. The Great Depression had an enormous retarding effect on the mechanization of American agriculture and this is even more so for European agriculture, which remained largely equine or bovine powered before the end of World War Two, another thing contributing to starvation as horses were conscripted for the German Army and cows and bulls just shot and ate them. Here, however, this is significant as French men and women were working the fields largely in the same way as they had in 1918.
Brassiers are actually a French invention, makign their appearance in the 1880s, as we've discussed before, and they received a boost due to World War One, as we addressed here:
As noted, things don't change overnight. So, maybe, young women coming of age in Paris in the 1940s who had an okay income or who had parents who did, might have a more advanced clothing standard then, say, a young woman growing up in rural Normandy, even if that young woman had moved into Paris during the war.
And, shall we noted this, in 1914-1918 Americans had been absolutely charmed by the French, and American men had been charmed by French women. But those men were largely rural and they were meeting women who were largely rural. In 1918, 20% of American homes had full indoor plumbing, meaning most did not. By World War Two most Americans homes did, although quite a few very rural ones did not. Most Americans were no longer rural by 1945.
In 1940 only 5% of French homes had indoor plumbing. The percentage for Italy was lower.
5%.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, therefore, lots of American troops were fairly horrified by the French, contrary to the way we like to remember it, when they started landing on French soil in 1944. The French, to put it mildly, smelled. And if the French smelled, the Italians smelled worse, with Italian women wearing cotton dresses in hot weather in which their upper lady bits flopped out, combined with omitting shoes and going around in bare feet. They were hopelessly primitive, in American eyes (which as noted is how the Germans found the Yugoslavians).
Anyhow, if you don't have indoor plumbing, you aren't going to be able to easily frequently wash your clothes and if you can omit something, you probably are going to.
Additionally, if you live in those conditions, and those of the 30s and early 40s, you are probably 40% underweight, smoke cigarettes constantly, have a large percentage of your caloric intake depending on alcohol, and you smell bad.
That's okay if everyone you associate with also is underweight and unwashed.
Things weren't like imagine them to be back then. Glamorous French women? Sure, on their own terms in the conditions in which they found themselves.
Life today is now a sort of special issue magazine featuring photographs. It's very large size format always existed, but it was originally a weekly and was so until 1972. It's big competitor was Look, which ceased publication in 1971. That both of these magazines took a hit in the early 1970s is really interesting is at long predates the Internet, which would otherwise be blamed for it.
Anyhow, Life was always a photo magazine, of which there were several others. It was a serious one, but right from its onset in 1936 (interesting to note it came out during the Great Depression) it frequently featured cheesecake, running racy photographs of actresses and semi undressed women on the guise of discussing clothing or fashion. Some of the photographs even today are shocking if you are not anticipating them. In 1953 it went full pornography for the first time running a nude of Marilyn Monroe which would be the same photograph used as the very first Playboy centerfold in 1953. The excuse, and probably the actual motivation, for that is that by doing that it was attempting to save the career of Monroe, who would be scandalized if her nude, taken in the late 1940s before she was a well known and up and coming actress, appeared first in a pornographic magazine, but still there's the only difference between the two publications of the image is the purpose the magazines served.
Anyhow, this is interesting in that Life and Look were general publication magazines that were outright flirting with cheesecake very early on, showing an (unfortunate) evolution on community standards. We've looked at this in the past, but this is certainly good evidence that whatever was going on in the culture was going on before World War Two and before the 1950s.
The Allied Control Commission decided to transmit to all neutral states a request for the return to Germany of "all German officials and obnoxious Germans".
Sweden resumed allowing foreign warships to enter its territorial waters.
MacArthur ordered the dissolution of the Imperial general headquarters and imposed censorship on the press.
The Shangdang Campaign began in the Chinese Civil War between the Eighth Route Army and Kuomintang troops led by Yan Xishan in what is now Shanxi Province, China.
The Indonesian Navy was founded.
The USS Midway was Commissioned
José Feliciano was born in Lares, Puerto Rico.
Related threads:
Labels: 1910s, Clothing, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Men, Standards, The roles of men and women, Women, World War One, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History Last edition:
Labels: 1940s, 1945, Armor, Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman, It was because of World War Two, Japan, Railroads, The Post War Economy Myth, Transportation, Union Pacific Railroad, World War Two, Wyoming (Green River)
