Women of the Homefront

Lois A. Ferguson was a training teacher for college graduates at a Japanese relocation center in California. Her husband set up a junior college and night school program. Their efforts were to help relieve the injustices done to fellow citizens. Kay Watson’s husband fought in Burma while Kay worked at one of the sites of a secret government project known as the Manhattan Project; she later learned that she might have played a small part in the plan to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mary L. Appling was a librarian in a California high school when she met Hugh Appling, a serviceman just returned from the war; together, they worked in Foreign Service for the United States for nearly thirty years, a direction affected by their actions during World War II.
The recollections of these three women and 52 others are edited and presented by Pauline Parker, who also endured the war. Many women had life changing experiences during this turbulent time—Parker has gathered the personal stories of such women as Marines and government workers as well as single mothers whose husbands had gone off to fight.

The late Pauline E. Parker was a university-trained sociologist and worked as a social research analyst in the California Department of Mental Hygiene until her retirement. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

Edited by Pauline E. Parker
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 310
Bibliographic Info: photos, index
Copyright Date: 2002
pISBN: 978-0-7864-1346-1
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8401-0
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments     v

Preface     1

Voices from Pearl Harbor     7

Voices from Relocation Camps     17

Voices from School     39

Voices of Government Women     55

Voices from the Laboratories     85

Voices from Wartime Opportunities     97

Voices from the Services and Military Hospitals     115

Voices from Military Dependents     153

Voices from Daily Life     205

Voices from Abroad     219

A Lonely Voice for Peace     275

Voices of Grief     285

Index     295

“these women explain how they lived their lives during the war…for some women, the war meant exciting new opportunities, but for other women the war seemed only a painful interlude to be endured”—Stone & Stone Second World War Books; “you may pick it up again and again, because it is that kind of book—The Hollywood Star.