Gender Roles and Sexism
Obviously gender roles have changed since 1956. The term sexism barely appeared in our collective consciousness until the feminist and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
Still, it’s hard to look back on some of these cartoons and the attitudes that spawned them without cringing, even for a male like myself. And yet in fairness there are a few reasons we might find these attitudes understandable (if not acceptable) in the context of the period and environment:
- Most women in the military at the time were WACs and nurses. Our GIs had no exposure to women as equals in the military in 1956. The WACs had been formed only in 1941, and in its first few years they suffered from a slander campaign labeling them as prostitutes and lesbians. Soldiers’ wives were against them too, fearing their men would cheat. Religious publications reprinted a false story that the War Department was providing them with contraceptives, effectively labeling the WACs as women of loose morals. There was literally a war against women in the military, and on up to 2016 it was policy to deny them roles in combat.
- Although the sexual revolution was still more than a decade away, pornography was normalized around the time my dad entered the Air Force with the first issue of Playboy in 1953 with Maryily Monroe on the cover.
- Let’s face it: these men were living together with other men and generally sex-deprived. They were also very young men, who are generally more on-the-prowl than older men.
Despite all of the above, there are some attitudes that have not aged well, even in the context of the times, starting with the general sense that women were simply intellectually inferior.
Women were treated mostly as sex objects in the military and in life in general at the time. (I suppose that attitude has changed only a little today.) One difference between then and now, as reflected in these cartoons, is that hourglass figures were a bit more in vogue then.
(Nice plug for Special Services, dad.)
Women in Europe and particularly France were viewed a little differently and played a more prominent role in these cartoons, surely because that was where my father was at the time, but also because they held a certain foreign allure. If they weren’t wearing stripes, they were wearing bikinis, which grew in prominence during the 1950s.
The cartoons below portray the unabashed sex-starved nature of our guys in uniform. I wonder whether the first one could have been published in the U.S. of the 1950s.
The cartoons below are the most cringeworthy. My father explains that the first one depicted a drill sergeant, and along with the second they are also making fun of men who simply order others around. (I guess there’s some small grain of truth in that explanation, but a very microscopic grain.) It’s at least nice to see that the women’s reactions appear a little surprised or troubled, although they aren’t in the third one, which surely doesn’t translate well in the “me too” era.
These two cartoons show men simply checking out women. It’s curious (or not-so-curious) that the observations are made while the women are walking away.
Surely these attitudes have changed over the years, right?
The hugely popular Internet meme called “distracted boyfriend,” shown below these two cartoons, says, “Hold my beer.”
There is one positive that might be taken away from these depictions of women. My father later became a portrait painter, and he particularly worked with the human form. These early cartoons were among his first steps along that road.
Yeah, that’s a reach, and I know it.