Feminist rhetorical acts of remembering in women veterans’ World War II scrapbooks

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Cynthia Damm McPeters (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Nancy Myers

Abstract: Feminist Rhetorical Acts of Remembering in Women Veterans’ World War II Scrapbooks considers rhetorical agency and authority accessed by women veterans of World War II through the personal genre of the scrapbook. Examining the rhetorical tensions extant in American cultural doxa as women entered military and extra-military service during the 1940s, this project focuses on the revelations of femininity alongside the construction of new professional ethe by four women veterans who transitioned from “women’s work” to the male-dominated world of war. These women veterans retool the feminized genre of the scrapbook to negotiate between societal gender expectations, popular media, and recruitment propaganda. Moreover, they identify themselves as remembering women, as conventionally feminine women, and as professional women in wartime service by siting themselves within their albums, in domestic and occupational ecologies and in physical wartime locations. Their memory texts afford these women veterans the ability to manipulate time and space as they write themselves into historical accounts of the Second World War through contemporary archives and composition pedagogy. Given that the world can never see a conflict like World War II, their narratives become valuable additions to the public memory of World War II.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2023
Keywords
Professional ethe, Rhetorical agency, Scrapbook, Women veterans, Women's rhetoric, World War II
Subjects
World War, 1939-1945 $x Veterans $z United States
Women veterans $z United States
Feminism and rhetoric $z United States
Scrapbooks $z United States $x History

Email this document to