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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Kara Dixon Bwick, a professor of war Conflict
in Society at Texas Christian University. He's also the author
of The Girls next Door, Bringing the home Front to
the front Line. Let's get into the story, Take it away, Kara.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
At a United Service Organization's benefit in October two thousand
and eight, George W. Bush boldly declared the moment things
began to turn around in a rock is when the
USO deployed Jessica Simpson. When I saw that quote, I thought,
that's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard in my life, right,
(00:56):
you know, like, how in the world could a pop
singer have anything to do with military success or anything
related to military strategy? And what I found out is
that actually a lot of military officials have taken entertainment
provided by women very very seriously. It has a lot
(01:16):
to do with soldier morale, the morale of soldiers, sailors, airmen,
and marines. But in other ways it's less obvious. The
military desperately wants women abroad to help sort of policemen's behavior.
You know that they're not running out, you know, getting
drunk and acting like crazy people. But they're also worried
(01:41):
about keeping soldiers from prostitutes. If you look at medical
issues in World War One, short of the flu, the
influenza is by far the largest medical issue. After that,
it's venereal disease, which couldn't be treated yet with a
quick shot of penaside. And so it really did cost
(02:02):
the military man hours and was a very serious concern.
And so what does Jessica Simpson, or what does Emma
Young Dixon in World War One? Or what do any
of these women with the Salvation Army or the YMCA,
what do they have to do with the war. The
thought was, if we send women abroad, if they can
interact with our dough boys in France, that that will
(02:26):
remind the men of their mothers, their sisters, their sweethearts,
their girlfriends at home, and that will inspire them to
walk the straight and narrow. After the Civil War ended,
the military itself reduced in size and primarily is station
in places like what they would have called the frontier
right stationed in the West. These are the years of
(02:48):
wars with Native Americans. They're far and away from the
American public's mind, from their eye. They're not stationed in
cities on the East coast, right, they're far away. And
most Americans thought that enlisted soldiers, not necessarily officers, but
enlisted men in particular, that those are kind of hard
(03:09):
scrabble men. Right. They do dirty work on the nation's behalf.
It's a hard life out there. If they got into
a bit of trouble or they caused a ruckus, you know,
as long as it didn't become a major issue beyond
the fort or beyond the post, they were willing to
sort of ignore it. They deserve to have a little
bit of fun every now and then. And what I
(03:31):
think really changed Americans' attitudes was conscription. Before conscription, it
might be a problem out in the forts in the West,
but those are somebody else's kids. That's somebody else's son,
that's somebody else's problem. When conscription came in, all of
a sudden, now this is your problem, r Your son
(03:54):
might be drafted, might possibly even be sent to France.
Where As everybody knew in World War that's just the world,
you know, the center of world debauchery. And so all
of a sudden, now what happens in a training camp
is everybody's problem. So once the Americans enter World War One,
you have an organization called the Commission on Training Camp
(04:14):
Activities that forms and offers to help the military in
home front training camps. They're doing things like sponsoring dances
or sponsoring events where the soldiers can meet sort of
respectable girls in a chaperone environment. They're basically trying to
provide all kinds of activities for these men to do
(04:37):
to keep them out of trouble. The problem for the
American Expeditionary Force sort of going abroad is who is
going to do this kind of work In France. This
is sort of the quintessential era of organizations. People really
belong to clubs that fit their values. And for the YMCA,
(04:58):
it wasn't a gym. It was an order organization that
was trying to spread its religious values in the country.
The same for the Salvation Army, it was a religious organization.
The Salvation Army in particular was working in urban areas,
really trying to deal with issues of poverty and those
kinds of things. And when the war came, these organizations
(05:19):
see an opportunity to really have a sort of personal
impact or personal relationship with these soldiers who are abroad.
You know, short of the Spanish American War, this is
the first time that's really happening on a massive scale.
It is a big deal to Americans that we are
sending boys. And of course there are always boys in
the language. We're sending boys to France, We're sending them
(05:42):
over here. They're going to have this, you know, this
horrible experience, and we need to help mitigate that in
some way. And so the YMCA in particular talks about
sending home to the soldiers. Right, We're going to create
a home away from home. We're going to send home
with your boys. And so sending home meant creating these
(06:05):
sort of clubs, these canteens, these physical spaces where you know,
dough boys could come. They could get a cup of
hot coffee, they could get a donut, there might be
a piano somebody's playing. It's just a space where they
can get away from it a little bit. And the
hope on the part of the organizations was that they
would go to these clubs instead of going to Paris,
(06:28):
instead of going to a city. And key to all
of these canteens were women. They are the ones who
are going to interact with the dough boys. They're the
ones who are going to sit down and talk to
them about what they've been doing. And they're the ones
who are going to serve them the coffee and the
donuts and sew their buttons on and you know, do
(06:48):
all kinds of little, you know, little kinds of domestic
chores in a sense for them. But that the question
then for these organizations is what kind of women. On
one hand, you want them to sort of be this
wholesome reminder of home and family, and at the same
time they're there to lure the men away from prostitution,
(07:12):
and so how does that work. They want women who
are a bit older so that they're more mature, so
that they can handle being away from home themselves, so
that they can handle, you know, sort of the rough
life of living in a war environment. But they can't
be too old then they won't remind these men of
(07:32):
their sweethearts. They need to be women who they think
are physically fit and strong enough to you know, follow
the troops on these wagons. They need to be hearty,
right the word that they use. But they can't be
too strong, too tough, or they don't seem feminine and soft.
They're there as something that is an alternative to the
(07:56):
dirtiness of the war, to the trenches, to all of that.
And so, so you want a woman who's strong, but
not too strong. She needs to sort of look professional
and put together, right but not. I mean, they had
a whole thing about the YMCA. When these women would
come in to interview, if they were wearing too much rouge,
they were wearing too much makeup, that was a sign
(08:18):
that those are not the women we want. They're trying
too hard. We don't want women who are all done
up and made up and who are too concerned with
their own appearance. But we still need them to be
pretty because we're trying to keep these men from running
to Paris. So we want them to be a lure, right,
We want them to be something that these men want
to come see. They need to be friendly and welcoming.
(08:41):
They need to make every single man who comes into
that canteen feel special and wanted and welcomed. And remember
that this is an era in which respectable, sort of
middle class white women are told you are not to
make the first move, you are not to appear as
though you're too open. Two men, and yet everything about
(09:04):
their work demands that they do that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you've been listening to Kara Dixon Viewick, a professor
of War, Conflict and Society at TCU, because he's also
the author of The Girl's next Door, Bringing the Home
Front to the front Lines. More of this remarkable story,
an untold story in large part here on our American Stories,
(09:39):
and we continue with our American stories and Kara Dixon Viewick,
author of The Girl's next Door, Bringing the Home Front
to the front Lines. And by the way, you can
get an Amazon or all the usual suspects. One of
those women was Emma Young Dixon. Let's return to the
story here again is.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Car so Emma Young Dixon was from Montclair, New Jersey.
She grew up in a very well to do family.
Her father had actually worked with Andrew Carnegie and had
resigned in protest over his treatment of workers. And he
had founded a company called Midvale Steel. And Emma had
(10:21):
grown up in a mean just a gorgeous home. The
family hosted soares and parties, and they hosted what became
the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. You know, they were on
the social pages of the New York Times this is
her upbringing. And when the war started, she volunteered with
the Red Cross, sort of rolling bandages, doing the things
(10:44):
that young women her age did, but she never felt
that was enough. It always makes me laugh because she
basically quotes the Howard Chandler Christy poster of the woman
wearing the sailor's uniform, and it says, gee, I wish
I were a man. I joined the navy. Emma actually
wrote that in her diary that she wished she had
(11:04):
been a man to have a small part in this
great conflict. And so she she kept trying. She volunteered,
she took classes in first aid. She actually applied to
the YMCA once to work in its canteen program, and
they didn't accept her, and so she went back home.
She did some more volunteer work, applied again, and they
(11:26):
accepted her. The first page of her diary starts with,
you know, her getting on the boat in the New
York Harbor about to go to France. I mean to me,
I read it and I'm like picturing a movie scene
in my head that she's standing on this boat. She's crying,
you know. She says she's very lost, in teary it's raining.
(11:48):
Her family is on the shore watching the ship pull away.
She's holding a flower bouquet that her boyfriend had sent her.
It's just this amazing scene of her lead going to France.
And in that moment, to me, she seemed very vulnerable
and very very cautious and nervous. And as soon as
(12:10):
the boat pulls away, she says, she went down, she
met her roommate and that's it. And a couple weeks later,
they're at the French harbor and she writes that four
convoys had come out to escort her ship into the harbor,
and she says, it seems so silly to be scared.
One can only die once anyway, And I thought, jeez, Louise,
(12:30):
like on in the course of her crossing in the Atlantic,
she's developed this like devil may care attitude, and she's
already a different person when you look back on it.
She's actually sort of in the heart of where a
lot of the action with the dough boys occurred. She's
near Valdancourt, France, and for the beginning of her time
(12:52):
she's really sort of working in the canteen, getting things
set up and working with the dough boys. When they
come in, she's serving the cookies and the doughnuts and
the coffee and all of that, and dancing with them
and just trying to talk to them and make them
feel at home. She also took with her a violin
that she had been trained to play as a child,
(13:12):
and she carried her violin around and played the violin
for them. That Emma, you know, she sets this canteen up,
and she's trying to coordinate that work with the officers
of the AEF to make sure they know what's going on,
and they get their men in here, and so they
have this they have this event where they're sort of
formally opening this club that she or this canteen. The
(13:35):
officers come in and it's a big deal and Emma
gets up to make a speech and she's very good
at this. She's sort of self deprecating, you know. She
talks about how nervous she is because of all the
brass behind her on the stage, and then she talks
to the dough boys and she's like, I am here
for you. I feel very little and incompetent, measured up
(13:56):
beside it. Right, she feels very small given the big
task ahead of her to help them through this war,
and she characterizes her work as, you know, doing the
things that they're that their mothers and sisters would have done. Right.
She uses this language of like family. She's their sister,
she's their mother. But it doesn't take her long to
(14:20):
realize that those dough boys don't see her as their
sister or their mother. They see her as a sweetheart, right,
maybe not their sweetheart, but a potential sweetheart in some cases,
or maybe sort of just this image of a sweetheart.
And so she has guys who are regulars in the
(14:41):
canteen who come to see her all the time. There's
one guy who somehow got himself a motorcycle. I'm not
sure how that happened, but he had a motorcycle and
he would he would bike into the canteen to visit her.
And he one day came in and told her he
was about to go to the front and he wanted
to ask her something. And she wrote in her diary
(15:04):
she knew what he was going to ask and she
didn't really want to hear it. And he proposes marriage again,
and she's she just makes a joke out of it.
She's like, I'm just too busy to get married right now.
What she doesn't say is I'm a little tired of you.
I wish you'd go away, because she can't say that, right,
She can't say anything that would make these men feel
(15:27):
embarrassed or put out in any way, right. And so
a lot of the women, Emma included, they develop all
of these ways of sort of deflecting attention or of
getting themselves out of situations that might turn into something more.
A gi or dough boy walks them back to the
house that they're billeted in and might try to kiss
(15:51):
her on the cheek and she'll quickly go to the
other side of the gate. Like they have all of
these tactics basically that they've developed to avoid the those
kinds of situations. At the same time that she really
does value her friendship with these men. YMCA official came
in one day and lectured all of the women, told
them they were flirting with the officers, and she was
(16:13):
very offended by that, and she said flirting wasn't the
same thing as being friendly. There was a clear divide.
She did not believe she had crossed that line, but
she understood that there was a line. And you're the
one who has to police that line. Those are the
kinds of things that women like Emma dealt with on
a day to day basis. But it's still a long time, right,
(16:38):
It's still a long time away from home dealing with
all of this. And yet when the third Division gets
moved to Chateau Tierri toward the end of what is
eventually the end of the war, Emma is really annoyed
that she can't go with them, And so eventually she
was one of only a fifty women who were sent
that close to the war zone, and so she had
(17:00):
some really interesting and unique experiences, even as a lot
of her story is emblematic of what a lot of
women were experiencing. How do you explain, you know, what
you did in the war, Why I serve doughnuts and
I serve coffee and I danced with dough boys? Right, Well,
that on one level might not make sense and or
(17:24):
might need some explaining for people to really understand why
it mattered and what, you know, how important it was
from the military's perspective, Does this win the war? No?
If you're thinking about morale and you're thinking about how
this might have helped soldiers, helped dough boys sort of
(17:46):
process what they're doing, get them ready to go back home.
Then it's absolutely essential from the military's perspective. In the
sort of lead up to World War Two, it is
an absolute given from the military perspective that we are
going to have these organizations again, similar organizations. The YMCA
is the Salvation Army, but you've also got organizations like the
(18:08):
Jewish Welfare Board, the National Catholic Community Service who are
also trying to help. And those are the organizations that
eventually unite and form the USO, which offers entertainment in
World War Two and then afterward. And as women who
have gone to war, that experience really sets them apart
(18:30):
not only from other women their age who have not
gone to war and who have not seen the kinds
of things that women like msaw, but it also sets
them apart from men who did not go. When Woodrow
Wilson sort of came out behind the Woman's Suffrage Act,
he did so explicitly citing women's wartime service. That rationale
(18:55):
actually displeased a whole lot of women who had been
fighting for women's suffrage for a very long time, because
their argument would have been that they are human beings
and they deserve the right to vote as much as
anybody else. The argument that won over Congress, however, went
over Woodrow Wilson, was that women had done their part
for the war effort, and so how can we ask
(19:17):
them to serve in a war? How can we ask
them to support a war if we don't also give
them the benefits of that citizenship right. That's ultimately what worked.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, And a special thanks to
Kara Dixon Bwick, author of The Girls next Door bringing
the home Front to the front lines, and what a
story in particular about Emma Young Dixon. I wish I
were a man, so I could have a small part
(19:50):
in this large conflict, if he once said, and when
Woodrow Wilson spoke about women's suffrage and the passage of
the amendment that the women the right to vote, he
cited the work of the women during World War One,
like Emmy Young Dixon. The story of the U s
how women served in our early wars, right up through
(20:13):
World War Two and to to day. Here on our
American stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Kara Dixon Bwick, a professor of war Conflict
in Society at Texas Christian University. He's also the author
of The Girls next Door, Bringing the home Front to
the front Line. Let's get into the story, Take it away, Kara.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
At a United Service Organization's benefit in October two thousand
and eight, George W. Bush boldly declared the moment things
began to turn around in a rock is when the
USO deployed Jessica Simpson. When I saw that quote, I thought,
that's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard in my life, right,
(00:56):
you know, like, how in the world could a pop
singer have anything to do with military success or anything
related to military strategy? And what I found out is
that actually a lot of military officials have taken entertainment
provided by women very very seriously. It has a lot
(01:16):
to do with soldier morale, the morale of soldiers, sailors, airmen,
and marines. But in other ways it's less obvious. The
military desperately wants women abroad to help sort of policemen's behavior.
You know that they're not running out, you know, getting
drunk and acting like crazy people. But they're also worried
(01:41):
about keeping soldiers from prostitutes. If you look at medical
issues in World War One, short of the flu, the
influenza is by far the largest medical issue. After that,
it's venereal disease, which couldn't be treated yet with a
quick shot of penaside. And so it really did cost
(02:02):
the military man hours and was a very serious concern.
And so what does Jessica Simpson, or what does Emma
Young Dixon in World War One? Or what do any
of these women with the Salvation Army or the YMCA,
what do they have to do with the war. The
thought was, if we send women abroad, if they can
interact with our dough boys in France, that that will
(02:26):
remind the men of their mothers, their sisters, their sweethearts,
their girlfriends at home, and that will inspire them to
walk the straight and narrow. After the Civil War ended,
the military itself reduced in size and primarily is station
in places like what they would have called the frontier
right stationed in the West. These are the years of
(02:48):
wars with Native Americans. They're far and away from the
American public's mind, from their eye. They're not stationed in
cities on the East coast, right, they're far away. And
most Americans thought that enlisted soldiers, not necessarily officers, but
enlisted men in particular, that those are kind of hard
(03:09):
scrabble men. Right. They do dirty work on the nation's behalf.
It's a hard life out there. If they got into
a bit of trouble or they caused a ruckus, you know,
as long as it didn't become a major issue beyond
the fort or beyond the post, they were willing to
sort of ignore it. They deserve to have a little
bit of fun every now and then. And what I
(03:31):
think really changed Americans' attitudes was conscription. Before conscription, it
might be a problem out in the forts in the West,
but those are somebody else's kids. That's somebody else's son,
that's somebody else's problem. When conscription came in, all of
a sudden, now this is your problem, r Your son
(03:54):
might be drafted, might possibly even be sent to France.
Where As everybody knew in World War that's just the world,
you know, the center of world debauchery. And so all
of a sudden, now what happens in a training camp
is everybody's problem. So once the Americans enter World War One,
you have an organization called the Commission on Training Camp
(04:14):
Activities that forms and offers to help the military in
home front training camps. They're doing things like sponsoring dances
or sponsoring events where the soldiers can meet sort of
respectable girls in a chaperone environment. They're basically trying to
provide all kinds of activities for these men to do
(04:37):
to keep them out of trouble. The problem for the
American Expeditionary Force sort of going abroad is who is
going to do this kind of work In France. This
is sort of the quintessential era of organizations. People really
belong to clubs that fit their values. And for the YMCA,
(04:58):
it wasn't a gym. It was an order organization that
was trying to spread its religious values in the country.
The same for the Salvation Army, it was a religious organization.
The Salvation Army in particular was working in urban areas,
really trying to deal with issues of poverty and those
kinds of things. And when the war came, these organizations
(05:19):
see an opportunity to really have a sort of personal
impact or personal relationship with these soldiers who are abroad.
You know, short of the Spanish American War, this is
the first time that's really happening on a massive scale.
It is a big deal to Americans that we are
sending boys. And of course there are always boys in
the language. We're sending boys to France, We're sending them
(05:42):
over here. They're going to have this, you know, this
horrible experience, and we need to help mitigate that in
some way. And so the YMCA in particular talks about
sending home to the soldiers. Right, We're going to create
a home away from home. We're going to send home
with your boys. And so sending home meant creating these
(06:05):
sort of clubs, these canteens, these physical spaces where you know,
dough boys could come. They could get a cup of
hot coffee, they could get a donut, there might be
a piano somebody's playing. It's just a space where they
can get away from it a little bit. And the
hope on the part of the organizations was that they
would go to these clubs instead of going to Paris,
(06:28):
instead of going to a city. And key to all
of these canteens were women. They are the ones who
are going to interact with the dough boys. They're the
ones who are going to sit down and talk to
them about what they've been doing. And they're the ones
who are going to serve them the coffee and the
donuts and sew their buttons on and you know, do
(06:48):
all kinds of little, you know, little kinds of domestic
chores in a sense for them. But that the question
then for these organizations is what kind of women. On
one hand, you want them to sort of be this
wholesome reminder of home and family, and at the same
time they're there to lure the men away from prostitution,
(07:12):
and so how does that work. They want women who
are a bit older so that they're more mature, so
that they can handle being away from home themselves, so
that they can handle, you know, sort of the rough
life of living in a war environment. But they can't
be too old then they won't remind these men of
(07:32):
their sweethearts. They need to be women who they think
are physically fit and strong enough to you know, follow
the troops on these wagons. They need to be hearty,
right the word that they use. But they can't be
too strong, too tough, or they don't seem feminine and soft.
They're there as something that is an alternative to the
(07:56):
dirtiness of the war, to the trenches, to all of that.
And so, so you want a woman who's strong, but
not too strong. She needs to sort of look professional
and put together, right but not. I mean, they had
a whole thing about the YMCA. When these women would
come in to interview, if they were wearing too much rouge,
they were wearing too much makeup, that was a sign
(08:18):
that those are not the women we want. They're trying
too hard. We don't want women who are all done
up and made up and who are too concerned with
their own appearance. But we still need them to be
pretty because we're trying to keep these men from running
to Paris. So we want them to be a lure, right,
We want them to be something that these men want
to come see. They need to be friendly and welcoming.
(08:41):
They need to make every single man who comes into
that canteen feel special and wanted and welcomed. And remember
that this is an era in which respectable, sort of
middle class white women are told you are not to
make the first move, you are not to appear as
though you're too open. Two men, and yet everything about
(09:04):
their work demands that they do that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you've been listening to Kara Dixon Viewick, a professor
of War, Conflict and Society at TCU, because he's also
the author of The Girl's next Door, Bringing the Home
Front to the front Lines. More of this remarkable story,
an untold story in large part here on our American Stories,
(09:39):
and we continue with our American stories and Kara Dixon Viewick,
author of The Girl's next Door, Bringing the Home Front
to the front Lines. And by the way, you can
get an Amazon or all the usual suspects. One of
those women was Emma Young Dixon. Let's return to the
story here again is.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Car so Emma Young Dixon was from Montclair, New Jersey.
She grew up in a very well to do family.
Her father had actually worked with Andrew Carnegie and had
resigned in protest over his treatment of workers. And he
had founded a company called Midvale Steel. And Emma had
(10:21):
grown up in a mean just a gorgeous home. The
family hosted soares and parties, and they hosted what became
the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. You know, they were on
the social pages of the New York Times this is
her upbringing. And when the war started, she volunteered with
the Red Cross, sort of rolling bandages, doing the things
(10:44):
that young women her age did, but she never felt
that was enough. It always makes me laugh because she
basically quotes the Howard Chandler Christy poster of the woman
wearing the sailor's uniform, and it says, gee, I wish
I were a man. I joined the navy. Emma actually
wrote that in her diary that she wished she had
(11:04):
been a man to have a small part in this
great conflict. And so she she kept trying. She volunteered,
she took classes in first aid. She actually applied to
the YMCA once to work in its canteen program, and
they didn't accept her, and so she went back home.
She did some more volunteer work, applied again, and they
(11:26):
accepted her. The first page of her diary starts with,
you know, her getting on the boat in the New
York Harbor about to go to France. I mean to me,
I read it and I'm like picturing a movie scene
in my head that she's standing on this boat. She's crying,
you know. She says she's very lost, in teary it's raining.
(11:48):
Her family is on the shore watching the ship pull away.
She's holding a flower bouquet that her boyfriend had sent her.
It's just this amazing scene of her lead going to France.
And in that moment, to me, she seemed very vulnerable
and very very cautious and nervous. And as soon as
(12:10):
the boat pulls away, she says, she went down, she
met her roommate and that's it. And a couple weeks later,
they're at the French harbor and she writes that four
convoys had come out to escort her ship into the harbor,
and she says, it seems so silly to be scared.
One can only die once anyway, And I thought, jeez, Louise,
(12:30):
like on in the course of her crossing in the Atlantic,
she's developed this like devil may care attitude, and she's
already a different person when you look back on it.
She's actually sort of in the heart of where a
lot of the action with the dough boys occurred. She's
near Valdancourt, France, and for the beginning of her time
(12:52):
she's really sort of working in the canteen, getting things
set up and working with the dough boys. When they
come in, she's serving the cookies and the doughnuts and
the coffee and all of that, and dancing with them
and just trying to talk to them and make them
feel at home. She also took with her a violin
that she had been trained to play as a child,
(13:12):
and she carried her violin around and played the violin
for them. That Emma, you know, she sets this canteen up,
and she's trying to coordinate that work with the officers
of the AEF to make sure they know what's going on,
and they get their men in here, and so they
have this they have this event where they're sort of
formally opening this club that she or this canteen. The
(13:35):
officers come in and it's a big deal and Emma
gets up to make a speech and she's very good
at this. She's sort of self deprecating, you know. She
talks about how nervous she is because of all the
brass behind her on the stage, and then she talks
to the dough boys and she's like, I am here
for you. I feel very little and incompetent, measured up
(13:56):
beside it. Right, she feels very small given the big
task ahead of her to help them through this war,
and she characterizes her work as, you know, doing the
things that they're that their mothers and sisters would have done. Right.
She uses this language of like family. She's their sister,
she's their mother. But it doesn't take her long to
(14:20):
realize that those dough boys don't see her as their
sister or their mother. They see her as a sweetheart, right,
maybe not their sweetheart, but a potential sweetheart in some cases,
or maybe sort of just this image of a sweetheart.
And so she has guys who are regulars in the
(14:41):
canteen who come to see her all the time. There's
one guy who somehow got himself a motorcycle. I'm not
sure how that happened, but he had a motorcycle and
he would he would bike into the canteen to visit her.
And he one day came in and told her he
was about to go to the front and he wanted
to ask her something. And she wrote in her diary
(15:04):
she knew what he was going to ask and she
didn't really want to hear it. And he proposes marriage again,
and she's she just makes a joke out of it.
She's like, I'm just too busy to get married right now.
What she doesn't say is I'm a little tired of you.
I wish you'd go away, because she can't say that, right,
She can't say anything that would make these men feel
(15:27):
embarrassed or put out in any way, right. And so
a lot of the women, Emma included, they develop all
of these ways of sort of deflecting attention or of
getting themselves out of situations that might turn into something more.
A gi or dough boy walks them back to the
house that they're billeted in and might try to kiss
(15:51):
her on the cheek and she'll quickly go to the
other side of the gate. Like they have all of
these tactics basically that they've developed to avoid the those
kinds of situations. At the same time that she really
does value her friendship with these men. YMCA official came
in one day and lectured all of the women, told
them they were flirting with the officers, and she was
(16:13):
very offended by that, and she said flirting wasn't the
same thing as being friendly. There was a clear divide.
She did not believe she had crossed that line, but
she understood that there was a line. And you're the
one who has to police that line. Those are the
kinds of things that women like Emma dealt with on
a day to day basis. But it's still a long time, right,
(16:38):
It's still a long time away from home dealing with
all of this. And yet when the third Division gets
moved to Chateau Tierri toward the end of what is
eventually the end of the war, Emma is really annoyed
that she can't go with them, And so eventually she
was one of only a fifty women who were sent
that close to the war zone, and so she had
(17:00):
some really interesting and unique experiences, even as a lot
of her story is emblematic of what a lot of
women were experiencing. How do you explain, you know, what
you did in the war, Why I serve doughnuts and
I serve coffee and I danced with dough boys? Right, Well,
that on one level might not make sense and or
(17:24):
might need some explaining for people to really understand why
it mattered and what, you know, how important it was
from the military's perspective, Does this win the war? No?
If you're thinking about morale and you're thinking about how
this might have helped soldiers, helped dough boys sort of
(17:46):
process what they're doing, get them ready to go back home.
Then it's absolutely essential from the military's perspective. In the
sort of lead up to World War Two, it is
an absolute given from the military perspective that we are
going to have these organizations again, similar organizations. The YMCA
is the Salvation Army, but you've also got organizations like the
(18:08):
Jewish Welfare Board, the National Catholic Community Service who are
also trying to help. And those are the organizations that
eventually unite and form the USO, which offers entertainment in
World War Two and then afterward. And as women who
have gone to war, that experience really sets them apart
(18:30):
not only from other women their age who have not
gone to war and who have not seen the kinds
of things that women like msaw, but it also sets
them apart from men who did not go. When Woodrow
Wilson sort of came out behind the Woman's Suffrage Act,
he did so explicitly citing women's wartime service. That rationale
(18:55):
actually displeased a whole lot of women who had been
fighting for women's suffrage for a very long time, because
their argument would have been that they are human beings
and they deserve the right to vote as much as
anybody else. The argument that won over Congress, however, went
over Woodrow Wilson, was that women had done their part
for the war effort, and so how can we ask
(19:17):
them to serve in a war? How can we ask
them to support a war if we don't also give
them the benefits of that citizenship right. That's ultimately what worked.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, And a special thanks to
Kara Dixon Bwick, author of The Girls next Door bringing
the home Front to the front lines, and what a
story in particular about Emma Young Dixon. I wish I
were a man, so I could have a small part
(19:50):
in this large conflict, if he once said, and when
Woodrow Wilson spoke about women's suffrage and the passage of
the amendment that the women the right to vote, he
cited the work of the women during World War One,
like Emmy Young Dixon. The story of the U s
how women served in our early wars, right up through
(20:13):
World War Two and to to day. Here on our
American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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