Women Marines: The World War II Era

The nexus of this study lies in the recollections of 146 Women Reservists who served in the US Marine Corps during World War II and who were surveyed by Peter Soderbergh in 1990 and 1991. Soderbergh's purposes were 1) to gather primary data before it was lost; 2) to cast the women's experiences in the social context of their time; 3) to contrast the role of women in the armed forces of the 1940s with the role they play today; 4) to give these female pioneers a voice that speaks to current counterparts, patriotism and competence; and 5) to provide a yardstick with which we may measure how much, if any, progress women have made in out patriarchal society over the past half-century. His study provides a social chronicles of a little-studied facet of US military and women's history.