Customer Reviews

Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front

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This book of letters is so revealing of that period in time.
It lays the emotions of the women left behind during war time right out in the open for all to feel and experience. This book has become a part of my life. I work at a college and when we have a program that needs a reading done I am always called on to read from "my" book of WWII letters from home. I feel like these letters are my children and each one is crying out to be heard and I really do hate to have to pick only a couple to read. This book is that good. I feel that this book should be read by everybody especially young people. I get very good response after my readings and some very emotional responses as well. This is a truly wonderful book and I recommend it to everyone.

I'm very interested in the powerful tapestry of the US homefront during WWII. This book provides a wide variety of first hand accounts of what was happening and more importantly how people felt about these events. The power comes from the fact that the words were written at the time rather than as later rememberances tainted by subsequent experiences. The only selectivity is in the letters people chose to save. But I think the authors have done a good job in trying to mitigate this natural bias by drawing from a wide variety of sources.

Compiling 400 letters, Litoff and Smith give readers a very personal look at what World War II was life for American women at home. Reading them is an almost vouyeristic experience, as these women share their thoughts, struggles, personal victories and tragedies.

The book is divided topcially rather than chronologically, giving the reader an opportunity to focus in on one aspect of the war. For example, "I Took a War Job" focuses exclusively on the liberating and empowering experience women felt in working in the defense industry (and making a man's wages.) The most touching and strongest chapter, "The Price of Victory" dealt with the loss of a loved one - husbands, brothers, lovers. The letters are from all social classes, races and parts of the country, providing a representative view, and speaking to the commonality of experiences. It is a remarkable resource, a fantastic read, and a rich collection of primary documents. For the professioal historian, I highly recommend it. For the lay reader, it is as insightful as it is fascinating. Recommended.

I study all kinds of stuff from the WW2 homefront. I really liked this book. It's an easy read, however, you really get to know what it was like for the women who had to stay home during the war. I learned really early in my studies to NOT just listen to what the propoganda tells you. It was not all USO swing dances, troubles finding nylons and writing letters.

The only thing I didn't like about the book is that the letters are edited. I read the book "war letters" before this one and I was spoiled because the letters in that book are unedited and even includes spelling errors, etc but they are exactly how the soldiers wrote their letters. So when I read "since you went away", I was kinda disappointed that the author only gave you what they thought was important in the letter.

The letters in this book are divided into categories such as war brides, working women on the homefront, newlyweds separated by war, why we fought, the price of war and having a loved one away for so long, and courtship by mail. There's also one chapter that consists entirely of photos and photocopies of postcards, advertisements for things like V-mail and writing to servicemen overseas, posters, drawings, and newsletters. Although many of the concerns and experiences are similar, no two stories are exactly alike. We get a wide range of people, such as newlywed wives who had to cope with pregnancy and raising young children while husbands were away, wives who lost their husbands and often kept writing because they didn't know of their deaths right away, a family in a Japanese-American internment camp, a couple who went from friendly correspondence to a nationally-known breakup and angry feud to finally lovebirds again and a happily and long-married couple, a Quaker couple dealing with the husband being in prison due to his pacifist beliefs and refusal to serve in the military, wartime shortages on the homefront, and the often hard life many farmers faced during these years. The one thing all of these female letter-writers had in common, though, was that they were dealing with the absence of husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, and male friends.

However, this book didn't pique my interest quite as much as it could have due to there being just so many different excerpts; even with the longer sections, there just wasn't as much opportunity to really draw the reader in and make him or her fully connect with these longago letter-writers, the way there could have been had there been more longer excerpts (even with fewer letter-writers represented overall), with some shorter excerpts mixed in along the way. Although this is a problem with all such anthologies; as great as the material is, one can tend to feel that it's still not the full complete picture, particularly when the editors haven't included all of their letters and have even edited the length of some of them. It makes one wish one could read all of these letters written by these interesting people instead of just these relatively short samples. Still, all things considered, this is a relatively minor complaint, certainly nothing that should dissuade one from reading this fascinating book.

This is an excellent book. For those of us who lost fathers in that war or shortly after it provides an excellent window into a world that produced the letters that mother's kept and reread but were lost upon their deaths or destroyed by step-fathers. It is also an excellent in the now glimpse of those who formed the Greatest Generation as they took on missions that lay ahead of them in wonderful ignorance of what would soon be. Another of the same variety is a book "Lost in Victory" that uncovers the ophans left behind.