Customer Reviews

Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II

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The premise of Jane Mersky Leder's Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II is to illustrate a shift in the way World War II society viewed sexuality. The views that emerged at this time have continued to shape us to this day. Leder brings forth some information that challenges the romanticized ideal that male soldiers stoicly served their country while wives and girlfriends waited patiently at home for their loves to return. The parents of the "baby boomer" generation were hardly the reserved innocents most of us believe them to be.

Soldiers and young adults from World War II relate anecdotes of turmoil and confusion, sparsely dotted with the stereotypical love affairs found so commonly in World War II stories. From sexual harrassment, sexual and racial discrimination, high percentages of enlisted homosexuals, legal prostitution, veneral diseases, and promiscuous "khaki whackies" intent on serving the country in their own ways, readers begin to see the war years as a time of self-discovery and a challenge to the conservative morals so readily adopted by previous generations. In actuality, World War II was the beginning of a sexual revolution that is typically believed to have begun in the Vietnam War Era.

Leder does an excellent job of presenting a liberal shift in sexuality that most of us assumed occurred much later in the twentieth century. Those expecting a torrid novel of sexual deviants should look elsewhere--this book is strictly academic nonfiction. However, Leder offers a refreshing viewpoint of a sentimental era that humanizes a generation once thought of as chaste and conservative.

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it. Ms. Leder does a nice job blending individualized accounts and memories with a broader overview of many of the social issues which arose before, during, and after World War II. Her chronicle includes tales of military wives, some very young, who traveled the country and lived in amazingly bad conditions to be with their husbands in uniform prior to their shipping out for overseas duties. It also includes tales of rampant infidelities -- I was surprised to learn, for example, that a 1945 US Army survey revealed that 80% of GIs away from home for two years or more admitted to regular sexual intercourse, with nearly a third of these having wives at home. Ms. Leder also links (albeit indirectly, as she concedes) the changing moral climate brought on by World War II to the Women's Liberation Movement, starting in the 1960s. I am glad I bought the book.

I enjoyed reading this book because it gives a more balanced picture of what people were really doing during the war. That is exactly what people always do given the circumstances in which they find themselves. They had sex, they cheated, they longed for each other. Some stayed faithful, some got divorced. So, they maybe weren't the greatest generation, they just did what people do. Interesting stories about real people's lives. This needed to be written and was written well.

Reviewed by Debra Gaynor for Reader Views (12/06)

World War II changed things, "the lives of American men and women would never be the same. The United States was at war, a war that would forever change the landscape of American society and balance of power between the sexes." Long has it been romanticized, creating visions of last-minute marriages before a soldier going to war, people willingly sacrificing for the war effort and women faithfully keeping the home fires burning while waiting for their man to return. But these are just visions. Ms. Leder allows readers to look at World War II from a different angle.

No one had ever expected the country to fall into such a deep depression. In 1933, "the Great Depression, which spanned over a decade from 1930 to 1941, with aftershocks up until American's entry into World War II at the end of 1941, ruined lives, derailed dreams, and changed the course of personal relationships."

Birth control wasn't the standard during this era. "The Comstock Act prevented disseminating birth control information through the mail or across state lines." "There were 55 birth control clinics in 23 cities in 12 states." Margaret Sanger challenged the Act and the Supreme Court repealed it.

Sex education was non-existent; sex was a topic that wasn't discussed. "When it came to sex, the Motion Picture Production code, commonly known as the Hays Code, was crystal clear. The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld."

Jane Mersky Leder is an excellent writer and has written a fascinating book that discusses facts and myths concerning a period in American history that changed society and the relationships between men and women. She has done an excellent job documenting the information. The cover is wonderfully done, reminding us of the romantic myth we've grown up believing in. My husband is very interested in this period of time and I intend to share this book with him. I highly recommend "Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II" to those interested in history.

Book received free of charge.

In 1985, the prominent historian John Costello wrote a book called, in the US, Virtue Under Fire. It was his premise that the sexual revolution began, not in 1963 as Phillip Larkin would have it, but during World War II. This is an important theory because it explains a lot about post-war America, in particular, the sexual reticence of the late 1940s and 1950s. It was as if millions of Americans had peeked into the Pandora's Box of sexual liberation and tried to nail it shut again, having seen the plagues of soaring rates of divorce, single parents and STDs, plunging rates of marriage and births and irresponsible men and injured women.

But Costello's work, as with any pathbreaking work, was tentative and preliminary and historians looked forward to a new study on the subject which would move the discussion forward. Unfortunately, Thanks for the Memories is not that study.

The author gives us some statistics, but the book is so poorly edited that they are unreliable. For instance, within three pages, we are given two very different numbers for the death toll at Pearl harbor, and neither of them are anywhere near the official figures. Instead, the book is primarily anecdotal, which would be fine, except that in most cases, the author spends no more that a few paragraphs on the people she talks about, which makes long sections of her book as enlightening (and as interesting) as reading the wedding announcements of people you don't know. This is a pity, because when she does spend time with her subjects, Ms. Leder can write movingly and informatively about their lives.

The author is not content to explore the book's titular subject either, ranging beyond gender relations to explore racial attitudes, popular culture and the postwar world, far too many subjects for a book which is less than 170 pages of text, including the footnotes.

The book is sloppy in its research, as well. The number of mistakes about military subjects would fill a much longer review than this one. Worse, the author is content to conclude that the military is always a socially unenlightened institution prone to racism, sexism and homophobic attitudes. She ignores the research of all serious scholars of military sociology - prominent social scientists like Charles Moskos and respected journalists like Robert Kaplan, for instance - who have concluded that the military is the least racist institution in the country. If the US Army is less racist than The New York Times and Harvard University, then any thoughtful writer would ask whether there is a difference between blacks and whites sharing a foxhole and men and women doing so or to ask what the impact on unit cohesion would be if gays had the right to proposition their fellow soldiers (which is, after all, the primary practical right denied to them by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy). Wise people could disagree with the military's answers to those questions, but by damning those who disagree with her position as reactionaries, the author proves herself incapable of furthering the debate.

What I objected to most, however, is that if Ms. Leder has any hero from the war years, it is Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and advocate of birth control. There should be a rule that if you want to praise Ms. Sanger, you should skip lightly over the 1930s and 1940s in her CV, because she out-Hitlered Hitler in her racial attitudes. She didn't view only Jews and people of African origin as untermenschen, but considered the whole world outside of those who descended from the northwest corner of Europe as inferior people and she founded Planned Parenthood explicitly to reduce their numbers in the US. She spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies and published prominent Nazis, including Hitler's leading eugenicist, in her newsletter. To its credit, Planned Parenthood has stripped its literature of the racism of its founder, although it is still common to find some of its white, upper class donors admitting that they support the organization because "the wrong color people are having children."

Ms. Leder is clearly not a racist and I suspect that she is ignorant of Ms. Sanger's past, but for a historian, ignorance of history is no excuse.