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American Life In Ww2 Essay

Decent Essays

American life was drastically impacted by World War II, and in this essay I will discuss how the war affected American civilian life on the home front.

On December 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan, and subsequently caused the rest of the Axis powers to declare war on them, engaging America in World War II. This led to massive change in the American lifestyle, as industry began maximizing production to supply the military with war supplies. As a result, the gap in American employment that was created by the Great Depression was quickly filled, in a race to occupy the large amount of new jobs which sprung up. Along with this, the need to get workers to meet the rate of production needed to win the war led the government to “increase …show more content…

Even though in the past, gender roles had restricted women from entering specific industries, the “demand for workers led to a dramatic rise in women’s employment, from fourteen million working women in 1940 to nineteen million by 1945” (Divine, pg. 896). The industry which saw the biggest increase in female workers was the aviation industry. “More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, representing 65 percent of the industry’s total workforce” (American Women in World War II, Paragraph 4). Not all American social groups benefited from the economic boom in the same way. For example, even though African Americans and Mexican Americans did have some economic gains, they still suffered from racial discrimination in the workplace.

World War II did not only have positive impacts on the American lifestyle, however. The biggest group to suffer from the war was the Japanese Americans. Due to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and their racial origin caused Americans to fear these citizens. In response to these fears, President Roosevelt “gave the army power, without warrants or hearings, to arrest every person of Japanese descent on the West Coast” (Scott, Lecture 5). As a result of this, 120,000 Japanese Americans, ¾ of which were Nisei (born in the U.S.), were forced into concentration camps all along

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