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Susan H. Horn's Women, Work, And Fertility Summary

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Susan H. Horn’s Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900-1986 is a monograph that argument centers on the change between her book’s focus of 1900 through 1986, and how this occurred due to the “modernization” of the twentieth century as well as an increase in women’s desire for productivity outside the domestic sphere. The work splits into three parts, with the first one 1900-1940 and the second 1940-1960, these sub-sections able to be compared to the other historical work previously discussed. The evidence Horn uses draws from a number of disciplines to properly examine the transformation that women underwent in this time frame; however, the author does not include much of the recent work in her study that could have added to her argument, which Horn sometimes expands upon without the proper evidence to support it. …show more content…

Knaff’s historiography Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art has the aim of analyzing and explaining the impact of popular media like magazines ushered in a cultural shift within the American public, especially in regards to young women. The author explores the effects of World War II on women’s participation outside the home using evidence from the Office of War Information documents, as well as widely read magazines and newspapers. The monograph ends with the conclusion that “female masculinity” that women projected during World War II assisted in the widening of perspective of “people’s ideas” and stereotypes of what constituted proper women’s behavior. This assessment agrees with the general consensus of most historians on the topic, continuing the narrative of World War II as a “watershed” moment of transformation for American

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