Women in the WAC, Sailors, Soldiers, and the Stewart Family: Military Service and Home Front Life During World War II, 1942–1945

W W. II Women in the Military

Photograph

World War II era photo album documenting men and women in military service, civilian labor, and domestic life from the early 1940s through 1961, centered on a network of relatives and friends identified through contemporary inscriptions. The strongest photographs date from the American mobilization of World War II, placing Army and Navy service within the family relationships maintained by wives, children, parents, and extended kin during wartime separation. A 1944 sequence from Frederick County, Virginia, extends the record beyond military service to men engaged in civilian construction work, while later photographs follow the family into the postwar decades.

Photo album containing approximately 160 silver gelatin photographs varying in size from 2 x 2 inches to 5 x 5.5 inches, United States, chiefly 1940s but ranging approximately from the 1930s to 1961. Named subjects include Wesley Stewart, Mrs. Annie Stewart, Mrs. Alice Stewart, Esther Stewart, Mae Orr, Mary Orr, Natalie Powell, Daisy Neff, and Frances and Dick Beard, the latter identified in Texas. Several generations appear in yards, beside houses and automobiles, holding infants, visiting relatives, and posing in couples and family groups. Wartime photographs show men in U.S. Navy uniforms, a man in Army uniform with a woman in civilian dress, and a young woman repeatedly photographed in an enlisted Women's Army Corps uniform, including with two young girls and informally with a child. The album also contains young women carrying books outside a brick institutional building, a graduation portrait, and a 1944 Frederick County sequence in which men work among heavy timbers at an active construction site. Later photographs record automobiles, children, and relatives through the 1950s and into 1961. Handwritten inscriptions establish relationships among the subjects and preserve the language through which photographs circulated within the family, including “your wife Mae Orr,” “Mrs. Annie Stewart,” and “Esther Stewart.”

The photographs of the uniformed woman belong to the first generation of American women admitted to Army service on a mass scale. Congress created the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in May 1942 and converted it into the Women's Army Corps in 1943, bringing women into the Army itself; approximately 210,000 women served in the WAC during World War II at home and overseas. WAC personnel filled clerical, communications, transportation, technical, administrative, and other noncombat assignments, while the album's photographs of young women with books and at graduation record education as another route into the expanding public and professional lives of wartime women. The family's presence in Frederick County situates part of the album in Virginia's northern Shenandoah Valley, an agricultural and market region centered on Winchester whose wartime labor demands drew civilian workers and, late in the war, German prisoners of war into its important orchard economy. The album continues after demobilization through graduation, marriage, children, automobiles, travel, and domestic life into 1961. Moderate wear throughout, including water staining and discoloration, fading, occasional creasing and cracking, surface wear, and wear to the album covers and mounts; individual photographs vary in preservation. Overall in fair to good condition.

Item #23874

Price: $2,500.00