The background of the World War II propaganda poster in historian Judith Litoff's office at her home in Providence shows a half dozen GIs sitting in a foxhole, obviously in combat or close to it. In the foreground, a world away, is a blond woman with perfect red nails and a fountain pen, obviously on the home front writing a letter to her husband at war.
"Be with him at every mail call," the poster urges American women.
Recognizing that letters from home were critical to morale among the men overseas, the wartime government went to great lengths to generate and then deliver the mail. Women across the country responded, many writing daily. A torrent of letters poured around the world to U.S. servicemen.
Afterward, in the interest of posterity, men's letters were collected, Litoff says, but, "There was no effort to collect and publish the letters of women during the Second World War."
Litoff has gone a long way toward correcting that omission, in the process providing an intimate look at the lives of ordinary women and families during an extraordinary time in American history. She has just published her fifth book of letters, this time focusing on correspondence between three children and their father during World War II.
IN THE SPRING of 1988, Litoff, a history professor at Bryant College, and her partner and former dissertation adviser, David C. Smith, a historian at the University of Maine, launched a nationwide search for women's wartime letters. They wrote to all 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States (including the Providence Journal-Bulletin) asking them to publish their appeal for letters "for a book on women's experiences in the Second World War."
They had no idea what was out there. They had no idea whether anything was out there, nor whether, if any letters survived, their owners would share them.
Their strategy was also unusual. Authors doing research often publish requests for information in highbrow places such as the New York Review of Books.
"We went to the boonies," she said, "because we wanted the real, ordinary Americans."
The query went well. Newspaper editors were agreeable, and several boosted the project by running the request in their Memorial Day editions or by turning it over to a columnist. "We got all this publicity we hadn't counted on. By July, 1988, we realized we had discovered a gold mine."
WHEN THE FLOOD EBBED, Litoff and Smith ended up with an extraordinary 30,000 letters, which she said constitute the largest archive of its kind in the country. The letters, in piles of boxes that cover three walls of her office from floor to ceiling, came from 48 states. Some women sent their originals. Some Litoff copied and sent back so the writers could keep their treasures.
The archive contains letters written by about 1,500 women. So many people were involved that Litoff and Smith began producing a newsletter that they sent out a few times a year to the hundreds of people interested in the project, letting them know what was happening.
The letters reflected a remarkable cross section of the country, she says -- rural, urban and in between. "We have letters from grade-school dropouts as well as college graduates." The letters, she says, are "beautifully written," probably because the writers got lots of practice, some writing almost daily. She also suspects that the quality of the letters reflects that "educational standards in the 1940s were very different than they are today."
So far, she has published four books of letters, as well as a book of essays written by women during the war.
HOW DID THESE THOUSANDS and thousands of letters, mailed to servicemen all over the world, get back to the women writers, so they could, decades later, hand them over to Litoff? Several ways, Litoff says.
The easiest way was when the letter-writers kept a carbon copy. Another resulted from the wartime paper shortage: a woman would write on one side of a sheet, and her husband would write back on the other side.
Some servicemen kept their wives' letters and mailed them back in a bundle. Some even kept them and used them, crumpled up, for padding when they sent wartime memorabilia home. Combat soldiers were told not to carry personal papers for fear that information could be used against them if they were taken prisoner, but many disregarded the order, kept special letters, and sent them home in batches.
CONVENTIONAL HISTORY often relies on official communications from big shots, speeches, government documents and the like, which tend to be self-conscious and self-serving.
Litoff likes letters because they give "a day-to-day look at their lives" and "a glimpse at what these women from the Second World War were actually doing, rather than what they were being told to do."
Critics, she says, argue that women writing to their husbands overseas would soft-pedal the bad news. But she says the letters show that's not true. "Over and over again, women would let their hair down." When they didn't, she says, their husbands would often write back demanding the straight story about the home front.
That's what Litoff likes. "Since the early 1970s, and even before that, even as an undergraduate, my focus was on telling the story of ordinary Americans and how the lives of ordinary Americans intersected with the rich and powerful."
In other words, President Roosevelt gave his radio "fireside chats," but Litoff wants to know what the people listening to the radios were up to.
A letter, she concedes, isn't perfect. But "I'm convinced that it provides you with the most accurate view of the experience of ordinary women."
LITOFF'S LATEST PROJECT carries that theme, the thoughts and experiences of ordinary people in remarkable times, into a new area: children.
Through great good luck, she and the Berman family of Minneapolis found each other. Dr. Reuben Berman went to Europe with the Army in May, 1943, leaving behind his wife, Isabel, and David, Betsy and Sammy Berman, ages 9, 6 and 4.
For the next two and a half years, Isabel Berman gathered the children, typed exactly what they wanted to say to their father, and mailed it to him. The resulting kid's-eye view of the war, edited by Litoff, is a book called, Dear Poppa: The World War II Berman Family Letters. Published last year by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, it contains more than 340 letters selected from the thousands the Bermans exchanged.
"I wish you would come right back because I want to see you," Sammy wrote in May 1943. "I wish you would come back right now. Are you going to come back some day, Poppa, are you, are you?"
"Dear Poppy," Sammy wrote on June 7, 1944, the day after the Normandy invasion, "I hope you don't get killed in the invasion. . . . I hope the Germans are killed in that invasion. . . . I hope you're not shot because if you're shot I'll feel very bad bacause I would like to have a poppa, you same poppa, that same poppa."
In March of 1945, Isabel tells her husband about how his other son, David, had cautioned her about buying new dishes: "Now, Momma, we didn't really need those plates. You know we're supposed to wear it out or make do." David had absorbed the wartime exhortation to: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or go without."
The Berman kids are now grown up and more. David and Sam are physicians in Minneapolis, and Betsy became a mathematician and lives in Kansas City.
LITOFF'S CHALLENGE was to organize the World War II letters in a meaningful way.
"You try to enter a project like this with a very, very open mind," Litoff says. "You don't know what you're looking for until you read thousands and thousands of letters." Litoff and Smith helped themselves deal with the torrent of letters by entering information about them into a computer database, letting them find all the letters from Arizona, for example, or all the letters from early May, 1944.
"I've read all of them," she says. "I've been doing this for 10 years."
She sees a few broad themes. The young war wives, roughly ages 18 to 30, grew up in ways they would never have grown up without the war-time experience. . . . "These women understood that if they could get through the war years, they could handle any challenge." The war, she said, "changed their lives forever," and "had a transforming impact on the lives of American women that has been carved all the way down to the present, 50 years later."
That impact is still reverberating through American society today, she thinks, because the women taught what they had learned to their daughters, herself among them. She thinks it's no accident that "It was the daughters of those women who went on and formed the core of the second wave of feminism in the '60s and early '70s."
Another gem that lay gleaming in the letters was the story of the Women's Land Army, which Litoff calls "one of the least-known stories about the Second World War."
"The U.S. was not only the arsenal of democracy, it was also the breadbasket of democracy," Litoff said. And somebody had to bring in the wheat to make the bread. Part of the Department of Agriculture, the WLA was created to help get the crops in.
The Women's Land Army, Litoff says, was "The rural counterpart to Rosie the Riveter."
"At least 3 million women were involved in the official Women's Land Army," Litoff says, and at least 3 million more were involved informally. They had uniforms, and their work was well-known, for a while. The WLA made the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Litoff says. "It was known during the Second World War, but it was forgotten" afterward.
Litoff, who is married and has two grown children, lives on the East Side of Providence. She got her doctorate from the University of Maine in 1975 and her undergraduate and master's degree from Emory University in Atlanta.
She has been teaching history since 1975 at Bryant College in Smithfield, where, along with some broad American History courses she had led courses on The Search for the Modern American Woman, American Women's History, United States Women and World War II, Women in Twentieth Century American History, Women in 20th Century American History, the United States and World Politics, The Vietnam War Era, and Cultures and Economies in Transition in the Post Soviet Era.
Given that other people's letters have been the mainstay of her scholarship, she says she's embarrassed to admit that "I am not a good letter writer."
Her current fields of exploration include the former Soviet Union. She's part of a Bryant faculty project teaching U.S. subjects to Russians, Estonians, Georgians, Belarussians and Ukranians at universities there. The subjects range from American history to American business practices, to make the Soviets more likely business partners.
The idea, she said, is to build up the educational system in the former Soviet Union. For Litoff, though, it's a an opportunity to meet and interview women who fought in the Red Army in World War II. She met one woman, now a pensioner, who fought as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Battle of Stalingrad -- and kept a diary. Litoff is having the diary, written in pencil, translated into English.
In Estonia's Tartu University, she says, she came across an archive "just sitting there" filled with letters and diaries of Estonians who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in prison in Siberia. She says she has plans for a study comparing American women during World War II with women from the former Soviet Union.
"I consider myself to be an old-fashioned, narrative historian," Litoff says. "I love to tell a story."
Telling the stories of the forgotten is one of Litoff's themes. Along with various aspects of women during wartime, Litoff has also studied and written about midwives, which she says is "a group of women who have always been forgotten."
"History in the United States can't be complete if we don't have both stories," she says.
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