“Holy…welp, the 40’s were…a different time. Goddamn.”
~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt
Wow. Just look at that for a second, everybody. Let it really sink in. Don’t worry, there’s a reason behind it. We’ll get to that in a moment.
While it’s easy to assume that AFFotD exists as a singular location for all the fatty food and alcohol adoration articles you can hope to find from a website whose logo prominently features a shotgun toting Grizzly Bear, we occasionally do read. Shocking, we know. Sometimes, a book even strikes our fancy enough that we decide to do a full-scale book report on it (usually because they’re short and don’t employ any metaphors). Books are important, and not always because they get turned into much better, easier to digest movies. Okay, most times they are, but sometimes, books can teach us about ourselves. Or, in this one particular case, they can teach us to be embarrassed by ourselves.
Yes, that last link takes us to the 1943 War Department pamphlet, “So You’ve Decided to Hire a Woman and Train Her Like a Monkey or a Seeing Eye Dog to do Simple Tasks” (we may have taken some liberties with the misogyny we interpreted from the title).
Yup, it was a different time for the Greatest Generation. All the men had gone to war, and all the dogs had gone to war, so all the women had to be counted on to make things. The horror!
Anyway, fasten your seat belt, and prepare your “cringing at now comically outdated and borderline-offensive beliefs of the past” face, as we review this sumbitch for you.
AFFotD Book Review: 1943’s “You’re Going To Employ Women” by the US War Department
America Fun Fact of the Day 