http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG051-099/dg068.wcoc/dg068.wcochistory.htm

A lot of the pro and against women arguments are clearly expressed in this cite, and i thought i would quote a long section of it below so that i would remember where it is for my paper. Interesting points made early halfway through last century and still very similar circumstantially today.


"Objection to the conscription of women . . . ought not to proceed from the assumptionthat chilvalry requires the shielding of women from hardship. There is no reasonfor objecting to it either on the basis of special privilege of sex or of the exemptionof anybody from the hard requirements of our time.
However, the women of the WCOC did oppose conscription of women on a gender specific basis. Military or civilian conscription, they said, would place women, as a sex, back under the complete control of men. In the military or in a war industry job women would be told where to go, how to work, where they could live, and how much they could be paid. WCOC director, Mildred Scott Olmsted wrote on this issue of male domination in 1943:
Women have not fought for and won their right to be free from thedictation of their fathers and husbands as to when and where andhow they may work only to turn that right over to their neighbors . . .reactionaries would require all women with children to remain athome and allow no woman without children to do so.
Olmsted used the same feminist argument in a radio broadcast the following year. This time she focused on women's loss of freedom in the armed forces:
Women have fought for years for the right to be free from thedomination of men - the right to be educated, to vote, to marry ornot to marry as they want, to work . . . . The army gives [women] . . .opportunity to do only minor jobs. They would have no realinfluence in the army, and no freedom, and they know it.
However, the argument that conscription would place women under male domination was not emphasized in WCOC's campaign. This feminist line of reasoning against the conscription of women did not appear in any of their printed literature. It seems likely that their second gender specific argument against drafting women brought more support to their cause. In the broadcast quoted above, where Olmsted gave, what we may cite as feminist reasons for opposing a women's draft, she also emphasized a more traditional role for women:
Women are naturally and rightly the home makers, producers,and conservers of life . . . . They play their part during the war by"keeping the home fires burning until the boys come home" by carryingon the services that hold the community together.
Women were charged with maintaining the "American Way of Life," while their male relatives were off fighting. This role for women was complex. Women were expected to preserve the home and the family the way they had been before the war. A propaganda film produced by the Office of War Information in 1943 included a soldier who made the following statement which illustrated this as part of government policy:
"I'm glad you haven't turned the old house into just a headquarters, Mom;I'm glad you're keeping it our home, the way it was. That's the way I feelabout it out here, that is also part of a woman's war job--keeping up the home,the homes we're fighting for, that some day we want to come back to."