LizzieMaine
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In the Era, the ladies who frequented Army camps were known as "Victory Girls" or "Victory Belles," and they described their work as Essential To National Defense.
In the Era, the ladies who frequented Army camps were known as "Victory Girls" or "Victory Belles," and they described their work as Essential To National Defense.
In the Era, the ladies who frequented Army camps were known as "Victory Girls" or "Victory Belles," and they described their work as Essential To National Defense.
My maternal grandmother was one of said harpies. A better description of the lot of them would be hard to imagine, unless you added hypocritical in front of harpies.with the possible exception of the dessicated harpies of the DAR
If you've never read his essay "The Birds and the Bees," which he banged out in the early 1990s, do yourself a favor and seek it out. What I would give for a younger Vidal's take on our current moment.
I'll have to try try my library for the volume it is contained in. It is not available to read online.
In the Era, the ladies who frequented Army camps were known as "Victory Girls" or "Victory Belles," and they described their work as Essential To National Defense.
Someone in the Era coined the term "Patriotutes" for these ladies.
I bet that was a real morale booster. "What do they mean we all have syphilis??? I don't have it, Bob doesn't have it, Joe doesn't have it, Max...well, okay Max has it, but..."And in the interest of fairness.
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I always thought that the notion of several million twenty-year-old boys being pulled out of their circumstances, herded into military camps, and then expected to remain clean-cut paragons of Virtue and Old Time Morality to be one of the most ridiculous fictions ever perpetrated. No one in the Era -- with the possible exception of the dessicated harpies of the DAR -- ever even pretended to believe it. And then Dr. Kinsey came along after the war and vividly proved their skepticism to be correct.
"What the hell" was ubiquitous in my family, but I never heard "WTF" until I went to work in a factory in 1986.
My grandmother, delicate 1911-vintage lady that she was, would dismiss someone she didn't want to hear any more from with "Yahhh, go s**t in your hat and eat it!" That's certainly more piquant than any variation of the sort of "F. off/F. you" stuff you get nowadays.
Scatology, blasphemy, and blasphemous scatology ran rampant at every level of our neighborhood, but with the exception of frequent suggestions that one's mother was a prostitute, for the most part sexual references just weren't used.
Doing their part.
There were standard jokes about women "waiting for the fleet to come in" even on early sitcoms like the Dick Van Dyke Show.