“From Rosie the Riveter to Harriet the Happy Homemaker” comes to CCHS

NORWICH – Rob Edelman, Lecturer in Film History at SUNY Albany will be bringing his multi-media presentation “From Rosie the Riveter to Harriet the Happy Homemaker: Women on Screen During and After World War II” to the Chenango County Historical Society Museum, 45 Rexford St., from 2 to 4 p.m. this Sunday.

Thanks to a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities the program is free and open to anyone in Chenango County and beyond who wishes to attend. “Rosie to Harriet” is being presented as one of the highlights of CCHS’ theme this year, namely, the ever-evolving social history of women in America and Chenango County in particular.

The witty Edelman will trace the changing expectations that society and women themselves had of “normal” behavior from the 1930s through the 1950s. From the “traditional” role of wife, mother and chief cook and bottle washer before the war, women’s work for many individuals shifted to assembly line worker or military officer. In the words of Edelman, “Many women began to experience personal and economic freedom that previously had been the exclusive domain of men.” After the war was won and millions of soldier husbands and potential husbands returned from the front. Almost overnight expectations of women’s roles shifted back to what they had been before the war. As Edelman puts it, “With peacetime came a return to ‘normalcy’ and the expectation that women would cheerfully exchange their paychecks for aprons, regain their lost ‘femininity’ and return to their traditional roles within the American family.