The "Varga Girl" Goes to War
During the Gulf War, Vanity Fair published an Annie Liebowitz photograph of Dolly Parton atop an M-1 Abrams tank surrounded by Marines. She wears a slinky white-beaded gown slit above the knee, revealing one of her beautiful legs and a pair of platform heels. Her gloved left hand rests on the tank’s gun barrel while she smiles broadly at the camera. Aside from its racial diversity and the presence of two women among the Marines, this image could have come straight out of World War II with its vast array of blonde, long-legged, smiling pin-ups. The photo specifically reminds us of the on-going legacy of Esquire’s buxom peach-skinned beauties by Alberto Vargas, the quintessential wartime pin-ups forever connected to that battlefield.
What is to be learned by dusting off these "Varga Girls" and exhibiting them in a university art gallery? Are we stretching the boundaries of art to include cheesecake and is that a good or a bad idea? How are we to understand artistic agency in the context of a commercial artist like Vargas, who lost control of his images the minute he turned them over to his publisher? Did his images exploit women by objectifying their sexuality into impossible dimensions? Are his scantily clad women, known for their creamy white skin and Nordic features, racist in their exclusivity? How do we connect these disturbing aspects of the Varga Girl to her Latino creator, a man who was happily married to his completely supportive wife? Above all, what does the popularity of the Varga Girl with the American soldier tell us about American culture then and now?
These are some of the questions I expect to arise from this retrospective of Vargas’s Esquire work from the war years undertaken by the Spencer Museum of Art. As a feminist who has studied wartime images of women in mainstream American culture, as well as the African American press, I have grappled uneasily with the pin-up’s popularity, for it helped overturn the equally popular image of Rosie the Riveter, an overall-clad figure of physical competence and determination. At the same time, I believe there is much to be learned from studying Vargas’s portraits, for they mirror deeper cultural forces concerning gender that framed women’s postwar role. How and why they co-existed with Amazonian images of war workers is the subject of this essay.
It is fitting that another famous magazine illustrator, Norman Rockwell, created the icon of productivity and muscular strength known as Rosie the Riveter, for his work is also undergoing reconsideration by the art world with similar questions about artistic value, range, and cultural significance. Presented in May of 1943 on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell’s Rosie is notably unfeminine in that her muscular arms are unadorned with jewelry, she wears a double-banded leather watch, she has on comfortable loafers to match her denim overalls, and her ruddy complexion seems the product of exertion, not makeup. She is clearly working class with her lunch bucket, bologna sandwich, and riveting gun. Framed by patriotic symbols and colors, Rosie is calmly stomping on a copy of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and its obscured swastika connects her home front factory labor to victory overseas. Furthermore, she is indifferent to our gaze; rather her proud stare announces absorption in a more compelling subject, symbolized by the American flag that forms the backdrop for her portrait.
Contrast this image with Alberto Vargas’s symbol of home front morale created just two months earlier for the March 1943Esquire magazine. Nameless, apparently jobless, this prone beauty is wearing an outfit meant neither for the factory line nor even the street. She is relaxing, with a pencil held like a cigarette, instead of hauling around a heavy piece of industrial equipment. Her blonde tresses are newly washed, silken, ready to be sucked into any big machine she might be asked to operate. Her nails are long and manicured, fit only for writing the V-mail letter to a lucky soldier overseas she dreamily contemplates. She too is decked out in patriotic colors, but her high-heeled mules are not meant for stomping on the enemy. Her body in fact is barely covered by a frilly apron-like chemise, transparent so that her soft flesh can be appreciated and imaginately stroked. She is as ready for lovemaking (or savoring its aftermath) as Rosie is for riveting.
Juxtaposing these female images by Rockwell and Vargas allows us to examine the schizophrenic tensions around gender that surfaced during the war, as does comparing the magazines for which they worked, one a popular family periodical of the home front and the other an equally popular publication for men distributed overseas. In the former, a maternal image of women prevailed with images of the home central to visions of peace; in the latter, sexy pin-ups framed with patriotic symbols presented a different kind of fantasy. Yet the Varga Girl was in many ways a continuation of the domestic ideal presented in a magazine like the Post and took the propaganda campaign with family values at its center to its logical conclusion.
Emerging from both streams of image shaping during the war was an erotically charged postwar era of idealized domesticity dubbed "Mammary Madness" by film critic Molly Haskell.(1) As Joanne Meyerowitz has pointed out, tensions over cultural representations of sexuality did not begin with World War II, and women have been full participants on both sides of the argument as to whether demure maternal or erotic cheescake portrayals of women should prevail.(2) At the same time, there was something new about the war period: a propaganda campaign to mobilize the home front that put women on the production line at its center and involved discussions of unprecedented complexity and scope about media images of female sexuality. Emerging from this conversation was a fractured portrayal of the American woman as both home front fighter and kittenish sexpot, preserver of the family hearth and sexual playmate, virtuous mother and hedonistic nymph.
The genius of Alberto Vargas was that he was able to integrate these contradictory aspects of women’s representation during the war to become the best-known pin-up artist of his day, perhaps of all time. He walked the fine line between eroticism and domesticity that characterizes American culture’s schizophrenia from the 1940's up through the 1960's. Along the way, he bridged the transition from boyish youthful New Woman figures of the 1920's and 1930's to voluptuous goddesses of fertility, from smart-talking tough cookies in Depression-era popular culture to dreamy sun-bathers, from women of action to fleshpots of statuesque seduction, from wartime amazons to nude playmates. He articulated a new vocabulary of sex at a time when sexuality took second place to winning a war, and in doing so pointed to a postwar future of domesticated mainstream eroticism contained within conservative family norms.
To understand the larger cultural forces at work in Vargas’s art, it is necessary to review the war’s split personality regarding images of women’s sexuality. As I and others have found, the Office of War Information (OWI) engaged in conversations with the military, the media, and the War Manpower Commission about appropriate appeals for recruiting women into war jobs and the armed forces. Central to this debate were concerns about sullying portrayals of women factory workers and military recruits with sexual innuendo. Stereotypes of working-class women as promiscuous flirts had long been in the popular culture, and the government wanted to create an image of seriousness, moral virtue, and dedication to the job as it recruited women into the vast numbers of new industrial jobs needed to win the war. In the words of one OWI directive to magazine writers and advertisers: "May we suggest that care be observed not to create the impression that women engaged in any phase of war work . . . are more tempted or more susceptible to extramarital dalliance than others. War service, rather, should be depicted as a regenerative influence."(3)
This injunction, designed to erase negative images of working women as frivolous gold-diggers or sexually loose, was coupled with the campaign against consumer spending. The government wanted to discourage consumption of consumer goods "for the duration" so that civilians would invest disposable income in War Bonds to help finance the war effort. Because feminine glamour depended on cosmetics, sexy gowns, expensive high heels, elaborate coiffeurs and the like, there was a conscious campaign to turn women away from buying the accoutrements of beauty in favor of sticking to the production jobs so necessary to victory. The materialistic siren, with her sights set on a man, came to stand for selfish, immature, reckless behavior at a time when soldiers depended on women to buckle down and turn out the airplanes, ships, and ammunition needed to protect them on the battlefield. In the words of one OWI directive, "decorative leisure is out for the duration."(4)
Early in the recruitment campaign, which kicked off in a major way in March 1943, the government’s emphasis was on down-playing women’s sexuality in popular treatments as a way of inculcating patriotic fervor into the civilian population, to mobilize its labor power, and build a collective spirit. The hard-working, serious war worker came to represent the spirit of the home front, the female half of America’s wartime arsenal. The conflation of women’s eroticism with irresponsible behavior became a staple of mass market popular story writers as they tried to foster "war-mindedness" in an economy where money from war jobs was at an all-time high but time for shopping limited. The glamorous siren was viewed as counter-productive in a number of ways, and she was transformed into a fresh-faced, job oriented patriot with the good of her soldier sweetheart uppermost in her mind. By casting war workers as virtuous homebodies, the government hoped to overturn class prejudice against blue-collar work for women and attract more of them into the wartime labor force where they were badly needed.
A story written for the recruitment campaign published in the Saturday Evening Post illustrates this discouragement of sexual themes in portrayals of women. "Have Fun, Kid" by Naomi Lane Babson, appearing in the July 31, 1943 issue, features a soldier’s wife, Barby, who evokes wolf whistles from men on the street with her flashy clothes, peroxided blonde hair, and heavily cosmetized face. Although in love with her husband, Barby is bored and lonely, immature and impatient with the hardships of war. Barby has no use for war work even though she had made gun parts at a tool plant in her home town of Readville before she was married. Instead, she is attracted to the manager of a nightclub, who offers her a job as cigarette girl where "she’d pull plenty of tips." He is a classic wolf, a slacker who has lied his way out of the army, and is making moves on this young working-class wife. Initially enamored of big-city amusements, sexual adventure, and glamorous possibilities in the movies, Barby retreats from her dangerous flirtation to settle down in Readville at the job her husband wants her to take. Barby’s path of fidelity to her soldier-husband leads her straight to a war factory, a wholesome family environment (she will live with her parents), and a small town where fun consists of simple, innocent activity under the watchful eye of neighbors. She has come to her senses upon realizing that the patriotic talk she has dismissed as hokum is a matter of life or death for her beloved husband, and that her marriage can survive only if she does her part to bring her missing half home safely.
Another excellent example is "My Own Money," by Gertrude Schweitzer, published in the May 6, 1944 issue of the Post. Louise "Candy" Sherwin is the seventeen-year-old daughter of a bookkeeper and homemaker who lives at home while working at an aircraft plant. Candy’s figure is "nicely rounded," and she draws several whistles of admiration as she leaves the factory with the "fat bulge" of her pay envelope tucked into her shirt pocket under an overall strap, a symbolic representation of her breast and brassiere, as well as an eroticization of her high wartime wages. She purchases a glamorous black dress with the new raise and, modeling it for her family, she fashions herself into what her father terms "a pin-up girl." Candy’s soldier-boyfriend, Jack, reacts with alarm, however, to her sexy appearance when he arrives for their date while home on furlough . He longs for the old Candy he left behind, the kid with freckles. It is only when she changes into a sweater and bobby socks, advising her parents that she will return the dress, that he comes to life, and by the date’s end has asked her to marry him.
This somewhat puritanical view of the war worker’s sexual representation extended to the military under the direction of Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, director of the Women’s Army Corps. According to Leisa Meyer, Hobby insisted on strict sexual regulations to counter rumors that women in uniform were serving as sexual partners for male soldiers. Meyer documents the whispering campaign against the WAC of 1943 and early 1944 when, rumored to be well stocked with condoms and other prophylactic measures, women in uniform were subjected to lewd allegations about their sexual habits.(5) To combat these ideas, OWI advised the War Advertising Council and other agencies to be respectful and circumspect in their portrayal of WACS and WAVES. As a story writer put it when creating a fictional WAC for the Saturday Evening Post: "[Military service] is a fine, decent occupation for a woman in wartime."(6)
Reinforcing these contained portraits of female sexuality was the government’s notion that the American family should be at the center of mobilization propaganda. Not only was it concerned that women’s entry into nontraditional work not be viewed as threatening to their family roles, the family itself became the locus of patriotic pride, defining the American way of life that was under siege by enemy forces. Typical of the rhetoric used by propagandists is this ad by Servel Refrigerator, which pictures a matronly woman of determined demeanor stating: "My home is at war! Enemies of ours are striking at the root of everything that has meant security and peace and dignity in human relationships--everything we sum up in that precious word HOME."(7) Another ad picturing a young mother and little girl gently playing with kittens in a field of flowers from Adel Manufacturing similarly showcases the family as central to American values: "It’s to keep that world and to bring back the birthright of millions of children elsewhere that American men and machines are fighting on every battle front."(8) Or in the words of the fictional soldier from "My Own Money" waiting for the aircraft worker in her parents’ living-room: "This is swell. Everything’s just the same. . . This is what soldiers dream of--a nice soft sofa, a warm room, a family, lemon cake."
The people in charge of recruitment of women into the armed forces also made the family central to its publicity campaigns. Colonel Hobby promoted the WAC as a family environment and fostered the idea that women who signed up were from solid middle-class homes. Furthermore, she maintained that army life prepared women for fulltime homemaking roles: " a girl’s experience in the Wacs . . . serves to accentuate her desire for home . . . and children. When you put on a uniform you don’t change nature."(9) Led by the War Department’s slogan, "The Wac who shares your Army life will make a better postwar wife!," OWI urged the media to promulgate this family image of women in military service and to portray their role as protector of the American home. Typical of this propaganda is a Ladies’ Home Journal article on the WAC in January 1943, which proclaimed: "The American family is the kernel of democracy, and that’s why U.S. women are entering the armed forces, sacrifice to save the family and democracy."(10)
In short, propagandists sought to bring home the serious theme of national struggle and collective effort by equating the family with Americanism. Women were at the center of this picture and lauded as guardians of the hearth while men protected them at the enemy front. Images of rural traditionalism, coupled with a womb-like world on the home front, in which nothing changed or challenged, became the backdrop for soldier fantasies of safety and victory. Women’s role was to prop up soldier morale, keep the home front stable and productive, and look forward to the day when the family unit would be complete. As an Adel manufacturing ad put it when picturing a young war worker about to pedal off to work when her little girl plaintively asks, "Mother, when will you stay home again?": "Some jubilant day mother will stay home again, doing the job she likes best--making a home for you and daddy, when he gets back."(11)
Conceiving of national strength as a solid family unit, U.S. propaganda drove home the message that women were to be vigilant in carrying out their social responsibilities as war workers, women in uniform, or homemakers. They should not step outside boundaries of the family circle in this vulnerable time even when called upon to assume male roles. Indeed female self-assertion threatened to dilute the collective will, sap the moral fiber of a military dependent on feminine virtue and loyalty. It was crucial that both men and women give up adolescent dreams of carefree adventure and assume the sober mantle of citizenship in a time of war, but for men, this meant endangering their lives in battle, while for women, it entailed putting husband or sweetheart, children, and community first. For all, it required an earnest dedication to shoring up a world that could no longer be taken for granted, one in which the placidity of home had to be carefully protected and valiantly fought for.
It is largely for these reasons that Esquire ran into trouble with the Postmaster General in September of 1943 when Frank C. Walker tried to revoke its second-class mailing privileges, a move that would have driven the magazine out of business. Vargas’s pin-ups, including the smoking V-mail writer, were characterized as obscene and became the primary target of Walker’s attempted censorship. According to Tom Robotham, editor Arnold Gingrich had been making monthly trips to Washington throughout 1942 and 1943 to avoid this impasse. He cleared each issue with OWI and the Post Office.(12) In doing so, he was not unlike other magazine editors who similarly met regularly with OWI’s Magazine Bureau to make sure they understood the timing and thematic nature of government campaigns.(13) In Gingrich’s case, however, Esquire’s mission to reach its male audience ran directly counter to the government’s efforts to provide upstanding portraits of women on the home front. Significantly, one of the illustrations that drew fire during the hearing was of a woman in the military. The April 1943 gatefold shows a busty WAC with a good deal of cleavage and a skin-tight shorts uniform as she gives the Victory sign and sits bare-legged and barefoot. This blatant display of a sexualized woman in uniform reinforced all the things OWI was trying to undo in its recruitment campaign. Undoubtedly Colonel Hobby and others were alarmed by the sexy WAC for her resonance with the whispering campaign that was undercutting enlistment drives.
Vargas’s revealing pin-ups competed with nonsexualized propaganda images of the military or industrial figure of female purity and strength, and Esquire’s reputation as a purveyor of prurient bachelor material during the 1930's further attracted the censor’s attention. His images of sensual enjoyment struck at the core of the propaganda campaign’s mission to instill stoic endurance and earnest hard work into the national psyche. If men were sexually aroused by such art, would they not be drained of fighting energy? How could the population be mobilized if wholesome images of the family were superceded by licentious images of lust such as these? Was it not disrespectful at a time of war to display military uniforms as skin-tight stripper’s garb? How could women be persuaded to join the military or production line if their reputations would be tarnished by the stereotypes Vargas seemingly brought to life?
Vargas’s shocking images were made more so by his significantly altered portrayals of the female body. Prior to the war, images of sexual women in American popular culture emphasized bare shoulders, natural bust lines, and legs. Even the Petty Girl was more athletic than overtly seductive. Slinky evening gowns of the thirties outlined slender bodies but revealed backs rather than breasts. Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlowe, and other sexy movie stars were not the busty Venuses that Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe were to be. Their bust lines were relatively small, and their sexuality was as much in the way they moved and talked as it was in how they looked. Even Busy Berkeley’s chorines and bathing beauties displayed modest bosoms and covered backsides.
Vargas’s own work previous to his Esquire contract mirrors these relatively more sedate visions of sexual allure. His Fox posters of the 1930's and Ziegfeld Follies work in the 1920's display figures quite different from his wartime pin-ups. The Ziegfeld poster, "A Live Wire," for instance, features an erotically charged phone conversationalist whose spread legs and open mouth suggest passion, but her body is clothed and her figure is not the pneumatic wonder Vargas would create in 1940 when his first picture in October showed a full-breasted reclining nude on the phone barely covered by a transparent chemise. The evolution of the female body in both popular culture and Vargas’s individual career underlines the constructed nature of women’s sexuality in the war years and emphasizes its contested terrain. What shocked the censors in 1943 was not only the association of promiscuity with the WAC in "Bugle Girl," the sexual nature of scantily clad nymphs, but Vargas’s new showcasing of huge breasts, tiny waists, and broad hips. He exaggerated the traditional hour-glass ideal and anticipated what would shortly become an eye-popping extravaganza of bouncing cleavage brought to new heights, as it were, by Hollywood Technicolor, Cinemascope, and Platex Wonderbras in the 1950s.
Yet for all the worry at government levels about Esquire’s sexualizing of the American woman in such newly blatant ways, there were cultural forces at work that would put Vargas at the center of OWI’s own campaigns and that he would exploit to ingenious new lengths. Propagandists worried, for instance, about the surveys that showed men were resisting women’s entry into nontraditional fields, including the army and the navy. A Gallup poll done for the army in early 1944 revealed that three-quarters of its female respondents said that men did not aprove of women in the military, and that this had been a major factor in female respondents’ decision not to enlist.(14) Surveys of soldiers indicated worry about whether they would get their jobs back and concern that women were becoming too independent back home.(15) Regarded as intruders rather than helpmates, economic rivals rather than comrades-in-arms, women in war plants and the armed forces threatened significant numbers of men, according to the government’s polls. As one OWI bulletin warned: "Some men, despite the advances of the past decades and despite the war, still cling to the tradition that ‘woman’s place is in the home.’"(16) Or in the words of a fictional bus driver complaining about the wartime changes in his home town: "Women. . . you can’t tell me that the women are goin’ to give up all the jobs they got nailed down. I guess the boys’ll just hafta stay home an’ keep house."(17)
The titanically strong war worker able to shoulder any responsibility, embodiment of noble self-sacrifice, was both a reassuring symbol of national determination and a formidable model of female autonomy. The flip side of Rosie with her phallic riveting gun was her challenge to traditional gender roles, particularly her potential abandonment of home care and maternal responsibilities. While OWI recognized this threat early on and countered with assertions that underneath the untraditional stance beat a womanly heart, it sought to allay male fears of women’s independence with softened images of women throughout the final months of the war. The sexpot in a bathing suit or lingerie could wear a jauntily placed helmet or peek invitingly over a knapsack because she was safely divorced from any business-like assertiveness. These were women a man could trust not to be hard-boiled, sophisticated, or even grown up. While the nation was turning to women for muscle power, in other words, the parallel image of female softness and innocent sexuality could highlight masculine virility, the potency of men on the battlefield, and superior male strength.
This softening and sexualizing of women was especially compelling in recruitment appeals mounted by the armed services in early 1944. Hostile rumors about promiscuity in the WAC may have initially encouraged circumspect treatment, but rumors that lesbians were attracted to the military created stronger pressures to showcase sexualized femininity in recruitment appeals. This direction is evident in a memo written at the height of the 1944 campaign: "There is an unwholesomely large number of girls who refrain from even contemplating enlistment because of male opinion. An educative program needs to be done among the male population to overcome this problem. Men--both civilian and military
personnel--should be more specifically informed that it is fitting for girls to be in service. This would call for copy . . . which shows that the services increase, rather than deteract from desirable feminine characteristics."(18) The OWI, therefore, set about lacing military appeals with servicewomen’s domestic orientation and sexual allure. A good example of its suggested treatment is a sample one-minute radio announcement for the WAVES: "The girls in the WAVES are real American women--the kind who love parties and pretty clothes, and who are good at cooking and sewing too. They’re very feminine, and proud of it."(19)
Both fiction writers and advertisers responded to this government guidance by departing from initial prohibitions against showcasing female sexuality. Although it was made clear they were from respectable middle-class families, women in uniform were often portrayed as glamorous sirens who could turn on their sex appeal and safely excite male lust despite their formidable demeanor. Although respectably clothed in a proper uniform or discreet evening gown as his were not, the faces of WAVES and WACS in story illustrations and magazine ads bear subtle resemblances to Vargas’s pin-ups. Many of them are wide-eyed, with bee-stung lips, beaming with vitality, and endowed with hour-glass figures. They come from solid families and are virtuous future homemakers, but they clearly have sex appeal and are interested in men. Images of romantic courtship were employed by advertisers, underlining this heterosexuality, as they participated in the government’s drive to increase acceptance of women in the armed forces. Tobacco advertisers, for instance, typically showed servicewomen in uniform on the job in one frame followed by one of the same woman in an evening gown with her hair down and smoking a cigarette.
Another impetus to the development of cheesecake was what Robert Westbrook calls the pin-up’s use as moral imperative in a drive to motivate soldiers. Whereas the family became the embodiment of an American way of life under attack on the home front, the pin-up was the soldier’s representation of America under siege, the goal for which he was fighting: "When American soldiers said, as they often did, that it was American women that they were ‘fighting for,’ they sometimes, to be sure, were identifying women as the spoils of war, but more often ‘for’ meant ‘for whom’ or ‘on behalf of.’ They were articulating the moral obligations of the ‘protector’ to the ‘protected,’ a relationship ethically problematic in its own right but nonetheless different from that of a man to a woman viewed simply as sexual property."(20) In Westbrook’s view, the pin-up of World War II was different from that of previous wars because it was officially sanctioned as a morale builder and distributed at government expense in the army magazine Yank, in part to encourage the GI to adopt a masculine protector role. In addition, the government allowed Esquire to send six million issues free of charge to troops overseas and three million to domestic military bases. The pin-up was an eroticized treatment of the "girl next door," a sexualized image of the domestic ideal for which the war was being fought.
Westbrook maintains there were homophobic dimensions to this promotion of the pin-up, mirroring military concerns about lesbianism in the WAC, and further explaining Vargas’s exaggeration of the female body. Historians have described the tremendous opening provided by World War II to gays and lesbians migrating to the armed services and to the urban centers of war production zones.(21) Emphasizing heterosexuality via the pin-up was, in Westbrook’s view, a way to contain the homosocial boundaries of army or navy life as were the drag shows put on by the USO: "American military officials linked the aggressiveness of the effective soldier with healthy, heterosexual desire and worried about sustaining such desire and thwarting homosexuality."(22) To cast the war in terms of heterosexual erotic drives undercut the homosocial patterns encouraged by the war. This was a dimension for which Esquire was well suited. From its beginnings, the magazine combatted possible associations with homosexuality due to its emphasis on fashion, food, and decor for the male consumer. According to Kenon Breazeale, the Petty Girl was a foundational technique foregrounding heterosexuality as the magazine’s erotic territory and identity.(23)
For all of their hyper-erotic dimensions, indeed because of them, Vargas’s wartime pin-ups prevailed over the censors due to these forces. Key to his success was that he could mesh the seemingly contradictory images of women as sweet centers of American family life and erotic sexual fantasy. Marrying virtue with sexual frankness allowed Vargas to land right in the middle of the propaganda operation’s attempt to reassure male troops of their masculine prerogatives in the midst of gender changes in the wartime economy. The over-arching ideology for representing the war became a gender-coded picture of masculine battlefield and feminine home front, male and female working together to rejoin their severed halves. Overt romantic connections were made between the woman in factory overalls or military uniform at home and the soldier for whom she was working and waiting. In the words of a General Electric ad picturing an aircraft worker extending to a combat plane the handful of diamonds with which she fashions instruments: "Small things perhaps, these jewels a woman gives a man--but in war, as in love, there are no little things."(24) Similarly, a drill press operator gazes wistfully into the future as she contemplates her sweetheart’s return in a Eureka ad: "She’s not so very tall . . . just as high as a man’s heart. . .You should see her assembling parts for the starter motor that whirls the props of the plane Jimmy flies . . . she works to the rhythm of a little tuneless song . . . This is bringing Jimmy back . . . bringing Jimmy back."(25) Suspended for the duration by their necessary labor on the production line, army post, or enemy front, this heterosexual couple’s family life was suspended until the war could be won and a domestic paradise put in place that rewarded both for their hard work. The fertility of this couple was key to the notion of birthing a new world in which old dictators were vanquished and Americans could get on with the business of a free private life symbolized by marriage and children.
Vargas grasped this message better than anyone else, and his pin-ups brought to the surface the subtext of heterosexual coupling and impregnation at the heart of OWI’s family values campaign. Vargas created images of fertility, penetration, and copulation under a veil of mainstream feminine virtue, military victory and patriotic fervor, and he did so with such subtlety that they escape the conscious eye. In his March 1944 "Target for Tonite," for example, the flesh colored bathing suit of a voluptuous blonde makes for a nude visual effect as she invites the viewer to penetrate a vaginally shaped space formed by her arm, torso, and leg. Indeed, the triangular vaginal opening became a trope in Vargas’s art during the war years as women’s legs, arms, hands, and feet arranged themselves in tripartite focal points of open space. Slender hands form vaginal holes as they grasp letters, batons, mirrors, sashes, ruffles, halter strings, cards or hair. Fingers are splayed in V-shaped representations of abandonment, reinforced by the flushed faces and dilated eyes of arousal. V’s are everywhere in Vargas’s visual landscape. In part he did this as a signature move for the name, Vargas, but he also joined the Victory salute with the vagina, patriotic colors with images of intercourse. Flashing the "V" for Victory sign, Vargas’s pin-ups could simultaneously evoke vaginal targets as they played with symbolic phalluses: cigarettes, swords, skis, pens, guns, whips, bows and arrows. Writing V-mail, recording their dates in diaries, or receiving GI letters, they bend over inviting penetration or playfully do push-ups with breasts and buttocks on display in a teasing parody of boot camp.
Freudian representations of intercourse are built into Vargas’s flying and swimming pin-ups as well, when he conflated women’s bodies with airplanes and warships. The December 1943 "There’ll Always Be a Christmas," for instance, features a blue-parachuted flying blonde in red suit with arms spread wide in the shape of airplane wings and thumbs pressed to index fingers in the Vargas trademark vagina. Her bust evokes an airplane’s nose, her legs its belly, and her feet its tail. The August 1944 joyous surfer in her red, white, and blue bathing suit straddles a phallic surfboard as sperm-like waves travel up her legs. Such images both feminized and sexualized the planes and ships on which troops depended and help explain why Vargas’s pin-ups lent themselves to GI art work on bomber noses and ship hulls. Metaphorically they were going into battle as already coupled partners with the women who functioned as a feminized support structure on American soil, a nonthreatening female production line turning out the planes, ships, and ammunition of war.
At first glance, Vargas’s pin-ups seem all about sexual conquest and erotic pleasure, with notions of babies and family off in some distant realm. These women do not look maternal, and they seem as far removed from images of domestic life in home front propaganda as it is possible to be. As Robert Westbrook points out, however, the war’s most famous pin-up, Betty Grable, displayed sexy wholesomeness as her greatest appeal, and this was a quality that Alberto Vargas brought to the Varga Girl with consummate skill. The famous shot of Grable’s legs was taken from the back, after all, and her buttocks are not outlined by her bathing suit. Her glance is playful rather than sultry, and she looks ready to take a dive into the swimming pool rather than jump into bed. Indeed when Grable starred in Pin-Up Girl (1944), she played a Washington D.C. government clerical worker (one of the occupations highlighted in recruitment propaganda), posing as a glamorous showgirl to impress a soldier. Instead of winning him with this ruse, however, she inadvertantly drives him away until he sees that she is a small-town, down-to-earth homebody. One of Grable’s central qualities, then, was that she embodied the virtuous girl back home waiting to resume or enter married life: "Grable and many of the other most popular pin-up models were viewed not only as objects of sexual fantasy but also as representative women, standing in for wives and sweethearts on the homefront."(26)
Vargas encoded this girl-next-door quality into his voluptuous pin-ups by giving them the faces of Hollywood’s freshest stars or the magazine illustrator’s portraits of average American women. Indeed he had practiced drawing these faces countless times in his work for Fox when he painted every major female star and in his advertising contracts with Jergens, Jantzen, and other companies. His bathing beauty of May 1944, for example, bears a striking resemblance to Ginger Rogers. In addition to the more obvious film sirens such as Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, Vargas’s pin-ups also recall Norma Shearer, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball, Maureen O’Hara, Ann Sheridan, and even Judy Garland. His puckered-up wide-eyed nymphets look much like the faces used in story illustrations or mainstream ads. Putting such faces on bodies made for sex joined sexual fantasy with the normalcy attached to these other cultural figures.
In addition, Vargas portrayed his beauties with apple blossoms and dressed them in wedding gowns or wedding-white nightgowns, evening gowns, bathing suits, leotards, or negligees. The transparent or skin-tight chemises had apron-like ruffles and ties. The Varga Girl’s jumpers were short-short little girl overalls. Her pale blonde hair was the color of a little girl’s before it had darkened with age. Bottoms of his sun suits and sarongs resembled diapers, especially when worn topless, and he frequently colored them in baby shades of pale pink and blue. The Varga Girl was a little girl with a young woman’s hormones, and she was not infrequently on her back waving her legs in the air, stretched out on the ground, or flat on her stomach with head in the air, simulating postures of a baby. Her O-shaped fruity mouth and open eyes recalled the Gerber baby’s innocent expression of wonder, the baby’s readiness to suck a nipple (see the November 1943 gatefold).
These images of domesticity and fertility fed into OWI’s lionization of American family values fought for by female home-front amazons and male foreign conquerors. Moreover, Vargas’s images of copulation reinforced the recruitment campaign’s gendered landscape of males peneterating enemy territory while females cradled riveting guns, sewed airplane seams, canned their home-grown food, and lived military life in preparation for a better postwar domestic partnership. Children and family life were at the center of both enterprises, the ultimate goal of winning the peace and settling into a domestic haven of consumer bounty. The Varga Girl’s pneumatic targets, her hips made for child-bearing and breasts swollen as if with milk, captured the vital center of OWI’s propaganda equating victory with reuniting the wartime severed male and female halves of the American family. His pin-ups were sirens, but they were not gold-diggers; they were erotic but not promiscuous; they loved to play, but their domain was the home; they were physically fit, but their bodies were clearly soft and sensual. The white background on which they appeared reinforced their virtue, for their nudity was not on public display even when they were in the open air. These are not strippers in a club, call girls in a hotel, or hookers on the street.Their open gazes, broad smiles, Pepsodent-white teeth, and healthy bodies were focused on soldier morale not illicit sex--they brought together conquest and sexual pleasure, erotic excitement and domestic stability. Women could be both sexy and maternal, naked and fit for matrimony.
Another aspect of Vargas’s pin-up that points to larger cultural sensibilities is his equation of the white female body with victory, a trope that highlights the propaganda campaign’s racist nature. The Varga Girl was a white girl of extraordinarily Nordic features--big frequently blue eyes, silky long hair that was often white-blonde, peaches and cream skin. She was not even tan despite her many hours of sun-bathing. Her slender manicured nails were far removed from the arduous farm labor or domestic service most women of color did. This was an erasure of nonwhite women’s sexuality but also of their identification with the bourgeois dream of home, family, and the fruits of victory. The domestic-centered ideology of World War II portrayed America as a united collection of white, middle-class, suburban families fighting for the survival of their way of life. Excluded from this picture were the many people of nonwhite ethnicity who were in the military and on the production line dreaming of peacetime themselves. Especially excluded were the nonwhite women who worked for a better life, wider economic opportunities, healthier families, and recognition of their beauty.
Not only was the Varga Girl’s whiteness made more forceful by a context of racialized conflict in the Pacific and Africa, but her Nordic features erased the women of hundreds of thousands of African American troops stationed overseas, not to mention the many other Latino, Native American, and Asian American men in uniform. Joanne Meyerowitz has discussed the impact of this erasure on the African American press, which supplied its own pin-up shots in Ebony and Negro Digest after the war.(27) My research into wartime black periodicals, such as The Crisis and Opportunity, confirms her findings that glamorous cheesecake shots of African American women were heralded as progressive images at a time when Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Hazel Scott and others were making inroads into dominant culture portrayals of black women as desexed maids and mammies.(28) While the army made efforts to bring celebrities like Horne before the troops via USO shows, its dissemination of the white pin-up reinforced segregation and white supremacy, something the black press was quick to recognize.
It is ironic that a Latino artist developed the war’s best-known iconography of white male conquest, but it was a logical outgrowth of another major dimension of OWI’s propaganda campaign: use of the Western frontier as a model of America’s role in the world. Women workers were cast as inheritors of the pioneer tradition in which women headed out west with their men to carve out homes in the wilderness. The National Life Insurance Company, for instance, ran a series entitled "Protecting the American Home," which stessed the bravery and strength of women of the Old West. Pillsbury also ran a series of pioneer ads emphasizing women’s ability to withstand deprivation and to care for their families in the midst of danger. Eureka featured a welder who urged readers to "Keep the Home Fires Blazing."(29) An Armco ad hailed a female trucker as "a ‘covered wagon’ girl": "Hers is the spirit of the women who reloaded the long rifles as their men fought off the Indians . . . the courage that helped build the kind of America we have today."(30)
Such imagery evoked the old ideology of "Manifest Destiny" which justified nineteenth century expansion into the territories of Mexico and taking of the land from Native Americans and Chicanos, an implicit rationale for American supremacy in the postwar world. Drawing on mythology of the Western frontier and pioneer settlement, with man the explorer/conqueror and woman the civilizer/hearth-tender, propagandists gendered the idea of military conquest to include visions of pioneer families taming the wilderness. That the Western became a dominant story formula in the 1950's is not surprising given its usefulness as a narrative of victory in World War II. American expansion into Europe, Africa, and the Far East could be conceptualized as progress, the natural destiny of a country that had built itself through male exploration and female homemaking. According to this narrative, prosperous families and communities emerged from violent conquest of an aggressive ruthless enemy. It is not surprising, therefore, that Vargas created his cowgirl in March 1944, with her six-guns blazing wearing a sky-blue ranch outfit and white-starred belt. She was helping her man tame the frontier of modern times.
Placing his goddesses of fertility on enemy soil and dressing them in Hawaiian, Tahitian, Latin American, or African motifs allowed Vargas to symbolically render the spoils of war in terms of sexual consummation and racial domination. If his home-front sweethearts were in bathing suits and sun shorts, it was in part because they could imaginatively inhabit the waters and beaches that separated soldiers from home. Once on land, however, they were clothed in Americanized sarongs, halters, grass skirts, fresh flowers, and the like representing a new global America whitening and civilizing the lands of people of color. These were the women whose bodies would be penetrated by the victorious soldier, not those whose countries were being conquered. They were the victor’s reward for accomplishing the soldier’s mission.
This appropriation of nonwhite cultures abroad or south of the border was a process that started well before World War II with films such as Flying Down to Rio with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Putting white people at the center of exoticized locales or featuring white-skinned women in native dress as erotic focal points had long been a staple of American popular culture fantasies, but the war brought such narratives new centrality. Putting a white woman in sexy exotic dress displaced women of color and symbolically situated white men where men of color had been. The Varga Girl in tropical flowers, then, was not only reward for rooting the Japanese out of the Pacific, but she embodied the notion of a white American military taking over weaker indigenous cultures.
The art of Alberto Vargas during World War II does more than take us on a trip down memory lane and reawaken old cheesecake images. It encodes deeper cultural forces regarding women that were seemingly far removed from Vargas’s erotic sensibility. One of these was that the Varga Girl not only displaced Rosie the Riveter, she permanently sexualized mainstream notions of the American woman. Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Lana Turner, Susan Hayward, Ann Sothern, Kim Novak, Ava Gardner, all descendents of the Varga Girl, would be the bombshell stars of the 1950's with their huge bust lines, fleshy hips, and cinched in waistlines. So decolletee was the cleavage of movie stars of the postwar era that when I was growing up, my mother provided crayoned coverings for the women gracing covers of my Modern Screens and Photoplays when they arrived in the mail. She could not quite reconcile my little girl love of Hollywood glamour with the mainstream images of her era, or maybe she had an eye on my father. Her own innocent beauty was similarly displayed in curvaceous sheaths, halters and shorts, deep red lipstick, open-toed platform heels, sweet hair ribbons, and ruffled aprons. She was a homemaker, a mother, an ex-serviceman’s wife, who remained sexy and athletic, maternal and glamorous, throughout the early years of her married life. Unlike her mother’s generation, which covered their maturing bodies with shapeless housedresses, draperied dark-colored street dresses, stout-heeled pumps, and full-bodied plain aprons, my mother wore tight t-shirts and sweaters, belted shorts, sling-back high heels, and revealing bathing suits. Family photographs feature pin-up shots of her taken by my father stretching to pin wet clothes on the line, smile fetchingly over pots and pans, sit jauntily with bare legs crossed on sandy beaches. These are images anticipated by the Esquire pin-ups of Alberto Vargas, and they suggest the domesticated eroticism he helped pioneer.
Women could be strong autonomous beings in the era we have come to know as the feminine mystique, but this combination of domesticity and kittenish sexuality came with a price tag.(31) Although women continued to enter the labor force in steadily increasing numbers and black women made great gains in the battle for civil rights, the infantilizing aspects of ideal womanhood captured in Vargas’s art undercut egalitarian themes in American society fostered by the war. Womanly bodies, breathless voices, walks with wiggles, obliterated New Woman androgynous ideals of the tough-talking, sure-footed modern American female who could do anything a man could do and therefore stay by his side through thick and thin. If she opted to have a family and take a time-out from paid work, her equality was nevertheless established and could be potentially reawakened. The Varga Girl, however, was destined for sex and babies. Her playfulness, sensuality, and fertility implicitly interfered with entering the public sphere as man’s equal. Such an image helped defeminize and marginalize women making inroads into male occupations, encouraged women to turn away from so-called masculinizing pursuits such as those opened up by the wartime labor shortage.
Alberto Vargas did not create the relatively narrow parameters for women’s ideal role after the war. As a commercial artist trying to survive, he excelled at picking up on the mainstream cultural trends flowing around him, and he was able to combine his talent for erotic art with wartime forces placing the pin-up in a central location. To appreciate the skill with which he did this is not to approve of the images themselves, however, nor to dismiss as trivial the impact they had on popular culture. Women’s opportunities constricted after the war in large part because representations of female strength were overtaken by those of sexual objectification. It may be possible to combine women’s sexuality with nonracist egalitarian portraits of female accomplishment, but the end result of World War II was to divide these images into contestatory domains even as they met on the common ground of women’s maternal destiny. Perhaps there is something inherently sexist in warfare, especially when erotic frankness is paired with conservative family norms, but the Varga Girl serves as a reminder that cheesecake is not on the margins of culture but rather is as American as apple pie.
