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Excerpt from Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front

Edited by Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith Published in 1991

Those Americans who were not fighting on the front lines during World War II worked on a different front—the home front, which fueled the entire war effort. The decade before the war had been a particularly bleak one for most Americans. The Great Depression, a period of severe economic slowdown, began in the United States in 1929. By 1932 approximately twelve million Americans were unemployed. But the nation's entry into World War II in December of 1941 brought a swift end to nearly twelve years of hardship and deprivation. High unemployment in the United States disappeared as government office positions and manufacturing jobs opened up in record numbers.

U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt has been credited with inspiring the...