Women?????

Question:

Women?????

what were the womens roles in wwii?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: In many Allied countries women were encouraged to join female branches of the armed forces or participate in industrial or farm work.
With this expanded horizon of opportunity and confidence, and with the extended skill base that many women could now give to paid and voluntary employment, women's roles in World War II were even more extensive than in the First World War. By 1944, more than 2.3 million women were working in the war industries in the U.S., building ships, aircraft, vehicles, and weaponry. Women also worked in factories, munitions plants and farms, and also drove trucks, provided logistic support for soldiers and entered professional areas of work that were previously the preserve of men. In the Allied countries thousands of women enlisted as nurses serving on the front lines. Thousands of others joined defensive militias at home and there was a great increase in the number of women serving in the military itself, particularly in the Red Army.

This necessity to use the skills and the time of women was heightened by the nature of the war itself. While World War I was mainly fought in France and was a war arguably without clear aggressor or villain, World War II was truly a global conflict where countries were invaded or under the threat of invasion from leaders in Germany (Adolf Hitler) and Japan that had ambitions of world domination. In these circumstances the absolute urgency of mobilizing the entire population made the expansion of the role of women inevitable. The hard skilled labour of women was symbolized in the United States by the figure of Rosie the Riveter.
Many women served in the resistances of France, Italy, and Poland, and in the British SOE which aided these.

American women also saw combat during World War II, firstly as nurses in the Army Nurses Corp and United States Navy Nurse Corps during the Pearl Harbor attacks on 7 December 1941. The Woman??s Naval Reserve and United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve were also created for women performing auxiliary roles. In July 1943 a bill was signed making the Women's Army Corps an official part of the regular army, but not in combat units. In 1944 WAC??s arrived in the Pacific and were landing in Normandy on D-Day. During the war, 67 Army nurses and 16 Navy nurses were captured and spent three years as Japanese prisoners of war. 350,000 American women served during World War Two and 16 were killed in action. American women also performed many varieties of non-combat military service in special units such as the WAVES, Women's Army Corps, and Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Indeed World War II also marked milestones for women in the US military, Carmen Contreras-Bozak, who became the first Hispanic to join the WAC's, serving in Algiers under General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Minnie Spotted-Wolf the first female Native American woman to enlist in the United States Marines. In 1943, the first female officer of the United States Marine Corps was commissioned, and the first detachment of female marines was sent to Hawaii for duty in 1945. Women also joined the federal government in massive numbers during World War II. Nearly a million "government girls" were recruited for war work.

United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, women were essential to the war effort, in both civilian and military roles. The contribution by women to the civilian war effort in the United Kingdom was acknowledged with the use of the words "Home Front" to describe the battles that were being fought on a domestic level with rationing, recycling, and war work, such as in munitions factories and farms. Men were thus released into the military. Women were also recruited into non-combat military units such as the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS or "Wrens") and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) thus further releasing men into the frontline. Auxiliary services such as the Air Transport Auxiliary also recruited women.
In Britain, women were not recruited into regular combat units, but the Special Operations Executive (SOE) did. They were used as agents and radio operators in Nazi occupied Europe.