AMERICAN BEAUTY: A HISTORY IN ADVERTISMENTS AND PROPAGANDA, 1940-1945

This honors thesis explores the intersection between total war and American female beauty--namely, how advertisers and the War Board used the female image to not only garner support for the war, but to reinforce certain moral standards in a time where women found more personal freedom in their everyday lives. Additionally, advertisers used the war machine to promote their own beauty products, creating a direct link between true Americanism and cosmetics--lipstick, especially. The work is broken into three principal parts: a brief history of cosmetics use in the US, the development of the connection between female beauty and patriotic duty during the Second World War and, finally, an analysis of advertisements and propaganda using the lens of beauty and patriotism. It focuses largely on single, middle class, white women--the focus of many of this images--but I have included discussions of women othered by these images, and the impact these images had on those othered women