Problems G.I.'s Faced Upon Their Return to the States

The accounts from soldiers describing combat in general present an image of a hellish nightmare where all decency and humanity could be lost. For men who fought under these conditions, coming home was a very difficult transition. Above all, these men wanted to return to "normalcy", to come back to a life that they had been promised if the war was won. This would turn out to be harder to obtain then first expected, problems ranging from the vailability of jobs in the work force to child raising and post-traumatic stress would make this return to "normalcy" very troublesome. This laborious task of reintegrating into American culture would eventually lead to problems in the gender relations in post war America.

One of the major problems that G.I.'s faced upon there return to the States was the availability of jobs. During the war, the U.S. government encouraged women and minorities to enter the industrial work force due to labor shortages and increased demand for war goods. By 1944 a total of 1,360,000 women with husbands in the service had entered the work force. This, along with the a migration of African-American workers from the south, filled the war time need for labor. This attitude toward women in the work force changed dramatically at the end of the war. The propaganda promoting "Rosie the Riviter", suddenly changed, focusing on the duties of women as a homemaker and a mother. Even with these efforts and those of the G.I. bills passed after the war, returning soldiers had a difficult time finding jobs in post war America. This independence given to women during the war and its removal with the advent of the returning men, had a definitive effect on gender relations in American society and which one of the seeds of the womens rights movements in later decades.

Another hardship encountered by returning soldiers was the reactions of the children they left behind. Most of the fathers that returned from the war concerned with how they would fit into the family system. Some fathers were determined to take an active role in the family and they did by becoming the master disciplinary. Returning fathers came to home to find undisciplined and unruly children, a far cry from ordered military life they had lead during the war. Some children even resented at the strangers who had re-entered their lives, lives that seemed complete without him.