Students in Dr. Marisa Chappell’s fall 2023 History 363 “Women in U.S. History” class spent the final three weeks of Fall Quarter 2023 in OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center exploring women in Camp Adair’s history.

By Emily Bakhshoudeh, London Hawes, and Maya Kirschenbaum

Women played many important roles at Camp Adair, a Benton County, Oregon World War II military training facility, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the camp’s official newspaper, the Camp Adair Sentry. Within its pages, women were valued largely for their beauty or simply relegated to the sidelines of the war effort. The sexualization and paternalistic treatment of Camp Adair women through events like the PX (post exchange) Girl Contest represents an intriguing counter-narrative to the popularly constructed story of heroic Rosie the Riveters assisting the Allied war effort.

The Camp Adair PX Girl Contest, held in 1943, exemplifies the objectification of women at the facility. A front-page column in the February 11 Sentry entitled “Elect Your PX Dream Girl!” discusses the voting rules for the contest and describes contestants, who were exclusively female PX managers, in sexualized terms solely based on their appearance. Directed at male service members, the article notes that the one who “rings your bell” could be “the cutie with the curves” or “the gal with the violet eyes, the miss with the miracle curves, the pretty little pumpkin with the pumpkins.”[1] Similarly, the March 11, 1943 edition of the Sentry focused on informing soldiers about voting for their favorite PX Girl and “celebrating” the beauty of female PX managers around the camp.[2] The same page features a conventionally attractive woman wearing a bathing suit posing seductively (see below). As with the prior month’s “PX Dream Girl” article, this photo’s caption characterizes the woman’s value in terms of her physical beauty.[3] While the Sentry does not tell us how the average soldier responded, it suggests how the officers who put the Sentry together viewed women. Women were sexualized and valued for their curves within its pages, and their importance to the war effort was mainly portrayed as gratifying the emotional and physical desires of soldiers. 

The announcement of the PX Girl winner followed the same pattern. The March 18, 1943 issue reported Betty Frick, or “brown-eyed Betty,” succeeded in “getting the knob by 150 votes over pretty Dorothy Caldwell.”[4] As with previous depictions of contestants, this article refrains from commenting on any aspects of the women other than their physical attributes. Any mention of the winner’s personality, achievements, or contributions to the war effort are effaced. This kind of objectification was not confined to coverage of the PX Girl contest. For instance, the January 21, 1944 edition of the Sentry featured a photograph of Ruby Richards, fountain manager of PX 3, posing in a bathing suit (Figure 3). The caption described Richards as “lissome” and emphasized her vital statistics.[5]

This kind of objectification was common in the 1940s. According to historian Marilyn E. Hegarty, “magazines, movies, posters, and other media covertly and overtly urged wartime women to provide sexualized support for the military in various types of public and private entertainment.”[6] Historian Steven Dillon discusses the emergence of sexual culture during World War II by showing the rise in popularity of the sexualization of women in media consisting of film, magazines, comics, radio, and newspapers. This sexualization went beyond visual images. When discussing radio, for example, Dillon notes that “women are not just heard on the radio; they are viewed; even if listeners can’t see them, female characters are judged by what they look like.”[7] This phenomenon was not limited to the United States, either; scholar Marilyn Lake writes that “[a]dvertisements for cosmetics, fashioning a new sexualized femininity, incited [Australian] women to ‘reckless, red adventure’ and warned that ‘Fair Girls Ought to be Doubly Careful.”[8]

It is clear that objectification of women occurred on a large scale throughout the United States and beyond during World War II and was not limited to isolated locales such as Camp Adair. However, the consistent and government-approved sexualization of female camp members by the Camp Adair Sentry is a particularly salient example of the methods the military used to build troop morale and create gendered expectations of masculinity as well as femininity.

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[1] “Elect Your PX Dream Girl! Contest Starts – The Rules,” Camp Adair Sentry, February 11, 1943, 1.

[2] “PX Girl Contest Judges Swamped,” Camp Adair Sentry, March 11, 1943, 1.

[3] “Positively Not GI,” Camp Adair Sentry, March 11, 1943, 1.

[4] “Betty Frick Winner of PX Girl Contest,” Camp Adair Sentry, March 18, 1943, 4.

[5] “No. 26: One Lump or Two, Sugar?”, Camp Adair Sentry 2, no. 40 (January 21, 1944).

[6] Marilyn E. Hegarty, “Patriot or Prostitute?: Sexual Discourses, Print Media, and American Women during World War II,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 2 (1998), 113

[7] Steven Dillon, Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940’s US Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 4.

[8] Marilyn Lake, “The Desire for a Yank: Sexual Relations between Australian Women and American Servicemen during World War II,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 4 (1992): 623.

Students in Dr. Marisa Chappell’s fall 2023 History 363 “Women in U.S. History” class spent the final three weeks of Fall Quarter 2023 in OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center exploring women in Camp Adair’s history.

By Austin McCarville, Clare Buresh, and Felicity Howell

Adair Village, a small community in Benton County, Oregon, is best known as a site of several military installations, most notably Camp Adair, a training cantonment during World War II. For several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though, the area was known as Adair Village, and it served as housing for married students attending Oregon State College (now Oregon State University) and their families. Archival materials at OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center offer a unique window into the lives of women who, for a brief period of time, made the area their home.

We learned that Adair housed OSC students and their families in the papers of Dan W. Poling, who served as Dean of Men at OSC/OSU from 1947 to 1970. The papers included Poling’s dissertation, written for his Doctorate of Education at the University of Oregon in 1956, chronicling the creation and operation of married student housing at Adair, titled “Adair Village: A Post-War Project in Community Living for Married Students of Oregon State College.” Poling noted that federal legislation that funded temporary child care for working mothers during the war also “ma[de] possible the construction of Adair Village for married students of Oregon State College.” A section of the dissertation titled “Family Life Programs” details aspects of daily life, and we were drawn to Poling’s discussion of the Mother’s Club, which prompted us to investigate the lives of women and mothers in married student housing at Adair.[1]

Poling noted that the Mother’s Club was open to all women in the community, not just mothers. Poling documented the club’s work to create and support the Little Beavers Play School and other activities and resources for children, including a community park, “Cordair.” He also mentioned that Adair residents wrote and published newsletters.[2] We worked with archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton to locate issues of Community Spirit, a biweekly newspaper published by the “Village Church Board,” which ran from November 1948 through May 1950. The newsletter was created on a typewriter, included illustrations but not photographs, and was reproduced on a mimeograph machine, in purple ink. Its first editor was resident Larry Hagen, an OSC faculty member, but by 1949 it was being edited by Joyce Kelly, a teacher at Little Beavers Play School). Community Spirit, which editors hoped would be an “interesting, informative, and informal paper,” offers a unique window into the daily lives and activities of Adair’s women residents, particularly through its discussion of the Mother’s Club’s activities.[3]

The November 11, 1949 issue of Community Spirit mentions both specific women and various activities planned by the Mother’s Club. An upcoming Mother’s Club meeting would feature a Mrs. Eleanor Peters teaching members how to make candy and dip chocolate and discussion of a Thanksgiving Turkey raffle and the community dance schedule.[4] Another article featured Helen Ingram, a soloist in the church choir, who along with Virginia Nelson (a teacher at Little Beavers Play School) hoped to start a community choir.[5] Grace Harrington, who graduated from Julliard in concert piano performance, announced that she was accepting piano students.[6] And Maxine Morgan and Moira Tan wrote to the editor to share that the presence of pet dogs in their homes served as protection against “rude conduct” of the community’s maintenance workers.[7]

One of the Mothers Club’s most significant contributions was providing activities for children, including educational programs and child care. The Adair Village Directory, also located in SCARC, called the Mother’s Club the “most active non-governmental group” in the community.[8] The Oregon State College newspaper, the Barometer, included advertisements for nursery school classes at the Little Beavers Play School, led by a Mrs. Katherine H. Reed, and for a Mothers Club rummage sale at the school.[9] After the school secured a permanent location in unit D-9, the Barometer announced an open house, organized by a Mrs. L.D. Marriage, in February 1948 to show off improvements made to the building. The improvements were performed by “mothers” who “cleaned, decorated, and remodeled the interior” and “fathers” who “assisted by constructing play equipment and individual lockers for the children,” reflecting a common division of labor in the mid twentieth century.[10] At least one other option for child care, Alameda Randall staffed a nursery at Adair.[11]

The participation by Adair women in clubs and volunteer work, particularly child-focused campaigns, is not surprising. It reflected a longer history. Since the late nineteenth century, American women had been busy forming clubs and working through them to influence women’s lives and society more generally. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1890, represented a wide variety of clubs, from mothers’ clubs and study clubs to gardening clubs and service clubs. And while the activities of women’s clubs might not seem very important, they had played a significant role in American history. According to historian Paige Meltzer, women’s clubs had been “critical contributor[s] to the women’s suffrage campaign, the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and the Children’s Bureau, and the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Health Act,” which provided federal funding for infant and maternity health care programs in the 1920s. Meltzer argues that in the 1940s, the GFWC promoted the idea that American mothers were responsible “for the health of the individual family, the local community, and the nation.”[12]

For the short time that Adair housed married OSC students and their families, its women, in their roles as mothers, wives, teachers, and volunteers, were crucial to creating “community spirit.”

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[1] Dan Poling, “Adair Village: A Postwar Project in Community Living for Married Students of Oregon State College” (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 1956), Dan Poling Papers, Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, OR (hereafter SCARC), 12, 133-134. For more on the legislation, see William M. Tuttle, Jr., “The American Family on the Home Front” in World War II and the American Home Front, ed. Marilyn M. Harper (Washington, DC: The National Historic Landmarks Program, 2007), 63.

[2] Poling, “Adair Village,” 133-134, 139-140, 108-109.

[3] Community Spirit, November 11, 1949 and Community Spirit, November 19, 1948, SCARC.

[4] “Mothers Club,” Community Spirit, November 11, 1949, SCARC, 1.

[5] “Helen Ingram Soloes,” Community Spirit, November 11, 1949, SCARC, 1.

[6] “Interesting People,” Community Spirit, November 11, 1949, SCARC, 2-3.

[7] Maxine Moira and Moira Tan to the Editor, Community Spirit, November 11, 1949, SCARC, 2.

[8] Adair Village Directory (Adair Village, OR: Adair Village Council, October 1949), SCARC, 2.

[9] “Council Approves $5 Increase in Registration Fees,” Oregon State Daily Barometer, December 2, 1947, 2; “Adair Village Mothers to Hold Rummage Sale,” Oregon State Daily Barometer, May 20, 1948, 1.

[10] “Little Beaver School to Have Open House,” Oregon State Daily Barometer, January 27, 1948, 1.

[11] “‘Who’s Who’ at Adair Village,” Adair Village Directory.

[12] Paige Meltzer, “‘The Pulse and Conscience of America’: The General Federation and Women’s Citizenship, 1945-1960,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 30, no. 3 (2009): 52-76.

Students in Dr. Marisa Chappell’s fall 2023 History 363 “Women in U.S. History” class spent the final three weeks of Fall Quarter 2023 in OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center exploring women in Camp Adair’s history.

By Anish Alam, Annabel McMillan, and Gwyn Scalet

As we explored the Camp Adair Sentry, the official newspaper of Camp Adair during its years as a World War II training cantonment, we were struck by its superficial portrayal of women. We knew from our course readings and discussions that women played significant roles during World War II, so we set out to explore this seeming contradiction by analyzing the differences between the portrayal of women in the Sentry and the actual roles women played at Camp Adair. Our findings suggest that at Camp Adair, as in the rest of the United States, the war offered various opportunities for women and that, at the same time, there were distinct attempts to contain the transformative possibilities of women’s expansive contributions to the war effort.

An article on the front page of the Camp Adair Sentry on February 11, 1942 announced a contest to “Elect Your PX Dream Girl!” The article discusses a contest being run on the base in which men at Camp Adair voted to choose the “best” female worker in the camp’s retail outlets, called Post Exchanges. The contest highlights the sexualization and objectification of women at the camp and in American society. The article describes competitors solely in terms of their appearances and framing their beauty in terms of male fantasy: “Wherever she is, she rings her bell. She’s the reason you stand in a surging line for an hour.” The article does not discuss the actual labor women performed as retail workers at all. It notes that the top four contestants would be “photographed – with sweaters (although bathing suits would be alright too),” further illustrating the women’s position as objects.[1]

This article was not unique. A review of issues of the newspaper revealed that women were generally dismissed or objectified. The Sentry repeatedly focused on women’s social role and the perception of women by male service members. When women’s labor is discussed, it is confined to their role as entertainment. The article “Social Swirl” from March 11, 1942, for example, documents women’s role overseeing social events for the enjoyment of servicemen.[2] Women-organized dances at Camp Adair and in nearby communities provided recreation and entertainment for men.

Despite the newspaper’s emphasis on appearance, other sources illustrate that women’s labor, both paid employment and volunteer labor, was essential to Camp Adair’s functioning. A November 23, 1943 advertisement in the Oregon Statesmen for “girls to clerk in Camp Adair exchange stores,” for example, promised a “good salary” for a six-day work week. The use of the world “girls” indicates that the employers were looking specifically for young women.[3] Retail jobs thus offered new opportunities for local women to earn wages. Another Oregon Statesman article discussed local women volunteering to create recreational spaces for service members at Camp Adair. Women had long performed this kind of volunteer labor, and its coverage in the newspaper suggested that it was recognized as valuable; at the same time, the article noted that the work was done “without additional help,” suggesting that readers might assume women were not fully competent.[4]

Women also served as clerks and nurses at Camp Adair. An article in the Oregon State Barometer on April 21, 1943 reports that Miss Virginia Landquist, who was “director of the division of biochemistry at the Camp Adair field hospital,” and Miss Winifred de Witt, member of the camp’s nurse corp, would visit Oregon State College to talk to students about “the opportunities open to women with home economics background and who wish to  make their efforts count for victory.” Many of those opportunities, as the speakers suggest, were highly skilled, salaried positions. Of course, salaried and professional roles and social and recreational ones were not mutually exclusive. The article notes that “Miss Lundquist supplements her work at the camp with duties as director of dancing instruction at the Corvallis USO [United Service Organization].” [5]

It is not surprising to find women workers and volunteers at Camp Adair. Historians have documented the varied positions women played during World War II. According to historians Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith, some 6.5 million women in the United States were employed, bringing the proportion of American women in the labor force from 25% before the war to 36% by its end. Historians argue that the labor women performed during the war affected their identities. Litoff argues that “one of the most significant themes expressed” in women’s wartime letters “is the new sense of self experience,” demonstrating that these roles held significant meaning and opened a new sense of purpose in women’s lives.[6] The historian Karen Anderson, too, argued that the fact that a majority of women “wanted to keep their jobs after the war signified that women’s aspirations for themselves and their sense of their own competence had been dramatically altered” by their war work.[7] When set against scholarship about expanding roles for women and research in other local newspapers, it is clear that The Sentry underrepresented the labor of women on camp.

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[1] “Elect Your PX Dream Girl – The Rules,” Camp Adair Sentry, February 11, 1943, 1.

[2] “Social Swirl,” Camp Adair Sentry, March 11, 1943, 8.

[3] “Help Wanted – Female,” The Oregon Statesman, November 23, 1943, 11.

[4] “Monmouth Women Furnish Second Recreation Room,” The Oregon Statesman, March 9, 1943, 5.

[5] “Home Economics Club Sponsors Convo Today,” Oregon State Barometer, April 21, 1942, 3.

[6] Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith, “U.S. women on the Home Front in World War II,” The Historian 57, no. 2 (1995), 354. For discussion of women’s home front work in Oregon specifically, see Amy E. Platt, “‘Go into the yard as a worker, not as a woman’” Oregon Women During World War II, a Digital Exhibit on the Oregon History Project,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 116, no. 2 (2015): 234-248

[7] Karen Andersen, “Teaching about Rosie the Riveter: The Role of Women during World War II,” OAH Magazine of History 3, no. ¾ (1988), 35.

Marisa Chappell, Associate Professor of History

The twenty-four students in History 363: Women in U.S. History spent the final three weeks of Fall Quarter 2023 in OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center exploring women in Camp Adair’s history. Archivist Tiah Edmonson-Morton made archival collections, oral histories, and other primary sources available for students to examine. She also shared her infinite enthusiasm, patience, and knowledge with the students, both in class presentations and frequent individual consultations. Students worked in groups of three to explore the sources, identify a historical question/focus, and find and read scholarship to help them contextualize what they were discovering. In the end, they produced new knowledge about the history of women at Camp Adair and Oregon State College.

Three groups were especially intrigued by portrayals of women in the Camp Adair Sentry, the camp’s official newspaper. A February 1943 front-page article about a PX Girl contest served as a starting point for all three groups, who were struck that a military training camp during wartime was holding what seemed like a beauty and popularity contest. The article led students groups in distinct directions. Two groups decided to further explore images of women in the Sentry. Bakhshoudeh, Hawes, and Kirschenbaum followed the PX Girl story and used it to discuss “Women’s Objectification in the Camp Adair Sentry.” Merims-Johnson, Lerner, and Johnson focused on the newspaper’s photographs more generally, using them to think about how media producers during the war grappled with the new opportunities available to women, in their post, “Mixed in Classification: The Paradox of Gender Roles in Media and the Mobilization of Women at Camp Adair.” Finally, Alam, McMillan, and Scalet wanted to learn more about “PX girls” and other kinds of women’s labor at Camp Adair, resulting in their post, “Image versus Reality: Women in the Camp Adair Sentry.”

In a related post, Collins, Cunningham, and Lake discuss the prominence of women as entertainers for servicemembers both at Camp Adair and at Oregon State College. In “Dances, Bands, and Pageants: Women and Entertainment at Camp Adair,” they argue that whether as nurturers reminding of the comforts of home or as objects of femininity, beauty, and sexuality, they found, women were enlisted during the war to maintain soldiers’ morale. Meanwhile, an exploration of the Oregon State Barometer led another group to focus on campaigns to promote women’s physical fitness at OSC during the war. While not directly about Camp Adair, the post “Promoting Physical Heath for Women at Oregon State College during World War II” by Blair, Matteo, and Zhang highlights yet another way that the war affected both ideas about and the experiences of women. The group found significant urgency around women’s physical conditioning, both as a way to fulfill wartime labor demands and as a general duty.

Moving forward in time, two groups were drawn to explore women’s roles at the first Adair Village, which the area was dubbed when it housed married OSC students in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They started with Dan Poling’s 1956 dissertation about that first Adair Village, which mentioned a Mothers Club. Students noted Poling’s reference to a newsletter, The Community Spirit, which archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton uncovered in SCARC’s collections. McCarville, Buresh, and Howell, in their post “The First Adair Village: Women at OSC’s Postwar Married Student Housing,” noted its homemade quality, which was starkly different from the more professional, military-produced Camp Adair Sentry. Students in both groups documented the activities of the Mothers Club as evidenced in The Community Spirit and a 1949 Adair Village Directory. Bransetter, Kreitzer, and Miller looked for evidence of the club and its officers in OSC yearbooks and the Barometer and they were surprised to find little. They conclude therefore that most members were wives of male students rather than students themselves. They also suggest in their post “Adair Village Mothers Club: Invisible Community Builders in the Postwar Era,” that women’s community-building activities, while crucial to the well-being of Adair Village families, did not seem to qualify as news on campus. Both groups’ findings raised questions about the longer history of women’s community building labor. Under what circumstances have government and public institutions committed to providing social supports for families and for which families, for example, and how has community building changed as women’s roles have changed?

At the end of class, we discussed how students’ findings related to the broader content of the course, which emphasized how women’s lives and ideas about gender have always shaped and been shaped by been shaped by race and ethnicity, sexuality, class, and other axes of difference. There is still much to discover about the mostly white, economically secure, and able-bodied women whose lives intersected with Camp Adair. At the same time, it will take a different set of methods and sources to find women who do not fit those categories. I look forward to engaging new groups of students in this work.