Women of the Homefront

Lois A. Ferguson was a training teacher for college graduates at a Japanese relocation center in California. Her husband set up a junior college and night school program. Their efforts were to help relieve the injustices done to fellow citizens. Kay Watson's husband fought in Europe while Kay worked at one of the sites of a secret government project known as the Manhattan Project; she later learned that she might have played a small part in the plan to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mary L. Appling was a librarian in a California high school when she met Hugh Appling, a serviceman just returned from the war; together, they worked in Foreign Service for the United States for nearly thirty years, a direction affected by their actions during World War II.

The recollections of these three women and 52 others are edited and presented by Pauline Parker, who also endured the war. Many women had life changing experiences during this turbulent time -- Parker has gathered the personal stories of such women as marines and government workers as well as single mothers whose husbands had gone off to fight.