Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America

Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America — page 9
PREFACE Thornton Morrison He is noted near the bottom There are numerous messages to her friend Betty Crawford These entries vary from the frivolous Look at the long haired lad in the row ahead and Oh this is deadly evidently con cerning a boring lecture in history class to the conversational Are you going to Northwestern next quarter to the epic Germany Declared War This Morning As an anthropology major at the University of Chicago Joan was told quite seriously by one of her male professors that the only way a woman could become an anthropologist was to marry one Joan would have seen these journals with the eye of an anthropologist She believed that everyone has a story even though he or she may not yet realize what it is As she presciently wrote on October 19 1941 To understand one’s story is to weep with pity In her school notebooks for her History 201 class Joan jotted down information from Allan Nevins’s The Gateway to History 1938 and reminds herself to read some chapters in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Then she wrote The true historian puts into history his imagination and the projection of his own soul into the facts Interestingly Nev ins became the so-called father of oral history the kind of historian Joan became later in life In a way this book is her own oral history unearthed from file cabinets not accessed for decades She pours her soul into the events that transpire on the world stage Robert Maynard Hutchins the president of the Univer sity of Chicago at the time was an idol for Joan as her journal makes clear When she heard his speech The Proposition Is Peace The Path to War Is a False Path to Freedom on the radio in March 1941 she enthusiastically embraced its xv