In this premiere episode of World War S.H.E., hosts Mary Ellen Page, Robin LaCorte, and Angélica Cordero, introduce themselves, along with the remaining project contributors of the Rosies, and their connections to World War II before delving into topics related to women's roles during the war. This episode sets the stage for their exploration of the human experiences and forgotten aspects of World War II, seen through the lens of women. From the influences of their personal family experiences to their diverse background as historians, the hosts unpack their perspectives on the war. The discussion includes an exploration of societal changes during and after the war, the overlooked impact of women in various industries and roles (from the Rosies and the labor force, to women's contribution in academics, military, and more), and the continued resonance of the war's events in present times. They also provide context for Veteran's Day and conclude by introducing their future plans for the next episode to focus on the theme ‘Rosie the Riveter’.
This episode was recorded November 11, 2023. Transcript included below.
Chapters
00:02 Introduction and Hosts' Background
00:27 The Passion for World War II
03:36 The Team Behind the Project
08:32 The Role of Women in History
10:42 The Impact of World War II on Women
19:22 The Evolution of Rosie the Riveter
32:52 The Significance of Veteran's Day
35:15 Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode
Transcript
[00:00:00] Mary Page: Greetings and welcome to World War S.H.E., a podcast that shares the human experiences and the forgotten aspects of World War II that rocked the world then and still echoes today.
Hi, I'm Mary Ellen Page and I'm here today with Robin LaCorte and Angélica Cordero, and we would so like to welcome you to our premiere episode of World War S.H.E. where we're going to take you on the adventures and stories of World War II and how it still impacts our world today.
You know, my passion for World War II started when I saw the movie Patton at the age of 10. It was so long ago; it actually had an intermission. But after that film, I became fascinated with the battles and personalities of World War II. And I also have a special love of World War II films and books, and I'm obsessed with World War II aircraft. What about you, Robin?
[00:00:48] Robin LaCorte: So, I'm Robin. Hello everyone. My passion for World War II came through my father, who was…actually, it was my stepfather who was a World War II veteran. He was in the Navy and enlisted at 15, ‘cause they did those things in those days. And I just fell in love with the whole history as I've gotten a little older, revisiting it, which is just, you know, an exciting time in my life.
[00:01:15] Mary Page: Hello, Angélica.
[00:01:17] Angélica Cordero: I'm Angélica Cordero, and I got into World War II studies, actually, haphazardly. Mostly because my grandfather passed away and I actually used studying the war to grieve him, which I know is really kind of weird for a lot of people. It has been just a blooming blossom that continues to never end in how much it gives and sucks me in to want to study even more.
I know that we each have different backgrounds. I personally work in the entertainment field doing a lot of development and research for podcasts and movies and TV shows and so forth. And you and Robin have a widely different background. Your days look very different. Mary, let us know a little bit about what you do.
[00:02:10] Mary Page: Well, currently I am the gallery coordinator at the Arizona Jewish Historical Society which is currently in the middle of a $25 million capital campaign to build a Holocaust education center because Phoenix is the fifth largest city in America, but the only city of its size that doesn't have a Holocaust education center. Honestly, working in this field and also being on the ground floor of a brand new education center and also on the content committee is really exciting times.
[00:02:39] Robin LaCorte: Well done, Mare. So, what I do is, I took a little bit of a leap of faith. Mary and I kind of came out of school and worked together for a bit of time. And I found out that there was this amazing opportunity, a one-of-a-kind job offering for a Holocaust education program coordinator. unfortunately, it was located two hours away at another university, Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, Arizona. I decided to go for it and a year and a half later, I'm a part time resident of Flagstaff, part time resident of the valley, and I move back and forth and work with teachers implementing quality and appropriate Holocaust education throughout the state of Arizona. Pinch me, I'm lucky.
[00:03:25] Mary Page: I feel the exact same way. It's so gratifying working in Holocaust education because it is about human rights as much as it is about the Holocaust.
But it's not just the three of us. We have three other ladies that will be joining us periodically. Julia Gimbel who is an author and a researcher, and a jeweler and one of the most talented women I've ever met. She wrote a book called Student Sailor Skipper…
[00:03:53] Robin LaCorte: Survivor.
[00:03:55] Mary Page: She used her own father's experiences in World War II for the framework for that.
[00:04:01] Robin LaCorte: That's right. Another one of our gals is Laura Bailey. And Laura is the O.G. of the modern Rosies, our group of six of us who kind of came together organically. Laura has a little bit of a different background. She kind of is a real modern-day Rosie in that she runs a machinist manufacturing business in North Carolina. And so, one of her claims to fame is if somebody wanted to have a Higgins boat made today, her company could do it. She's kind of a boss babe.
[00:04:39] Mary Page: Absolutely.
[00:04:40] Angélica Cordero: Laura's also doing a lot of oral history with World War II Veterans and is also in the process of writing a book for one of them. Isn't that right?
[00:04:50] Mary Page: Yes. About a GI named Vern Schmidt.
[00:04:53] Angélica Cordero: Yeah. And then our third lady, or our sixth lady is Carys Caffarel. She's our preservation queen. She used to work at the National museum for World War II in New Orleans working directly with the artifacts, which is really just so mind bogglingly cool. Her undergrad's in anthropology. She went to LSU and currently is working in geographic information systems at a cultural resource management firm in New Orleans.
I had to look up what GIS was for a second there to be like. I think I know what this is, but I'm not sure…those crazy maps that you see everywhere that show the different spatial, um, things geographically. I'm going to totally mess this one up.
[00:05:44] Mary Page: No, my son does GIS work and it's basically, you know, topography and ditches and parking lots and stuff. A lot to do with construction and the lay of the land, so to speak.
[00:05:55] Angélica Cordero: They aren't with us today, but in episodes to come, you'll meet the rest of the team.
[00:05:59] Mary Page: And the team got together in a really beautifully, organically, wonderful way. We are all graduates of Arizona State University's World War II Studies Master's program. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans and ASU collaborated to create this online master's program. And it was through this program that each of us met.
We actually are in daily contact with each other. It was actually the best thing to come out of the World War II studies program besides all this fabulous knowledge and just learning this tremendous history. To have these women. We've called ourselves the Rosies. We always say hello, Rosies. Our WhatsApp group is called the Rosie's. So, we've very much identify with Rosie the Riveter and the many iterations of Rosie.
[00:06:47] Angélica Cordero: The entire idea of what this podcast is all about is for us to be able to talk more openly and more frequently about the things that we spend way too much time on when it comes to the Second World War. But the other really great and exciting thing about this is that we want to do it from the female perspective and focus on stories or histories that haven't necessarily been given their due diligence in the spotlight or that we know about. That's what World War S.H.E. is all about.
[00:07:21] Mary Page: It is got a double meaning. It means that you're hearing World War II history through the lens of women, but we're also going to be doing a lot of concentrating on telling the story of the war through women's stories. I think we're going to really be exploring a lot of different aspects of World War II and how it still affects all of us today.
[00:07:44] Robin LaCorte: Right. I know one of the things that I've always struggled with is, especially in education, is that World War II and the Holocaust are often viewed as uniquely independent subjects when really, they are so intertwined and so enmeshed in each other it's impossible to separate. I've never quite understood why it is that we don't talk about them together. I'm here to kind of rectify that a little bit.
[00:08:12] Angélica Cordero: Yeah, I'm very excited. I can't wait to actually have those conversations with you, Robin, and Mary as well. I know that you guys do spend quite a bit of your time specifically in Holocaust studies.
You know, having six female World War II historians on this one project is really very unique. We were talking much earlier before we even started recording today about how we don't really typically think of women as historians. I came across a demographic, statistic that basically said that of all the historians in the United States, about a little over half of them are women. And that didn't used to always be the case.
So, I pulled it a study that I wanted to share with you guys. In 2010, the American Historical Association said that in 1990, representation of women in history was half the representation of women in all academic disciplines with women accounting for 32% of all faculty in higher ed and just 17 in history. So, it's a big deal that we're doing this podcast with the six of us. I know that over the years I've read other studies that have said that the profession as a historian has actually grown, but it's also lost a lot in the last few years too.
[00:09:35] Mary Page: It's also how women are portrayed in history books as well. I just finished reading a book called Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. This was written in ‘92 and every woman in there was always, her description was predicated on how beautiful or unbeautiful she was. And it had nothing to do with the Nuremberg trials, and there were women working on that.
And so, it's not just having women tell the stories. It's also rectifying how women have been portrayed historically in books and theater and film and documentaries. It's really a huge, huge subject.
[00:10:15] Robin LaCorte: Yeah. Dare I say, and add to, not just portrayed, but how they've been valued over the course of time in literature, in film, and all of the things that you just mentioned. I think it's hysterical in some ways because we've always been there. We've always been there. We're not any smarter or any less smart than we were then. And yet here we are all coming together to talk about this same subject these many years later.
One of the things that I love most about the six of us is, having been through the master's program together, it's like we've all read the same books. So, we start from a place of knowledge that a lot of people in podcasting, perhaps, don't have that baseline knowledge the way that we do. Not that we're brilliant, but we're pretty smart.
[00:11:06] Angélica Cordero: Yeah. The other thing too that's interesting to the same conversation is also the representation of communities like the queer community and other minorities like the Asian population also Hispanic or Latinx Americans as well. I mean, all over the gamut when you think about it.
[00:11:25] Robin LaCorte: African American.
[00:11:27] Angélica Cordero: African Americans. Oh, I mean, incredibly so. I think a lot about the concentration camps the United States when Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents also were forced to surrender all of their property and be moved into the middle of nowhere to these camps were everywhere. And a lot of people don't all know that there were German families that were in there, that there were Italian families in there as well. A lot because of the fact that they were all unfortunately associated to the Axis powers at the time.
What are y'all's perspectives on how female historians particularly might have a different, or offer a different perspective than male historians?
[00:12:12] Robin LaCorte: Ooh, we could get into some dicey areas with that.
[00:12:15] Mary Page: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Robin LaCorte: I'm Sure. It's hard because we don't want to stereotype ourselves, nor do we want to stereotype men, but we just look at things maybe a little bit differently. I think there's a beauty in that that brings a whole new facet of information to us. Considering the time and considering where women's rights were at the time, or lack of rights, I might want to add to that. How they started perhaps to be able to come out and be from behind the shadow of their men and, and take the spotlight, take the lead position. And then post war, how they were once again relegated back to that suburbia, quintessential mom, wife, “This is your job” environment. They busted out in the forties and then the fifties came around and things kind of slid back into place, if you will.
[00:13:17] Mary Page: Even with those small but significant gains during the war, there's also these stories… People don't really view this, but in World War II, and in the earlier wars, but even still today, many of the victims are women and children. And they're not just victims because it's mostly men that go to war, or at least did in World War II. They became widows or they became orphans. You've got this entire subject about how basically women on a lot of the and the, and the after effects of war. Remember in class we were told that after World War II, that basically the government expected the wives to kind of rehabilitate the men's, you know, PTSD and that kind of stuff.
There’s just all of this depth the women's experience in the war that just hasn't been explored.
[00:14:12] Angélica Cordero: Mm-Hmm. One of the things throughout the program that I thought was pervasive, at least for me it was, was the difference between what the gentleman in our program were more interested in than what I found myself to be interested in. Particularly the thing that always screams out to me is that I was really fascinated about the psychology of soldiers and I was really fascinated by migration patterns that were happening, specifically in the United States. The way that the war actually changed our nation and the way that it looks today is directly because of the war. Mary, you and I talk about this all the time, is about supply chain stuff, which I don't think anyone really thinks about when they talk about the war, but I am constantly finding myself so fascinated by how they moved people around, how they moved supplies around, and…
[00:15:13] Mary Page: You cannot win a war without a healthy supply chain and also a knowledge of how supply chains work. That was one of the worst, the most…you know, one of the reasons why the Germans lost is because of logistics. But it's also, it's not just food, it's people migration.
[00:15:31] Angélica Cordero: Well, and honestly the other thing too is that as a part of the migration stuff we really kind of ignore and neglect the history of war production cities in the United States. And don't even really realize that a lot of the major metros that we have now, actually back then, were war production cities.
I've talked to people about the cross also between the war production cities and homelessness now. What do we see from then? Because there were housing issues during the war time that a lot of people don't know about. There was a lot of strikes that were happening too. There were riots that were happening. There's so little that's actually paid attention to on the home front that it reminds me a lot of those differences from what our colleagues were wanting to talk about from a war perspective, military strategy and battle. And I'm not trying to say that none of that matters or none of it is interesting. It's just that it's so funny that we seem to spend so much time on that aspect of the war and ignore the other aspects.
[00:16:41] Mary Page: And you know, remember when women started going back to work, juvenile delinquency started going up. There's all this romantic talk about how the entire country came together and we produced planes and ships and this and that, but you know what? There was a lot of absenteeism during that.
And, as you said, there were strikes, there were racial problems too, because at least during the war, the races were somewhat more equal. It didn't last. There's just all these layers to the home front. You're right that people just don't know about it.
[00:17:15] Robin LaCorte: I was just going to say, I think that we tend to wax poetic with time and we romanticize so much of the reality of [the war]. But the reality was that it wasn't pleasant and everybody was struggling and there wasn't enough food. And a lot of people don't even realize that rationing, it wasn't on our home front, but in the UK and in England, rationing didn't stop until 1955. Ten years post war, they were still in a recovery mode and still dealing with ration cards and limited goods for the populace. They couldn't feed their own people after the war.
[00:17:53] Angélica Cordero: Safe to say half the reason why a women's perspective on the war history is so different is because we're looking at things that are have long-term effects. I'm not saying that guys don't see that, but for some reason or another it does seem like that's a pretty typical viewpoint when it comes to the male perspective.
[00:18:13] Robin LaCorte: We have different perspectives. There's no question about it. We look at things in different
[00:18:18] Angélica Cordero: They're all needed. That's the other thing.
[00:18:21] Robin LaCorte: Absolutely. Absolutely.
When you guys were talking about the home front and development of towns and places, one of the things I learned when I moved to Flagstaff to take this job is that Flagstaff had an Ordinance Depot and that a lot of people came down from the Native American reservations to work at that depot. Prior to that, they had not lived in Flagstaff. It changed the trajectory of how their lives were lived. and People who otherwise would never have come in and, come together in a mutual effort. Again, it wasn't all, moonlight and roses, but it changed the way the demographics of even this small town was, and it grew the town, it brought people in.
[00:19:04] Angélica Cordero: Earlier Mary mentioned about how we like to call ourselves the Rosies, and maybe we should take a minute to explain. What is a Rosie? What's a Rosie to you? What was it before [the Master’s program] and what is it now?
[00:19:21] Mary Page: Oh, I like that. I would say before the program, it was the traditional Rosie the Riveter, the woman making B17s and carriers and that kind of thing. In the overalls and the red polka dot, you know, beret, so to speak. After that, actually, Angelica, you've really helped influence me with this as well, is that we're all Rosie's, you know. If you were a WAC (Women's Army Corps) or a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), well you were a Rosie, you know. If you were a Red Army soldier, a female soldier on the front lines, well, in your way you were a Rosie. And so, I look at a pretty expansive opinion about, it's basically, I think part of what Rosie symbolizes to me is equality. I look at her as an equality symbol. I look at her as part of the beginning of the modern-day women's movement. I look at Rosie somewhat through a feminist lens. So, that's why I love her. Yeah.
[00:20:19] Robin LaCorte: I was just going to catapult off of what you said in terms of equality. To me the word that stands out is opportunity. It was a chance for women who perhaps had wanted to do something different with their lives other than being a nurse, teacher, a mother, and a nurse and teacher only until they could become a mother because you really couldn't work afterwards. You had to stay home and your new responsibility is to take care of your babies.
One of the revelations for me was realizing my grandmother, who was just an amazing, amazing human being… When my grandfather went off to war, she was at home and she immediately went into working in a cafeteria for Mobile Oil.
Well, we all know that oil was a hot commodity [during the war]. You don't go anywhere if you don't have oil. And so, what they did is they would bring in the men for the noontime meal and she was the cafeteria manager who literally made the most amazing meals for these men. And they would come in from the fields; they would eat whatever she had made for the day. She and her crew. Then, they could go back out with a sustained tummy and get back to work and champion getting the oil to where it needed to be. For me it was a realization that holy smokes, she was an early day Rosie as well. She just did, instead of doing it with a riveting gun, she did it with a wooden spoon and a spatula.
[00:21:54] Angélica Cordero: Yeah. You know, beforehand, before getting into the program, I remember spending most of my life being in absolute admiration of Rosie the Riveter. I think that I probably have way too much Rosie the Riveter merch that I've had over the course of my life. She definitely grew to be a symbol of equality for me as well, but also a symbol of empowerment.
This anything you can do; you can do it. Rosie did it and you can do it too. She was totally that icon for me before going into the program. My perspective changed in a broadened way, like Mary was saying.
I think that she became something much more to me in learning that…it sounds really silly. I should have known this. I should have known better. I think it's just indicative of the fact that we all make these oversights and assumptions on things and that we're all ignorant to a lot of things. It's not that we all know everything.
I don't know why in my mind I was like, “Women had never worked before. Women had come out and the war had brought women into the workplace!” And “Oh my God, it's amazing!”
[00:23:14] Mary Page: It's a surprise!
[00:23:15] Angélica Cordero: “It changed everything!” And, and I, I remember reading and, and being like, wait a minute. Of course women were working before the war. Of course. How could I forget the Industrial Revolution? How could I forget the tenements of New York City?
How could I forget that there were barmaids back in the day and sex workers? Let's be real. Sex work is work. So, there were plenty of prostitutes and “Ladies of the Night” beforehand.
[00:23:49] Mary Page: But also, all women are working women! You know, you have women who lived on farms in the 1800s and they had kids in the morning and they were picking
[00:23:56] Angélica Cordero: Right.
[00:23:57] Robin LaCorte: So, is it less about working and more about value?
[00:23:59] Mary Page: Or getting paid?
[00:24:01] Angélica Cordero: Maybe that's the case. Right? It was really telling to be in the program and to be reading more and more specifically about women in labor during the war period. That really kind of opened my eyes to this idea [that] women have always been doing this. We've just always been at it.
There's a really [popular]…Well, for me and I think other World War II historians, there's a really popular, I think it's a Saturday Evening Post cover [of a] woman who is carrying a ton of stuff on her back and she's basically pummeling forward. You see her [in] mid stride and everything that she's got on her back is a whole bunch of different things.
When you go into the editor's note for it, it basically lists 35 different jobs (Correction: It lists 31.) that that one picture is supposed to depict [of women at that time] and it was so true of women during the war period…that they were asked to do a million different things for the war effort.
[00:25:11] Robin LaCorte: Without losing sight of what they'd already been doing leading up to the [war].
[00:25:18] Mary Page: This also brings up the problem with history books, which is the complete absence of women in certain war stories. That's ridiculous. Of course, there were women working and healing [others] and that kind of thing. Something else that is really present is that you have these histories of war without any women's stories in them. So, it doesn't make it a complete story then.
[00:25:41] Angélica Cordero: Well, and I do think that when we think of World War II and we think of women, we definitely think of the WACs. We think of the WAVEs. We also think of women who were volunteers at USOs (United Service Organization). We think of celebrities that were also touring with the USO as well. We think of A League of Their Own. There's no crying in baseball, right? We think about them, but we don't think, “Oh, there were women lumberjacks. Oh, there were complete police forces in the country that were nothing but ladies. There were milk women. There were female bus drivers and trolley car drivers.” I mean, everything you can think of women had their hand in during the war period. And it’s really kind of unfortunate that for so long it's been overlooked.
Even what they did prior to it and knowing that not only were they working prior, but they were also fighting for their rights within labor as well. I think that also gets forgotten too.
[00:26:52] Robin LaCorte: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think about, and the name is going to escape me right now, but the group of African American women who in a record amount of time sorted a huge backlog of mail to get it to the soldiers. And, I should know this, I should have done a little more homework.
[00:27:09] Angélica Cordero: It’s the 6888!
[00:27:10] Robin LaCorte: I knew I could count one of you for that.
[00:27:15] Angélica Cordero: It’s one of my favorite stories. I love telling that story.
[00:27:17] Robin LaCorte: It’s a beautiful story and they're just now getting their due.
[00:27:21] Angélica Cordero: I know.
[00:27:22] Robin LaCorte: Nobody knew. I mean, they knew, and their families knew, but nobody in popular culture knew the contribution that they'd made. These guys are over there waiting for mail. There's this huge backlog. How many months back, do you remember, Angélica? How backlogged it was?
[00:27:39] Angélica Cordero: I mean, it was so bad that it was a warehouse full. That's what I remember reading.
[00:27:44] Robin LaCorte: Yeah. And they had it sorted and on its way. In a matter of like what, three days? Something like that.
[00:27:50] Angélica Cordero: Well, and the other really interesting part of that particular story is that at that point in time, there really weren't that many WACs that had been posted overseas. So then you have this huge squad of not just women, but African American women who were stationed overseas and it was really [unique].
[00:28:11] Mary Page: You know, what I've been thinking though, as we've been talking, all these women police forces, this and that, but it also shows you what a massive effort the war was [when you've got so many men overseas] that you needed women to complete police forces and women doing jobs that typically weren't allowed to them in industry, but also in the military. It showed just how massive this war was around the world, that it needed that many peoplee to participate.
[00:28:46] Angélica Cordero: Yeah.
[00:28:47] Robin LaCorte: Definitely.
[00:28:48] Angélica Cordero: To the thought that we were talking about when it comes to a women's or a female historian's perspective on the war versus a male one: another thing too that I find myself also really kind of fascinated by are the little things that we wouldn't think of that are modern day things that we don't realize came out of the World War II like GDP. The fact that GDP did not exist before World War II or the fact that…
[00:29:18] Robin LaCorte: Just so that everybody knows what that is.
[00:29:20] Angélica Cordero: Oh, gross domestic product. Ask me what it is and to explain how it works in economy. I don't know. I mean, I'm definitely not an economist. So, I'm not gonna get into any of that, but it was really just the fact that we didn't have economists even in our government [during the war]. That we didn't value them prior to World War II, which is a whole thing that also blew my mind as well.
[00:29:48] Robin LaCorte: No accounting system for the country.
[00:29:49] Mary Page: In that one class, basically it said it was economists who decided when D-Day was. [It wasn’t] the military. It wasn't the President. It was the economists.
[00:29:59] Robin LaCorte: And the weather.
[00:30:01] Angélica Cordero: And the weather! Which is a whole episode just to talk about the weather and [D-Day].
I feel like we've waxed poetically on this for a minute. I would hope that this conversation kind of shows and is a good indicator of what's to come in our future episodes, what we hope to do with this podcast.
[On another note, t]he other thing to [this project] when we think about it, when we consider the other ladies, is how we're all different ages. We're from all across the country. We've got West coast. We've got Northwest. We've got the South. We've got the East coast all covered and I think we've got, was it, four generations of people in our small little group.
[00:30:55] Robin LaCorte: Must you include that fact?
[00:30:57] Mary Page: Three, maybe. Four's getting a little insulting.
[00:31:00] Angélica Cordero: I'm sorry.
[00:31:02] Robin LaCorte: As the elder Stateswoman among the group, Mary, thank you.
[00:31:07] Mary Page: Yeah, I actually have been thinking of times where I need to pull the mom card. Like, “I'm the oldest. So, I get to decide where we're going out to dinner.” So, you know, just beware ladies.
[00:31:16] Robin LaCorte: I'm the second big sister. So, I'm gonna go with what she says.
[00:31:22] Mary Page: Actually, Angélica and I met because we were working on a project together. I had the voice and she had the tech background. So, we made beautiful podcasts together. And then Angélica invited…Actually, what's the actual order of things here now?
[00:31:40] Angélica Cordero: I think it was that I was suffering through one of the classes because of how much work was going on. And so I posted to our Master's programs Facebook page. Something basically like waving a white flag. “Help me, help me.” And then Carys reached out independently. Then we ended up creating just a small little WhatsApp group that kind of just blossomed over two semesters [that I think it took for us to get] all six of us in. And then it's been that since 2019.
[00:32:12] Mary Page: All of you out there in the audience, I hope that you're enjoying what you're hearing. We've already covered like 45 topics of World War II. In the future, we'll be doing it a little bit more specifically. But, I think you can understand where we're coming from, that we're trying to tell the story of World War II and its impacts today through the stories of women, the impact of women, and also pretty much [thought what] you would've learned because women have been an intricate part of almost every historical event. We'll be really exploring a lot of things.
[Now,] a little bit about today's date in history. Today is Veteran's Day and Angélica has found out some details about Veteran's Day.
[00:32:59] Angélica Cordero: Well, so here's a little history on Veteran's Day itself. In 1945, a World War II veteran, his name was Raymond Weeks, and he was from Birmingham, Alabama. He had an idea to expand Armistice Day (which was a day in celebration of World War II. Well, no, World War I Veterans. Excuse me.) to celebrate all veterans, not just those who had died in World War I.
[00:33:30] Robin LaCorte: Go Raymond!
[00:33:31] Angélica Cordero: I know. Mr. Weeks led a delegation to General Eisenhower, who was in massive support of the idea of creating a National Veterans Day. Mr. Weeks led the first national celebration in 1947 in Alabama–Sweet Home, Alabama–and he did so annually until his death in 1985. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan honored him with a presidential citizenship medal because he was the driving force behind it becoming a national holiday. So, Veteran's Day we have to thank for being in existence as a national holiday for all veterans to a World War II veteran.
[00:34:19] Robin LaCorte and Mary Page: Thank you Mr. Weeks.
[00:34:20] Mary Page: Veterans Day is on the 11th of November because the World War I Armistice was the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, and that is why it is celebrated on the 11th of November.
[00:34:34] Robin LaCorte: Trivial Pursuit. We got a winner. We got a winner.
[00:34:39] Angélica Cordero: Where did that come from? Where did the 11th of the 11th of the 11th come from?
[00:34:43] Mary Page: Well, I think that they signed the armistice at 11:00 AM on the 11th day of November.
[00:34:48] Angélica Cordero: See. Things that are new things that you learn every single day. Even as a master's degree student, you're always learning.
[00:34:57] Mary Page: You know what? I think if I can say anything about our group is that I've learned a lot about history from you as well. I hope that all of you out there in the audience have a friendship like this because it gives me such great joy. And, we're just pretty excited about our first ever episode of World War S.H.E.
So, we're wrapping it up today, ladies. And next time you'll hear from us, we'll be talking about Rosie the Riveter and all that that entails. And ladies, do you have anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up?
[00:35:34] Robin LaCorte: Just looking forward to the next one and getting more into the, getting literally more into the weeds of some of these stories that we've brought up today. You know, one of the things I thought when I started the master's program was “I'm going to be such an expert. I'm going to know so much about World War II.” And I do, but guess what?
There's a whole lot that I don't know. And that was one of my biggest takeaways was that I could spend the rest of my life learning and I still am not going to know everything [about the war’s history]. So, it's going to be fun to explore some of these lesser-known topics and to bring them forward to people who also don't know about them.
[00:36:12] Mary Page: That’s the exciting thing about history. There's always more to learn and so it's, you know, as we say, life-long learning.
[00:36:20] Robin LaCorte: Absolutely. We're going to put the her in history.
[00:36:24] Angélica Cordero: The Herstory!
[00:36:26] Robin LaCorte: There it is.
[00:36:28] Angélica Cordero: Well, if you've made it this long to listen to us. Hooray. You've listened to our entire episode all the way through! Congratulations, you and thank you so much for listening.
[00:36:40] Mary Page: And we hope you feel smarter!
[00:36:43] Angélica Cordero: Make sure that you connect with us. You can follow us on Instagram at WorldWarShe. Or you can subscribe to our newsletter on Substack at worldwarshe dot substack dot com.
[00:36:58] Robin LaCorte: If you have something that you want to know about, you know, just that little thing in the back of your mind that's been bugging you all these years about why, or who or what, shoot us an email at worldwarshepodcast at gmail dot com.
[00:37:15] Mary Page: So troops, we’ll see you next time when we get our next set of orders.
[00:37:19] Robin LaCorte: Yes ma'am.
[00:37:20] Angélica Cordero: Over and out.
An Introduction to World War S.H.E.