Projects

Eastern State Penitentiary—opened in 1829 and closed in 1970—operated throughout nearly every major conflict in modern American history: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Vietnam War. The inmate population mirrored a typical military population—in large part made up of young working class men.

War has always upended women’s lives; left at the home front to care for their families and returning soldiers in a society where all of the usual economic and social structures have disappeared. But by the onset of World War I, women were poised to play a more active role than that of the homemaker struggling to hold families and some semblance of civil society together with diminished resources.

An overview of three girls' series books that had heroines who participated in the war effort at home and abroad.