Our Lady of Perpetual Desire: Religious Discourses of the American Pin-Up Girl in World War II

This thesis is an exploration of how the iconography, consumption, and meaning of World War II pin-ups resemble religious discourses; demonstrating that U.S. soldiers’ interactions with pin-ups mirror the ways that Catholics worship icons of saints and the Virgin Mary. To reach this conclusion, first popular World War II pin-up images such as the Varga Girl, Hurrell photographs, Rita Hayworth’s Life pin-up, and Betty Grable’s pin-up are analyzed in terms of their composition. How soldiers’ consumed these pin-ups are evident in photographs of GIs lives during World War II where pin-ups are seen in battlefields, military bases, and painted on planes. Looking at soldiers’ writing about women in publications like Yank: The Army Newspaper, Life, and Esquire during the war shows how they idolized these women and saw them as protectors, paralleling the ways that Catholics in the war looked to the Virgin Mary for protection and forgiveness. Through examining the relationship between the soldierly gaze, women’s bodies, the inter-religious atmosphere of WWII America, and the meanings that soldiers placed onto pin-ups, I offer an unexplored view of the significance of World War II pin-ups. I locate this innovative approach within the larger trend in Western history in which women’s bodies are deployed as vessels for men’s symbols, metaphors, and ideas.