Japanese American internment camps: effect upon wartime and post-war male and female gender roles within family and community

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to educate readers about a topic that often is overlooked and to provide additional information and offer a new interpretation about the transformation of gender roles from Japanese American men and women who were sent to internment camps during WWII. Much historical literature written on gender and women during World War II in concentration camps has ignored the Japanese American experience. In part, because the gender analysis did not exist in the 1940's, postwar studies are only recently beginning to explore the effects of internment and the impact it had on the Japanese American family. In this study, I find that internment camps created greater levels of equality between men and women that were unprecedented and not in the offing within the Japanese American community prior to their state incarceration. Evidence presented here suggests these changes would have taken place at a much slower pace had the wartime experience been different. Internment and isolation accelerated the change. This research matters because living in a post September 11th world, we must not repeat the same mistakes. The United States was founded on freedom, and to incarcerate a population based on their ethnic ancestry neglected fundamental principles of American democracy. The Japanese American lives were economically destroyed, emotionally damaged, and cultural traditions devastated all because of racial prejudice and wartime hysteria. In addition, this paper will explore how families functioned, or did not, and the government impact on families. Japanese Americans were the only ethnic group interned, some may say that this will never happen again, but it happened before, it could happen again.