T H E W A R

Movies, music and shorter hemlines eased the stresses of war, and women began to demand equality in all areas of life.

The war years tore people and countries apart, then later brought them together again in an even stronger bond. People learned to make sacrifices during the war. Families said good-bye to loved ones who went off to fight. Women made do without cosmetics, stockings and fabric for new clothes, creating makeup from the juice of red beets and new fashions using potato sacks. The British government urged women not to wear high heels in order to save wood. Fashion designers rose to the task and raised hemlines and designed the bikini bathing suit to conserve on fabric. A generation of more confident women started demanding equality across the board. Countries in Europe finally gave women the right to vote and most western countries welcomed women into the work force. Unmarried women between the ages of twenty and thirty were called up for war work in Britain. Advertisers started using sex to sell their products and the pin up girls were launched. Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable became household names. Attitudes toward homosexuality started to relax- it was decriminalised in Sweden, and the US War Department recommended discharge and treatment instead of court martial. War themes understandably dominated films throughout the '40s, reflecting the world's fears and hopes. Onscreen couples such as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, and Judy Garland and Robert Walker portrayed both the serious and lighter sides of life during the war. Big band music topped the charts and people danced to bandleaders Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo and Artie Shaw. The Ink Spots, Vaughn Monroe, and Perry Como crooned their way into the hearts of listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Frank Sinatra became a teen idol, and later in the decade Nat King Cole soothed wounded hearts. The Andrews Sisters, Doris Day, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald represented the females in '40s music. The end of the war was a joyous time and the start of the baby boom in the United States. Couples long separated reunited with abandon-with the predictable result of the largest rise in the birthrate ever recorded.

THE SILVER SCREEN

In the cinemas, in addition to war love stories such as Casablanca, suspense and lighthearted films also drew in filmgoers. Director Alfred Hitchcock gave us Rebecca and Spellbound.Meet Me in St. Louis let viewers fall in love with Judy Garland all over again, and the Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life, still touches our hearts every year. In Europe, Jean Cocteau's poetic masterpiece La Belle et la Bete appeared. And this was the decade that the epic Les Enfants du Paradis was finally released, after an extraordinary production-not only was it the most expensive film to date, but it was made during the Occupation in France with hundreds of resistance fighters working undercover as extras.

BETWEEN THE PAGES

The 1940s was a decade for books that would become staples in high school and college literature courses, with classics such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway) and You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe). Evelyn Waugh found fame with Brideshead Revisited, a depiction of love and student life at Oxford University in the late twenties. Early sex manuals such as Living with a Husband and Liking It, The Function of the Orgasm, and The Hygiene of Marriage began to make an appearance.

PEOPLE

The decade brought us some notable pairings. Ronald Reagan married film star Jane Wyman. Marilyn Monroe married for the first time in this decade, as did Elizabeth Taylor. Laurence Olivier was divorced by his first wife on the grounds of adultery with his onscreen lover Vivien Leigh. Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and was granted an extra hundred clothing coupons for her dress. And while one famous German