Forgotten Men and Fallen Women

During the Great Depression and into the war years, the Roosevelt administration sought to transform the political, institutional, and social contours of the United States. One result of the New Deal was the emergence and deployment of a novel set of narratives¿reflected in social scientific case studies, government documents, and popular media¿meant to reorient relationships among gender, race, sexuality, and national political power. In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women, Holly Allen focuses on the interplay of popular and official narratives of forgotten manhood, fallen womanhood, and other social and moral archetypes. In doing so, she explores how federal officials used stories of collective civic identity to enlist popular support for the expansive New Deal state and, later, for the war effort.These stories, she argues, had practical consequences for federal relief politics. The "forgotten man," identified by Roosevelt in a fireside chat in 1932, for instance, was a compelli