About the use of lipstick in American culture during World War II,
"Wearing makeup during World War II sometimes indicated overly sexual, manipulated women (...) For others, makeup suggested a woman intimately bound to sex, prostitution and rape, for whom lipstick signified their regrettable victimization, or an iconic woman who was more advertisement for a well-wrought nation than real, vocal flesh and spirit. But there was, I contend, another woman in this wartime picture, evoked in the words of army nurse Ruth Haskell. Makeup could be a sign of female agency, that included sexual power and citizenship and as such was disruptive of wartime's masculine codes of power."
