Visitors to the museum enter the Home Front U.S.A. exhibit through a recreation of the entrance to Pensacola's Isis Theater, where a sailor flirts with a girl at the ticket booth and a magazine on the newsstand features movie actor Clark Gable in uniform. In the age before television sets in every living room, movie theaters played newsreels before feature films, giving the public a glimpse of the happenings overseas.

The entry of so many men into the Armed Forces during World War II sparked a social revolution in America, with women like these working on a PBY Catalina at Naval Air Station (NAS) Corpus Christi, Texas, entering the work force. From aircraft factories to shipyards to any number of machine shops that formed the arsenal of democracy, women old and young, married and unmarried, black and white, punched the clock. Their symbol was Rosie the Riveter, her name borrowed from a song of that title that appeared in 1943. Her likeness was created on canvas by the acclaimed artist Norman Rockwell for a Saturday Evening Post cover and in a poster for Westinghouse by J. Howard Miller. All told, by 1944 a total of twenty million American women were at work supporting the war effort.

Image in the collection of the Library of Congress

Interspersed with period movie posters in the lobby of the replica movie theater of the Home Front U.S.A. exhibit are small displays devoted to facets of home front life. Whether collected by roving armies of schoolchildren or thrown in makeshift bins, old pots and pans donated by Americans became airplanes and vehicles, a tangible link between the home front and the battles waged overseas in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific.

Amid the traffic congestion inherently part of New York City life even in a time of gas rationing, pedestrians pass by a collection point for pots and pans contributed to support the war effort.

Image in the collection of the Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.