TOW #5: Visual Text

In this visual text, a U.S. propaganda poster from World War One, one can see the extremely patriotic and sometimes far reaching nature of wartime propaganda in the early twentieth century. The poster, not necessarily authored but instead published by the United States Treasury Department, shows its bias in authorship through its creation by a government agency for government motivations. The poster was created in 1918 as the United States entered the First World War. Like any country in a time of war, the United States was in need of support from all of its citizens, men and women alike, and in this case was in need of monetary support. Monetary support in this poster would appear to come in the form of War Savings Stamps, stamps marketed to the common American that supported the military and that could be transferred into war bonds. This advert targets women of the United States as its audience, and its purpose is to convince women to buy war bonds by means of showing how ordinary women could "save" their country by doing so. In order to do this, the poster ineffectively employs a comparison of Joan of Arc to average American women in a way that seems forced and unintentionally comical. The text on the poster reads "Joan of Arc saved France--Women of America save your country--Buy War Savings Stamps" and has a picture of a woman in armor who is assumedly Joan of Arc. The comparison is lack luster and stretched at best, comparing two completely unrelated things under the pretext that they both involve women and war. The image Joan of Arc as a strong female war figure and comparison of her to every day Americans attempts to invoke feelings of female patriotism, but it falls flat as Joan of Arc is an outmoded and French, not American, example of female empowerment. In addition to the out of touch use of Joan of Arc, the fact that the image is used to show how women could be similar to her by buying stamps is even more outrageous. Joan of Arc "saved" her country through her religious fervor and questionable military knowledge (she was fourteen, she couldn't know much) while women of American can "save" (according to the poster) their country by buying stamps. The fact that America was not in need of saving at the time of this poster (America was not under attack during WWI) as well as the fact that stamps could not save America in general, shows that this poster is overreaching in its abilities and comically bombastic in its claims, and thus ineffective in its use of rhetoric to serve its purpose.