IB History Domestic Impact of the Second World War on One Country in the Americas Key Definitions

When women take on roles traditionally held by men (such as wartime industrial work) while also maintaining their traditional responsibilities (such as childcare and managing the household). Women in post-revolutionary Cuba and Communist China experienced this contradiction between official equality and lived reality.

An African American wartime campaign demanding victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism within the United States.

The transition from military production and wartime controls back toward civilian goods, peacetime employment, and consumer markets.

The granting of the right to vote. In the context of the suffrage movement, it refers to extending voting rights to women. In the Canadian Indigenous context, it had a different meaning: the process by which an Indigenous person gave up their legal status and rights as an Indigenous person in exchange for Canadian citizenship.

The approach of working within existing political and legal systems to achieve gender equality through legislation, litigation, and lobbying.

A system in which permanent military, intelligence, diplomatic, and executive institutions play a central role in government even outside declared wartime.

A war in which all of a country's resources are mobilised: political, educational, scientific, technological, cultural, industrial, and economic. The First World War was the first conflict in which total war was fully realised by the major powers.

African-American military pilots who trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama during the Second World War. The 99th Pursuit Squadron, nicknamed 'the Red Tails', served as fighter escorts in North Africa and Europe, challenging assumptions about African-American capability in combat roles.

The largest New Deal agency, established in 1935, which employed millions of unemployed Americans in public works projects and cultural production. Its arts divisions included the Federal Art Project, Federal Writers' Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Music Project, which together employed thousands of artists, writers, actors, and musicians. The WPA produced murals, state guidebooks, plays, and recordings that documented Depression-era America, and was dissolved in 1943.