Join the WAC Now, three choices and a map

Join the WAC Now! is a 1944 U.S. Army recruiting sheet for the Women's Army Corps. Photographs and a map of nine Service Commands sit under three headlines offering a choice of job, branch, and station (NAID 514054).

What the sheet prints

The layout is yellow and black panels, closer to a brochure than a painted poster. Two photographs show women at work, one at radio equipment beside a sergeant and one at a laboratory bench. A map of the country is divided into nine numbered Service Command areas. The copy is a menu.

Choose
your job
from 239 types of
Army work

Choose your
branch of service
Army Air Forces, Army Ground Forces
or Army Service Forces

Choose
your station
in the Service Command
where you enlist

JOIN THE WAC NOW !

★ GET FULL DETAILS AT U.S. ARMY RECRUITING STATION ★

OR — ASK POSTMASTER FOR FREE POST CARD AND MAIL IT TODAY

[imprint:] P-X-43—RPB—1-12-44—25M

Who issued it

The issuer is the U.S. Army, Women's Army Corps recruiting. No artist is named; the images are photographs. The blank strip was for a local recruiting office to stamp its address. The free post card through the postmaster gave a second route for anyone without a station nearby.

How to read it

The sheet sells choice. Job, branch, and station are each offered as the recruit's decision. The archive tags it card stacking, because the options are listed and the costs are not: no hardship, no risk, no word on what happens if the Army's needs and the recruit's choice differ.

That criticism is fair, and it applies to almost every recruiting sheet ever printed. What is worth noting on the other side is the premise. Men of the same age were being drafted. Women were being asked. The sheet competes for a volunteer by promising her a say in how she serves. In a war fought mostly by conscripts, a service that had to win its members by persuasion is a small piece of the voluntary principle surviving.

Other women's service appeals from the same year are the Navy's To Make Men Free for the WAVES and the Army Nurse Corps sheet. Civilian war work for women is on the War Manpower Commission page. The poster agencies are on the Office of War Information hub. How Army recruiting fit into the rest of the war government, Executive Order 9066 included, is the subject of the Roosevelt administration essay.