The mobilization of women in the United States during World War II. When the United States entered World War II, the need for increased production brought unprecedented numbers of women into the wage labor force. During the war, approximately 20 million women worked in defense production and civilian jobs; for 6.5 million of them, it was their first employment experience. For the first time in United States history, more married women than single women worked. In addition, the war brought a significant redistribution of women workers into jobs previously open only to men.
The War Manpower Division and the Office of War Information coordinated campaigns to encourage employers to hire women, to persuade the public that women should work, and to encourage women to work. Propaganda emphasized a woman’s patriotic duty to work and linked her war work to the safety and victory of American troops. Publicity materials also assured women that they would be able to maintain their femininity and even compared the jobs they would be doing to cutting out patterns in sewing or following a recipe in cooking. Although many women did work for the patriotic reasons encouraged by the government, many also worked because their families needed their wages.
The U.S. Congress also debated possible solutions to the labor shortage. In 1942, House Resolution 6806 proposed to require women 18 to 65 to register under the Selective Training and Service Act. Other bills were proposed in the Senate between 1942 and 1943, including Senate Bill 666, known as the Austin-Wadsworth Bill or National War Service Act, which would have required women between the ages of 18 and 50 to serve in whatever industrial or agricultural job they were assigned. Pregnant women, those with children under 18, and those with incapacitated dependents were to be exempt. In the ensuing debates about the proposals, there was little congressional discussion specifically about drafting women and more debate about questions of drafting any civilian for wartime work, the proper means to execute such a draft, whether the proposal was an attack on unions, and whether such a draft was needed. Although polls of society found a majority in favor of an industrial draft, no legislation came to a vote.
The more than 3 million women who worked in defense production came to be known as Rosie the Riveters. The number of African American women in industrial work quadrupled during the war, but these women were often hired for the dirtiest or most dangerous jobs. Many women with specialized training in fields such as mechanics, engineering, or mathematics were not hired in their fields but were employed in less skilled and lower-paying jobs (Hartmann 1982, 60, 80-82).
Women in industrial jobs typically worked a forty-eight-hour workweek, six days a week. Many worked overtime hours; vacations and most holidays were canceled for the war’s duration. All women workers felt intense pressure to perform well, both to ensure that faulty equipment did not result in a war death and to prove they were capable of doing the work traditionally done by men.
Few areas of defense production were untouched by women. Approximately 85,000 women, organized into the Women Ordnance Workers division, worked directly for the Ordnance Department, where they loaded and fired weapons to test equipment and ammunition. Other women worked in dangerous munitions factories, often located in rural areas, where they produced bombs and ammunition. Shipbuilding was a deep-rooted industry long accustomed to an all-male workforce and was slow to take on women, but the numbers of vessels needed for the war meant that women also went to work in shipyards. The relatively new aircraft industry quickly employed women to work on stamp presses and to rivet. Women also performed heavy work in the steel and mining industries. Most women who worked in the railroad industries held clerical positions. In addition, female industrial workers performed such jobs as operating cranes to move tanks and artillery, guarding plants, operating hydraulic presses, driving tractors along assembly lines, and fighting fires in industrial accidents.
The need for childcare was a problem faced by many women and one that was never adequately addressed by industry or the government. At the beginning of the war, Works Progress Administration nurseries operated in some areas, and they continued to be run throughout the war by the Federal Works Agency. These childcare centers cost nearly $50 million and enrolled 130,000 children in more than 3,000 locations but were unable to meet the increasing demand. In 1942 Congress passed the Lanham Act to provide funds for childcare centers in communities most affected by war production. These centers provided day-care and after-school care for children between 2 and 14 years of age and spent $51.9 million on 3,102 centers for 600,000 children. Nonetheless, the facilities were not sufficient for the estimated 4.5 million children under the age of 14 in need of daycare in 1944. In many instances working mothers were blamed for the problem of childcare and were encouraged to fix it themselves by establishing babysitting networks and volunteering in childcare centers.
Women work in a tool production plant, Chicago.
Throughout the war, no laws required equal pay for women workers. In 1944 the average salary for men was 50 percent higher than that for women. Part of the discrepancy derived from the low numbers of women in skilled and higher-paying positions, but even in unskilled positions women earned 20 percent less than did men in the same positions. Although polls showed a majority of the population supported equal pay for equal work and although the National War Labor Board ordered equal pay and frequently ruled in favor of equality in wage disputes, few employers paid equally. In some instances, employers segregated workers by gender so that they could say the workers performed different jobs. Although many of the women held union memberships, unions offered little wage protection.
For many women, though, the wages they earned were higher than what they had earned before the war or what they could earn in service jobs or office and sales work. Many women in civilian work, such as waitresses, teachers, and saleswomen, left their jobs for better-paying industrial jobs and consequently left their previous sectors short staffed. In addition, industrial jobs often provided benefits and social security, advantages that were especially valuable to African American women who left domestic service work for industry.
In addition to jobs in manufacturing or defense production, many women found wartime jobs in other sectors. In fact, approximately five times as many women worked in civilian employment than in the war industry, but much press coverage focused on women in war industry jobs. Many civilian positions previously closed to women were opened to them because of the labor shortage, including jobs as buyers and clerks in food stores, ushers in movie theaters, cashiers, drug clerks, elevator operators, meter readers, mail carriers, and cab drivers. At least 2 million women worked in clerical jobs, many in the federal government. Even women in the music industry found opportunities in all-girl bands.
Within the Office of Civilian Defense women directed salvage projects and blood drives, publicized victory gardens, ran the Civil Air Patrol, sold war bonds, and worked as ambulance drivers. In February 1945 there were 249 women in the Office of War Information’s Overseas Operations Branch. They were stationed in New York, San Francisco, and Hawaii, producing radio propaganda, newsreels, films, and various publications for use in enemy or neutral countries. In the Office of Strategic Services more than 4,000 women did clerical work, deciphered radio traffic, translated documents, and debriefed agents who had been behind enemy lines.
More than 3 million women over 18 years old worked in the Women’s Land Army either during their vacation time, for an entire summer, or for a few hours each day. By the summer of 1942 the proportion of women farmworkers had risen from 1 percent to 14 percent. These women were paid between $14 and $18 per week, much less than industrial women workers earned, especially considering that the average worker paid $10 per week for lodging and meals to the family with whom she lived or to the camp where she stayed. The Victory Farm Volunteers recruited close to 2.5 million high school girls for similar agricultural work from 1943 to 1945.
As the end of the war neared, the question arose as to what women working in industry and civilian jobs should do when the men returned. Beginning in 1943 the media ran articles encouraging women to leave their jobs at the end of the war and return to housework. Nevertheless, approximately 75 percent of respondents to a 1944—1945 survey said they expected to continue working after the war, including more than 50 percent of those who had been housewives before the war and more than 57 percent of married women who said they needed to keep working to support their families. Almost 95 percent of African American women expected to continue working after war (Hartmann 1982, 90).
By 1947 women had vacated 1 million factory jobs, 400,000 jobs in the federal government, 500,000 clerical positions, 300,000 jobs in commercial service, and 100,000 jobs in sales. Many women who remained in the wage labor force often did so by moving from blue-collar work to clerical jobs or jobs in the service sector. Even with the losses, however, nearly 17 million women remained in the labor force, a higher number than had been employed in 1940 (Hartmann 1982, 90-91).
In addition to work in the wage labor force, approximately 3.5 million volunteers worked in the Red Cross, shipping food parcels, collecting blood donations, aiding war refugees, acting as a communications link between families and relatives in the military, assisting servicemen and their families in filing for pensions and other benefits, and assisting wives and families of military personnel as they moved to different posts. The Production Department assembled and shipped kit bags containing soap, shoe cleaners, cigarettes, paper, and other goods to soldiers and prisoners of war and produced and shipped knitted garments to hospitals and civilian relief centers. Gray Ladies and nurse’s aides worked in understaffed military hospitals to help relieve the nursing shortage. Volunteers in the First Aid Department of the Red Cross offered courses to help the civilian population deal with medical emergencies.
By 1944 approximately 1.5 million women volunteers in the United Service Organizations (USO) had established more than 3,000 clubs in the United States and overseas to meet the recreational and social service needs of troops and their families. USO camp shows also presented performances of well-known entertainers to military personnel. In the USO, unlike many other organizations, African Americans were included as volunteers and staff and as participants in shows and audiences. The USO also opened more than 300 clubs for African American troops and stationed workers in segregated bus and train stations and embarkation ports.
The American Women’s Voluntary Services trained more than 350,000 women to drive ambulances, give first aid, and set up mobile kitchens and field hospitals in the event that the United States was bombed. In addition, women were trained in cryptography, mechanics, and translation, and they did relief work at military bases, worked with other organizations to sell war bonds, and provided services to military personnel and families.
Women who did not work outside the home also found their lives changed because of the war. Rationing changed homemaking as women devised substitutes to replace scarce goods such as sugar and red meat. Gas rationing limited how far women could drive to find groceries, supplies, and daycare and to run errands. In addition, women planted victory gardens and salvaged aluminum, tin, and rubber to be used in making war supplies.
Women also volunteered in a host of other organizations and aided the home front in numerous ways. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began in 1943 and provided sports entertainment as male baseball players served overseas. Female entertainers raised money by selling war bonds and promoted support of the war effort.
Other women opposed the war effort for reasons as diverse as not wanting to send their husbands or sons to war and opposition to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt or to Judaism. Many women pacifists worked in the Civilian Public Service program alongside male conscientious objectors.
