Average occupation for a woman in her 20s in 1944?

Question

I'm working on a story that takes place in several different time periods and I want it to be as historically accurate as possible.

One of the timelines takes place in 1944 or 1943. I want her to be upper middle class or similar, around the age of 20 or 21, and living somewhere on the West Coast.

What would this woman be doing with her life? Would she be going to college or working, and where would she be working? Would she still be living at home? What would her income be? What was daily life like?

Please be detailed. Sources would be helpful.

Thank you!

I posted this in History, but I'm not getting any responses, so I thought I'd widen my search.

Answer 1

The average woman:  She would be a homemaker, her work would be to help war efforts with the Red Cross or with assisting with rationing.  Her income would be from her husband,  who was probably off at war.   She probably did not go to college, but if she went to college as soon as she graduated she got married.     Since her husband was at war she probably moved home to live with mom and dad.   An upper middle class woman would not have been in a factory.



What you choose to have your character do is up to you.

Answer 2

Robot on the assembly line for the war production I guess.

Answer 3

She might be working in a drugstore or department store, which were very different in those days than they are now.  She might be a nurse (like Cherry Ames) or helping in a hospital, or a teacher.  Very few women went to college in those days.  She might be working in a factory building plane parts or whatever.  She would probably be growing a victory garden, and volunteering as a hostess in a USO canteen.  

She almost definitely would remain at home until a husband swept her off her feet.  

Sources:  rent old movies.  Ask your grandparents; interview people at the local senior center.  Ask your local reference libriarian - that's what they do and love it.  They can help you locate 60-yr-old salary information.

Good luck and have fun.

ETA:  she may also have joined the service as a WAC or a WAVE, and done support and secretarial work.

Answer 4

Being upper-middle class, she would likely be skiving from proper war duty and instead be involved in some cushy position on national radio as a 'script editor' or perhaps 'organising' programmes about women doing the work of men (when in reality she's doing sod all and lower class women are slaving their guts out in factories choked with phosphorous).

Answer 5

lot of women worked in the factories to help the war-time effort of world war two. look up world war 2 and women and you will see a lot of things done here at home was done by women.

Answer 6

Wealthier women at that time could have been doing any sort of charity work for the war effort.

In Australia, lots of wealthier families had daughters in the women's services, where they were drivers and so on for the officers, a trend which was started by Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth and her sister, who joined the army at the outbreak of the war in the UK.

Not sure if that sort of thing happened in the US, but if it did, that would be a plausible job.

Certainly many US women became nurses, not only on the home front but in battle situations where they were greatly needed.

And of course, just as in peace time, many women worked in administration roles, in industry, in retail shops, in the home caring for children and the elderly, in the police and security services and in schools and educational institutes of all sorts.

There were also women working in the entertainment industry in large numbers, many of them (such as Katherine Hepburn) from wealthy family backgrounds.

I've tried to put a few interesting web site details below, but for some reason I get an error message when I try to post the links.

As you don't accept emails, I've just kept the links and if you want them you can email me through the Y!A system and I'll send them to you.

I've opened them all on my own computer and the anti-virus didn't have any problem with them, but you can decide for yourself.

Also, you could have a look at the short stories of writers like Dorothy Parker, she writes a lot about the 'upper' classes and their lives during the period leading up to the war years, especially the lives of women.

Cheers :-)

Answer 7

nurse or school teacher..or music teacher..would live at home..

she would go to bed and rise every day on a regular schuel..would be active in the church..

helps with housework and may help caring for an older relative that would live in the home

reads a lot.does fancy sewing..would lisen to the radio with her family

Answer 8

well that was the middle of the war, so you could pretty much believably put her in just about any job, from welder to bus driver to dance-hall floozy. A few years before or after she'd probably have been a secretary, nurse, teacher etc......

Answer 9

She might still be in college, though in the 1940s the percentage of young people who went to college was much lower than it is now, about 6 percent (for both sexes).  However, as an upper middle class girl she would be in the group most likely to be in college in those days.  or she might be a teacher or a nurse or a librarian or a social worker or she might be working in an office' a great many women did secretarial work in those days. She might be doing defense work, some young women did drop out of college to do that.  She might be in one of the women's services, most probably the WAC (Women's Army Corps), or the nursing corps.

It is unlikely that an upper-middle-class girl would be working in a shop, which would be more of a working-class occupation then as it is now.

She might still be living at home, or she might be sharing an apartment with friends perhaps.  She would probably go to the movies quite often, most people went at least once a week in those days.  She would go out dancing, but if she had a boyfriend in the services she would very likely not dance with other men, girls often used to dance with each other in those days, if they had boyfriends or fiancees who were away in the army etc.  Even the dance bands were sometimes all-girl bands in wartime. "The girls that I knew all had boyfriends who were in the services and we didn't date because we were 'tagged'" said Emily Koplin of Milwaukee. "We didn't do any dating - those were the years where we would go to dances and girls would dance with girls."

She might have difficulty getting stockings, as they were rationed in wartime too.  girls who couldn't get stockings often used to paint their legs, women's magazines had guides on how to draw a realistic-looking seam down the calf.

Gasoline was rationed in wartime, so people walked a lot more.  Food rationing meant that a lot of things were in short supply, sugar, coffee, butter, some kinds of meat, and canned goods were rationed.  Rationing meant that you could only buy a limited amount of these items, you had stamps which you had to hand in when you paid for your goods, and if you used up your stamps for the month, you couldn't buy any more of that item until you got your next month's stamps.  Sometimes women got together to swap their ration stamps "My mother and all the neighbours would get together around the dining-room table, and they'd be changing a sugar coupon for a bread or meat coupon.  It was like a giant Monopoly game." said Sheril Cunning, who was a child in Long Beach, California, during the war.

Answer 10

I'll tell you about my mother, who was in her late teens in 1944. She did not come from a wealthy family but decided to attend college instead of working for the war effort in a factory. She was not there to look for a husband but to get a degree, which she did. She did not get married right after college even though she did have a boyfriend. She worked at a number of jobs including social worker and English teacher for several years until she got a job that took her to Europe. She and that boyfriend never did marry. She met someone else while in Europe and married him.