What did women experience while working in factories during World War II??

Question

What did women experience while working in factories during World War II??

Answer 1

My mother didn't work in the factories during that period because she was attending college but she had friends who did. The women experienced harrassment from the male workers (who usually were veterans or were rejected for military service), especially if they were young and single. Many men weren't used to having women working alongside them and didn't view them as being competent or intelligent enough to do the job. Then after the war ended, the women were fired or quit because they were no longer needed.

Answer 2

In 'America's women' Gail Collins writes:

'The first women to volunteer for defense jobs had already been working, in low-status, low-paying positions, and they grabbed at the chance to make better salaries.  Peggy Terry, who got a job with her mother and sister at a shell-loading plant in Kentucky, was euphoric. "To us it was just an absolute miracle.  Before that, we made nothing."  As a result of the great migration of women to defense jobs, 600 laundries went out of business in 1942, and in Detroit, a third of the restaurants closed because of the lack of help.

Although most unmarried women were already working when the war started, a number of college students quit school to join the war effort.  Among the other early volunteers were the wives of servicemen.  "Darling, you are now the husband of a career women - just call me your Ship Yard Babe!" wrote Polly Crow to her husband overseas.  Rose Kaminski of Milwaukee, whose husband served in the Navy, left her young daughter with an elderly neighbor when she learned that crane operators were needed at an ordnance plant to move the huge howitzer gun barrels. "Well, I was running one in three days" she recalled much later.  "It just came to me.  I loved it."

By late 1942, unemployment was virtually nonexistent, and the government projected a need for 3 million more workers in the next year.  Child labor laws were suspended for youngsters over twelve.  handicapped Americans were given opportunities to enter the workplace, as were black women and older women.  But the prime pool of potential workers was married women.  However, even when the war was at its height and the need for workers was most desperate, nearly 90 percent of the housewives who had been at home when Pearl Harbour was bombed still ignored the call.

One of the reasons undoubtedly was the lack of child care.  unlike england, where the government provided all sorts of support services for women who worked, the US government left them to their own devices.  Congress didn't appropriate money for federal day care centres until 1943, and even then it was used so ineptly that only about 10 percent of the defense workers' children were ever enrolled.

But there were other less tangible reasons for rthe unenthusiastic response to recruitment campaigns.  Defense work, although more rewarding than waiting tables, was not all that pleasant.  In 1943, two San Diego highschool teachers, Constance Bowman and Clara Marie Allen, wrote about their experiences during that summer, when they volunteered for the swing shift at a factory that built the B-24 bombers.  At the end of the first shift, Bowman wrote "I was tireder than I had ever been in my life and also dirtier.  Myhair was tinseled with tiny shaving of metal, my hands were grimy, and my fingernails were bordered in black".  Being forced to wear pants to work instead of skirts made Bowman and Allen feel that they had lost their position in the universe.  Men no longer offered them seats on the crowded buses; they were snubbed by clerks and ticket agents and leered at by strange males on the street. "It was a great shock to C.M. and me to find that being a lady depended more upon our clothes than upon ourselves." Bowman wrote. (Though women wore slacks for athletics, they were not yet common for street wear.  When four WASPS were grounded by weather in Americus, Georgeia, in 1944, they were arrested by local police for violating a rule against women wearing slacks on the street at night).

For black women, the war years were a combination of opportunity and frustration.  The high-paying defense factories were the hardest to crack.  In 1943, at the height of the labor shortage, the United Auto Workers surveyed 280 factories that employed women workers and found that only 74 were willing to hire an African American.  Most employers, when challenged by government or civil rights groups, claimed they could not hire black women because white women refused to work with them.  That was often true, although companies that took a firm line and forced their employees to choose between integration and loss of their lucrative jobs generally managed to overcome the problem fairly quickly.  white women seemed to have a different reaction to integration on the job than white men.  Studies suggest that men were not threatened by the presence of African Americans in the factories, but they reacted angrily if black men were promoted to jobs with higher salaries or more authority.  The white women, on the other hand, seemed intent on keeping a physical distance.  They sometimes demanded seperate bathrooms, claiming that black women carried venereal disease.

When the war ended, the nation welcomed the men home and began enforcing the promise that women workers had made - or the country had decided they had made - to give up their jobs for the returning soldiers. "They always got priority and they would replace us, one by one" recalled Rose Kaminski. "Finally the fellow that I replaced came, and I remember him coming back and I was laid off.  It didn't bother me....I think we kind of looked forward to it." But after a few yers of "normal living" and the birth of another daugher, she called her old boss and took a "temporary" job at the factory.  It wound up lasting thirty-one years.

Thre million women left the workforce in 1946, and many of the younger ones were indeed eager to set up households and get on with the postwar baby boom.  But most of the women who had worked during the war were older, with chldren who no longer needed them at home.   They either needed to supplement their husbands pay, or else they were the sole support of their families.  Surveys showed 70 percent of the female war workers wanted to stay at their jobs, but few were given the choice.  "it just ended overnight" said Marye Stumph, a single mother who had made three times her previous salary as an assembler at an aircraft factory.  William Mulcahy, who supervised women at an electric parts assembly factory in Camden, remembered "the day after the war ended.  We met the girls at the door, and they were lined up all the way down Market Street to the old movie theatre about eight blocks away and we handed them a slip to go over to personnel and get their severance pay.  We didn;t even allow them in the building, all those women with whom I had become so close, who had worked seven days a week for years and had been commended so many times by the navy for the work they were doing."

It was inevitable that many of the women would lose their jobs - the defense industry was shuttting down, and the employees that the heavily unionized factories were going to keep were the most senior, male workers.  the enlisted men had been guaranteed their jobs back, and sentiment for hiring the men was so high that new male applicants were given jobs over women with seniority.  But as usual, the natinal theory about a woman's place ignored the fact that many women didn't have husbands to go out and work for them.

If defense work did not lead to a career for most women, it was still a transforming experience for many.  Peggy terry, the Kentucky woman who worked in a shell factory, had so little knowledge of the world that she barely understood what being at war meant.  Her horizons expanded when she would up in Michigan, working at a plant with a large population of Polish workers.  "They were the first people I'd ever known that were any different from me" she said years later "A whole new world just opened up...I believe the war was the beginning of me seeing things."

Answer 3

Here are places to start:

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/rosie/...

http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.c...

Answer 4

nothing at all. it was a waste of time thts wht they learned. tht they need to find something better to do.