A History of the Wife (49 page)

If, during the Depression, the working wife had been the object of widespread disapproval for “taking away a man’s job,” now, with the labor shortage, she was courted and praised. Rosie the Riveter, house- wife–turned–factory worker, became a national icon. Like the Revolu- tionary War wife “Mollie Pitcher,” who had joined her husband on the battlefield, Rosie was honored for filling in for a man. But as Leila J. Rupp reminds us in her study of wartime propaganda, transformation was intended to be temporary. Everyone understood that as soon as the war was over, she would return to her primary occupation as wife, mother, and homemaker.
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The employment of married women in large numbers represented what historian William Chafe has called a “drastic change in policy by business and government.”
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Previous bans against the employment of wives were now discarded, as were policies that discriminated against older women—that is, women over thirty-five. These older women, most of whom were married, brought a new dimension to the work- force. With their children in school or already grown, they relished the opportunity to exchange their pots and pans for filing cabinets and riv- eting machines. Women like these, with comparatively light homemak- ing and childcare responsibilities, swelled the ranks of the female labor force.
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For every two working women over thirty-five in 1940, by the end of the war there were three.

Another change was the increased employment of women with small children. At first, the War Manpower Commission expressed the preva- lent belief that a mother’s overriding duty was to stay at home with her offspring, but before long it changed its attitude: everyone, with or without children, was needed for the war effort. Responding, however,

to concerns about the children’s well-being, the WMC directed govern- ment agencies “to develop, integrate, and co-ordinate federal programs for the day care of children of working mothers.”
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Some nursery schools had already been provided through the Work Projects Administration for children from low-income families— 180,000 preschool and school-age children were enrolled in these in 1942–1943. After June 1943, the WPA nursery school project was dis- continued, and a new program was established under the provisions of the Lanham Act for the children of mothers in the defense industry. At its peak, this federally subsidized program cared for 130,000 children in 3,000 centers. At the same time, other programs were initiated by state, local, and private agencies throughout the country, but never enough to care for the estimated 2 million youngsters needing some form of assistance, according to the WMC in 1943.

The fault was not entirely with government policy. American mothers were initially wary of collective solutions to their childcare problems, and, whenever possible, preferred to make their own arrangements, either with family members, neighbors, or friends. William Tuttle’s
“Daddy’s Gone to War”
documents the diverse childcare solutions mothers improvised.
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Some worked the night shift and left their children with a father who worked a day shift, or with grandpar- ents, or with older siblings, or alone. One homefront child remembered that her mother worked a night shift so that her daughter-in-law could work days, and they could both share the baby-sitting. Other mothers worked the day shift and left their children to fend for themselves after school.

These “latchkey” children provoked anxiety in the hearts of worried Americans. “Who’s going to take care of me, Mother, if you take a war- plant job,” asked a fair-haired boy in the May 1943 issue of
Better Homes and Gardens.
Similarly, a patriotic and self-serving ad for Adel Precision Products pictured a fair-haired girl asking her mother dressed in overalls: “Mother, when will you stay home again?” To which the mother optimistically replied: “Some jubilant day mother will stay home again, doing the job she likes best—making a home for you and daddy when he gets back. She knows that all the hydraulic valves, line support clips and blocks and anti-icing equipment that ADEL turns out for airplanes are helping bring that day closer.”

This fictitious mother’s reply notwithstanding, there was reason to

worry. Some children were clearly being neglected, at least according to popular magazine articles. Mothers coming home from work exhausted were often unable to give their children anything but minimal care. And their job performance also suffered; absenteeism was high among working mothers, who were often obliged to take time off for a sick child or to quit working altogether.

Individual defense plants resorted to innovative measures to keep their female employees. For example, Los Angeles aircraft manufactur- ers petitioned the city to keep the schools open in summer, since many working mothers needed to be home with their children during the vacation months. A more foresighted plan was undertaken in Portland, Oregon, by the Kaiser Company, which established on-site, round-the- clock centers at its two plants for children aged eighteen months to six years. With 25,000 women workers in its shipyards and progressive thinking on the part of its leaders, the Kaiser Child Service Centers “still stand as an example of what private industry might accomplish to alle- viate the pressures on working mothers while providing real care for the children.”
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Despite this and other corporate and community initiatives, ade- quate child care never kept up with the need. The United States did not follow the lead of its British ally, which provided a large range of ser- vices for its working wives and mothers: day care centers, home-helps, canteens, prepared meals, and one free afternoon a week for shop- ping.
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Moreover, Great Britain worked out a system of part-time work for married women, allowing two part-timers to perform the work of one-full-time employee. This system was a boon to the British war effort—and to working wives.

The household responsibilities of America’s wartime wives did not disappear when they went off to the factory with their overalls and lunch boxes or to the office with their stockings and gloves. Then as now, women simply added one job to another, and tried not to collapse under the strain. Why did these women take on five- and six-day-a- week schedules, often on swing and night shifts, in addition to their workload at home?

Many were undoubtedly inspired by patriotic feelings. Those with husbands and sweethearts in the armed forces hoped their work would help shorten the war and have a direct impact on the lives of their men abroad. They believed the posters that read: “Longing won’t

bring him home sooner.... Get a War Job!” and “Do the job he left behind.”

Another reason was economic. Servicemen’s wives existing on a mea- ger government allotment often had difficulty making ends meet. In Athol, Massachusetts, one navy wife and mother, with a second baby on the way, figured that after she had paid for rent ($20), electricity ($3.75), telephone ($2.00), milk ($6.50), laundry ($4), groceries ($30), insurance ($2.95), and oil ($2.80), she had only $8 left from her

$80 monthly allowance for “clothing, medicine, heat in winter months, newspapers, periodicals, amusement, etc.”
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By 1944, a total of 1,360,000 women with husbands in the armed forces were working for pay, out of approximately 4 million servicemen’s wives.
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Whether one had a husband in the service or not, women and whole families flocked to the new wartime centers in search of jobs. They migrated from Appalachia, the South, and the plains states to the West, the East Coast, and the Great Lakes region. They left rural farms for booming cities, like Detroit, which built the largest plant in the world at Willow Run, producing bombers in unprecedented numbers and with record speed. They crowded into substandard housing and trailer parks, and sent money back home for their relatives and friends to join them.
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Wartime pay was good, better than ever before in American history, and that pay was now being offered to women for jobs that would pre- viously have been reserved for men. Wives who had depended on their husbands for support could now contribute to the family economy—to the purchase of new furniture or clothes or even a house. Some were proud to be earning money for the first time in their lives, and to have some say in how that money was spent. Those who could afford it bought china and silver on the installment plan, sent gifts to their par- ents back home, bought war bonds, and saved for their children’s col- lege education. Many of them were simply glad to be out of the house. As one worker at the Puget Sound Navy Yard put it, “Somehow the kitchen lacks the glamour of a bustling shipyard.”
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The war permanently affected the composition of the female work- force. Before the war it had been dominated by single, young women; afterward a majority of the women were married and middle-aged. In 1940, 6,380,000 single women and 4,680,000 married women were gainfully employed. Ten years later, the ratio had changed to 5,270,000

single and 8,640,000 married women.
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The wartime wives had, on the whole, more work experience than women who had married in the 1920s and 1930s, and were more likely to work after marriage, despite a drop in overall female employment during the immediate postwar years.
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During the next half century, the percentage of women combining work and homemaking soared to unimaginable heights. A girl born in 1950, when only one out of four married women worked for pay, would have had a very different picture of womanhood from one born today, when more than three out of five married women are employed in virtually every occupation. And if one considers women with chil- dren—married and unmarried—the proportion rises to approximately four out of five. In the following pages, I will look more closely at wartime wives working in different sectors of the economy and differ- ent regions of the country.

SHIPBUILDING WIVES

During World War II, shipbuilding, one of the highest paid indus- tries in the country, opened its doors to women—single and married, younger and older, with and without children. Consider the case at the Commercial Iron Works in Portland, Oregon. Throughout 1942 it explicitly refused to hire women, but by March 1943, it had taken on 500 women as industrial workers. One of them, Berenice Thompson, a wife with grown children, had opposed her husband’s express wishes when she went to work at the shipyards. “I had been very poor,” she recalled, “. . . and it meant a lot just to prove myself. My husband was from Kentucky. He didn’t think women knew anything. So I showed him.” Eventually he had to accept her upgraded status when her wages paid for their new home.
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Rosa Dickson’s husband, who worked at the shipyards, thought it was a bad place for women. According to his wife, he said, “Oh you cannot work down there in the shipyards. They’re too rough and the language is bad.” After looking for employment in a store that paid modest wages, she said, “Well, I’m not gonna take a job like that because the shipyards are paying the big money.” With three of her five children still at home, she took a job as a welder at a small shipyard in the Portland area, then became a pipe fitter’s helper, and held various

jobs until 1946. The Dicksons’ combined earnings made it possible for them to buy the house they lived in till the end of their lives.
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Even when a husband didn’t object, women had to overcome blatant sexism among the male workers, many of whom continued to believe that females didn’t belong in shipbuilding. It was no easy task to prove themselves as welders, riveters, shipfitters, electricians, painters, machinists, and boilermakers in a male bastion that was hostile to the very idea of women as coworkers.

An article written by Virginia Snow Wilkinson, titled “From House- wife to Shipfitter” and published in the September 1943 issue of
Harper’s Magazine,
offers a lively account of one woman’s experience in the shipyards. Virginia Wilkinson’s husband had apparently not objected to her new employment; indeed, sharing her excitement, he and their children asked to be awakened with her at five-thirty the first day she went off to the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California.
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With six other women, she was greeted incredulously by the man in charge of new workers: “Oh, my God! Women shipfitters! Why do they treat me like this?” Because Mrs. Wilkerson had already attended a defense class, she was immediately given a variety of small assignments as a shipfitter’s helper, but most of the time, like the rest of the workers, she just stood around waiting. Shipbuilding, it appears, did not pro- ceed with the efficiency of the assembly line.

Why so much idle time? Mrs. Wilkinson’s foreman explained that the management employed more men and women than it could put to work at the same time. “You’ve got to have a lot of people to draw from in order to get even some good workmen.” He also explained to her the place of women in shipbuilding.

“And the women too have got to be used. The men don’t like the idea; they voted against it in their unions; but they’ll get used to women in time and think nothing of it. They used to feel the same way about women in the plate shop, but it’s full of women now—they run the show—and there’s no real hostility there toward them any more. Women haven’t been seen much on ships yet but they’ll be seen as the war goes on.”

While she accustomed herself to the men who called her “duchess” and “darling,” Virginia Wilkinson was unprepared for an incident of outright sexism. When three shipfitting women, including the author, were given their own unit to work on, their enthusiasm and efficiency

went hand in hand. “We became integrated persons working together on a project which focused all our interests. I noticed how quickly we ran our own errands, how conscientious we were in checking, how we abhorred sloppy measurements. For once we had been given responsi- bility, for once we had been put on our own, for once we had enough to do.”

But the female team was not to last. By late afternoon, the three women “became gradually aware of the hostility of the men.... They were ‘seething with resentment’ that women should be given a unit to construct . . . this was the first time that we had been seen in the light of competitors.... The next day, with no explanation, our XAK, ‘our baby,’ was taken from us and given to the men. We had to stand aside and see the men working on what we felt was our project.”