A History of the Wife (50 page)

One of the female workers said the men were afraid that the ship units would become “overrun by women,” like the plate shop. Mrs. Wilkinson generously conceded that it must have been hard for the men “who were heads of families, straining to take care of several dependents,” to see their jobs taken up by women lacking in experi- ence and earning the same money as the men. She had started out at ninety-five cents an hour.

After six weeks she was given her own unit to direct. This entailed measuring and locating the steel material for her unit, labeling it with chalk and engaging the riggers to lift it, finding a flanger and a welder to put the steel in place. Watching the crane lifting the material, and later looking out to sea where a troopship on which she had worked was being towed by, Virginia Wilkinson felt a keen sense of exhilara- tion. “It was good,” she wrote, “this working together on a ship.”

Although this story ended on the requisite upbeat note, it did not hide the misogyny endemic to the shipbuilding industry. Before the war, in 1939, only 2 percent of the entire shipyard industry was female. Any woman who ventured on the grounds was traditionally greeted with whistles and catcalls.
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The influx of women into the shipyards changed the statistics and the atmosphere: by 1944, 10 to 20 percent of the shipbuilding workforce was female, and most of the men had learned to treat the women with respect, however grudgingly.

A few women in the shipbuilding industry even advanced to super- visory levels. For example, at the Dry Docks and Shipbuilding Com- pany in Mobile, Alabama, thirteen women were promoted to much

publicized leadership positions. One of them, a wife, supervised a crew of fourteen workers, including several men.
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Not all women working in the shipyards were shipbuilders; many were secretaries, accountants, cleaners, cooks, canteen operators, and groundsmen. Polly Crow, a thirty-year-old wife and mother whose army husband was shipped to Europe in 1944, took an office job at the Jef- ferson Boat and Machine Company near Anderson, Indiana, while she was living with his parents in Louisville, Kentucky. Her letters to her husband provide a window into the experiences of one working mother whose small son was well cared for by his paternal grandmother.

Darlin’:

Louisville, June 12, 1944

You are now the husband of a career woman—just call me your lit- tle Ship Yard Babe! Yeh! I made up my mind that I wanted to work from 4:00 p.m. ’till midnight so’s I could have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to work but didn’t want to leave Bill all day—in the first place it would be too much for Mother altho’ she was perfectly willing and then Bill needs me. This way Mother will just have to feed him once and tuck him in. . . . I finally ended up with just what I wanted. Comptome- ter [calculator] job—4:00 ’till midnite—70 cents an hour to start which amounts to $36.40 a week, $145.60 per month, increase in two months if I’m any good and I know I will be. . . .

Opening my little checking account too and it’s a grand and a glori- ous feeling to write a check all your own and not have to ask for one. . . .

Good nite, Darlin’ I love you, Polly
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Polly was lucky to have a mother-in-law willing to take care of her son, Bill. Her major worry was getting to and from work, which took forty- five minutes, but once that problem was solved, she was enthusiastic about her new life as a defense worker. “I like it here,” she wrote to her husband on November 9, 1944 “. . . and am out for every penny I can get while the getting [sic] good.” By then she had put away $780 in the bank—enough for a small family to live modestly on for six months.

The experiences of Polly Crow and Virginia Wilkinson, one the mother of a small child, the other the mother of five children, suggest

that employment in the shipyards was a rich and satisfying experience for white women with backup support, despite the difficulties of childcare, transportation, and lingering sexism on the work site. But if one were African-American, work in the shipyards was almost always compounded by deep-rooted racism. Before the war, black women throughout the land had been largely limited to employment as maids, waitresses, agricultural workers, and other low-status positions. When well-paying jobs in war production became nominally open to them, thousands of black women were quick to leave their former employment, even if that meant traveling long distances to the new work sites. Many flocked to the burgeoning West Coast shipbuilding centers.

The oral histories of Portland/ Vancouver shipbuilding women recorded by Amy Kesselman include the stories of several African- American women who experienced severe racial discrimination in the workplace. Six black women welders, having complained to their supervisor that their lead man called them “niggers” and treated them unfairly, were all inexplicably transferred from the graveyard to the swing shift. Then they were given discharge notices and told they could work only on the day shift. Since they all had children and had made childcare arrangements for the graveyard shift, the revised schedule created real hardships for them. One of the women remembered: “I told them it would be impossible to work days with two small children, one school age and the other too young to attend a nursery, my husband gone to service... but my request went unheeded.” In the end, the protests they placed before the Kaiser Vancouver management and the War Manpower Commission were of no avail.
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Similar incidents occurred to other African-Americans throughout the country. Some defense training programs simply would not accept black women, and many war plants either refused to hire them, or seg- regated them into low-status occupations once they were hired. Man- agement justified these practices by arguing that white workers would not accept working alongside “colored” women. At the Edgewood Arse- nal near Baltimore, there were walkouts and widespread protest when black women were first employed.
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SOUTHERN WOMEN AS DEFENSE WORKERS

The differential treatment of African-American and white women

was endemic to the South. Consider the case of the female defense workers of Alabama, as recorded by Mary Thomas in
Riveting and Rationing in Dixie
.
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Before the war, few white wives were employed outside the home. Characteristically, they worked a few years before marriage, and then devoted themselves exclusively to their families. White women who worked because their husbands did not earn enough to support them were looked down upon by more affluent Southern women. It was simply not socially acceptable for a middle- class wife to be employed.

African-American women, single or married, were in a totally differ- ent situation. They had to work for economic reasons, and about half of them did, mainly as domestic and agricultural laborers. When the defense factories opened their doors in various parts of Alabama, many of these women would have been glad to exchange their menial, low- paying jobs for work that paid at least two to three times what they had been earning before.

The Air Service Command at Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, which was to become the largest employer of women in the state, actively recruited only white employees. Within that color code, it recruited single women, married women, older people, and handi- capped persons. By 1943 it employed 17,000 people, half of whom were women and 800 of whom were physically handicapped. But it took complaints lodged with the Fair Employment Practices Commis- sion for them to hire some black women, and then primarily in low- paying and low-skilled jobs.

Mobile was one of the new boomtowns that drew an unprecedented number of women from the Alabama countryside and neighboring states. Many women followed their civilian husbands to the defense centers, where they too found employment. One wife who had joined her husband in Mobile was hired by the Civilian Welfare Association and eventually became its chief clerk. Another, who had thought of herself exclusively as a wife devoted to housework, cooking, and play- ing bridge, went to work as a supervisor in maintenance, and discov- ered that she loved being a paid employee. An older woman, who had worked prior to marriage and then again after she had raised two daughters, was hired as chief of the Central File Section. She left this advice for younger women: “If you get married young, you can raise your family and all that sort of thing and still have plenty of time left to

have a good time. Just because you happen to be a grandmother doesn’t mean it’s a sign to curl up around the edges.”
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Elsewhere in the South, as in other parts of the nation, women moti- vated both by patriotism and economic necessity went from home to factory with a sense of excitement and purpose. For many, it was a wel- come change from the drudgery of full-time housework. Karen Ander- son, in her study of wartime women, recorded the feelings ranging from relief to elation experienced by several women working in Balti- more. One, a machine operator, was grateful to exchange her precari- ous situation as a coal miner’s wife in West Virginia for a well-paying city job. A hand driller at Eastern Aircraft said she needed a change when her husband went into the service because “staying at home— emotionally and temperamentally does not suit me.” Another admitted that leaving her factory job at her husband’s insistence had made her so nervous that she went back to work on the advice of her doctor.
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Women’s entry into the defense industry allowed Baltimore women to work in a variety of formerly sex-segregated occupations. Even though the traditionally female arena of clerical work paid somewhat less than factory work, it held on to its women workers because “it had shorter hours than factory jobs, was less strenuous physically than the assembly lines, offered the status of a white-collar job, provided more job security than the war-inflated manufacturing sector,” and was less threatening to conventional ideas about gender roles.
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Even African- American women, denied the training and employment that was open to their white counterparts, profited from the wartime economy; the number of black women in Baltimore previously employed as maids was reduced by almost half during the war years because they were able to find jobs in other fields.
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They fared better than the black women of Alabama, not only because of engrained prejudice in the deep South, but also because they were closer to Washington, D.C., where the shortage of workers was acute.

War is nothing that any sane person ever welcomes. This is particularly true of women, whose lives have traditionally been devoted to nurtur- ing life rather than destroying it. Yet it is also true that war has some- times provided new opportunities for women, thrusting them into positions of responsibility and independence that were previously unthinkable. The absence of men and the shortage of manpower,

forced and voluntary dislocations, the spirit of patriotism and adven- ture, the blurring of gender boundaries in previously sex-segregated occupations, and the creation of new organizations for women—all of these factors catapulted women into unfamiliar landscapes where they had to find their way with few guiding lights.

WACS AND WAVES

Take, for example, two new organizations “manned” exclusively by women: the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), authorized by President Roosevelt in May 1942 and renamed the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) the following year, and the Women Accepted for Volun- tary Emergency Service of the U.S. Navy (WAVES), founded in July 1942. These two military organizations, followed by the SPARS (U.S. Coast Guard) and WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron), were not greeted unambiguously by all Americans. The same people who bemoaned the sight of women in factory overalls were equally unnerved by the vision of women in uniforms replacing men not only as typists, cooks, postal workers, telephone operators, and drivers, but also as intelligence officers, translators, radar specialists, medical tech- nicians, control tower operators, aerial gunnery instructors, and pho- tographers. Though all of these women were barred from active combat, they did eventually serve in dangerous areas, where some were wounded or killed.

Married women served alongside single women in all of these organ- izations, though in fewer numbers. Typically, a young married woman would enlist in the WACS or WAVES when her husband was shipped overseas. The following vignettes follow three such wives in their tours of duty.

In 1942, soon after the WAACS had been formed, Gertrude Morris was a recent bride living with her lieutenant husband near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When Lieutenant Morris was sent to North Africa two months after their wedding, Gertrude Morris enlisted in the WAACS. Her memories evoke the makeshift nature of basic training for women at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, during the early stages of the war: “. . . falling out for reveille at 6:00
A
.
M
. in dark, below-zero weather in deep snow . . . the oversized man’s GI overcoat, which I wore over a thin fatigue dress.”
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After basic training she was sent to Georgia, then to Missouri, then to Texas. She did clerical work, learned Morse code, and had her “most exciting job” directing the traffic in an air control tower. In the fall of 1944, after her husband had fought his way from North Africa to Sicily, France, and Germany, she too was scheduled to go overseas. She recalled: “My excitement was intense—not only was I to go overseas, but perhaps I would by some fantastic stroke of luck cross paths with my husband.... Of course, irony and the army’s logic prevailed, and my orders came through for the Pacific theatre.” She was sent to New Guinea and ended up in the Philippines, “never too far behind the advancing troops but . . . not exposed to any real danger.”

Even after the war had ended and Gertrude’s husband had returned from Europe, she was still in the Pacific awaiting transport home. Despite her husband’s efforts to influence the WAC commandant, Oveta Culp Hobby, in Washington, Gertrude Morris did not come home till October 1945. Reunited with her husband, she went back to teaching, had two daughters, and would always remember her wartime experience as a “a time of adventure, opportunity for development, and above all service.”