Why, look at the women of England! Forced to send their kids off to the country or into tube stations. And the French! Here we cut briefly to fashionable women tearing up their last good clothing to use as tourniquets for bleeding soldiers. We also watch a Russian grandmother building something in her kitchen that looks like a bomb. Meanwhile, back in innocuous Middletown, idle females carried out the “meaningless household chores” that had previously been declared their purpose in life. As the camera moves back and away from the street set, the women look like little kids rushing around as they play.
As if the point hadn’t been made, a companion film, Women of Steel, introduced a shop-girl welder and her Hungarian great-grandmother who, using her blowtorch, lit a male coworker’s cigarette.
There she was, the one singular female icon to arise from this antisingular period: Rosie the Riveter, industrial pinup, her hair back in a snood or kerchief, her body swimming inside overalls, one hand holding the signature blowtorch. What’s rarely mentioned is how few ever made it to welder status and the coveted role of human cigarette lighter. And of the few who did, 99 percent were white. At the time, many didn’t take note or find such discrimination unusual; the society was segregated, and most whites had never before worked with those then referred to as Negroes. (If white women worked in offices, black women were lucky to clean them at ten P.M.)
It’s one of the first things we learn during the average “Rosie” documentary, most made during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Jewish, Italian, and Irish workers recall the exhaustion and exhilaration. They all talk about loneliness. When we come at last to a black worker it’s clear that wartime single life was often lonelier than any white women might have imagined. One former black welder spoke in a 1972 documentary.
I had done all the requirements, the hours, but it was just the case they’d never put anybody in the more interesting welder jobs unless she was white…. three years of me watching—it seemed like hundreds of girls get in there before me… yeah, I finally got in. And they think I don’t know they paid me less than half [the salary] of the whites?… when it was leaving time, they always made me and the others wait until the white ones had left first. So we never talked…. I remember thinking one day, oh God, is this stupidity?… Here we were all alone pretty much. None of us, just from the faces you could see, was going home to very much…. It was a strange time, very tough, and I couldn’t get over that we couldn’t break it down a little, stick it out together.
They had at least this in common: Despite reports indicating that as many as 75 percent of all working women wished to keep their jobs after the war—black women, for example, had increased their presence in the clerical sector by five thousand jobs—Rosie and all her sisters were to become the century’s most exotic, briefly celebrated temps. At the time, they would never have believed it.
In May 1942 Business Week reported that airplane plants considered women 50 to 100 percent more efficient in wiring instrument panels than men, due to general carefulness and a greater attention to detail. The authors of this survey felt confident in stating that women could perform 80 percent of all war-industry jobs and all but 80 out of 937 jobs in civilian industry. Boeing Aircraft in Seattle utilized squads of superwomen for moving and lifting heavy loads. Sperry Gyroscope announced: “Women can and do work in every capacity possible.” Tough individualized women, reflections of this stunning assessment, began to appear in the popular culture. Wonder Woman, after Brenda Starr, was the most popular cartoon strip of the period, and movie serials—the cartoonish and cheaply made “B” movies—tracked exotic creatures such as Ruth Roman in Jungle Queen, Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka,” deeply embattled in the endless Perils of Nyoka, and Marguerite Chapman as Spy Smasher. For the first time since its introduction in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was voted three times to the Senate floor.
Throughout the war years, an unusual number of actresses worked playing single women in films. Olivia De Havilland and Ann Sothern played aircraft workers in Government Girl and Swing Shift Maisie. Lucille Ball played a rich girl turned defense plant worker in Meet the People. Lana Turner played an unlikely war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You and an heiress turned WAC (the Women’s Army Corps) in Keep Your Powder Dry. Movie girls also contended with what had become a housing crisis. In The More the Merrier Jean Arthur shared an apartment with two men. In The Doughgirls Ann Sheridan pretended to be married so that she could keep a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Ginger Rogers starred in Tender Comrade, as one of several women who chip in to share and fix up a large house. And they get along beautifully, with no trace of the competition and bitchiness of Stage Door (1937), in which some of the above-mentioned stars lived in a boardinghouse for actresses, battling one another for auditions, dates with producers, and walk-on parts.
But as early as 1942, a campaign was under way to prepare the workplace for men by planning—and I paraphrase an actual headline—how to get rid of the women. A Time story complained that women flirted at work and, as evidence, reported that Douglas Aircraft had been forced to close its Santa Monica bomb shelter due to “lovemaking” during the lunch break. It seemed that women wore transparent blouses and “peekaboo” sweaters that distracted men.
Other publications quickly leapt on the story. There was an excessive powdering of the nose on company time. Absenteeism due to menstrual periods or constipation or both. Rampant gossip. Business Week, once so enthusiastic about this addition to the workforce, reported in 1943 that single women had been caught “soliciting” for extra cash, although it was unclear where the alleged munitions-plant prostitution had occurred. WACs were the target of endless jokes and nasty cartoons. Suddenly everyone knew the acronym “PWOP” (pregnant without permission). The subject of their underwear, specifically, what color it was, became a conversational topic. There were more than 300,000 WACs, and not a week passed without some newly invented scandal, very often involving suspected mass lesbianism. As if to purge the last impression, a 1944 Tangee lipstick ad showed photos of seven uniformed women and this declaration: “We are still the weaker sex. It’s still up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible.”
The New York Times Magazine apparently agreed. In 1943 it ran a piece called “What About Women After the War?” The question was answered, primarily, by a female personnel manager who adopted the tone of an advice columnist. “Different women want different things,” she wrote. “I think most of them—whether they admit it or not—want only to marry, have a home and a man to do their worrying (and sometimes their thinking) for them.”
The Labor Review for September 1945 casually reported that the Department of Labor was now “laying down recommendations on separation of women from wartime jobs” and the “ways and means [to] cushion the effects of transition.” The “transition” wasn’t smooth; it was brutal. Several states reinstated old restrictions that forbade women from lifting more than twenty-five pounds in the workplace, to cite one of many examples, or hired only “first-class” mechanics, when most women rated only third-class status. Unions reinforced seniority clauses, and the GI Bill would give veterans preference in all government hiring; the civil service accepted applications only from veterans.