WWII changed women’s roles
“We embarked by way of a small landing craft with our pants rolled up — wading onto the beach a short distance … We marched up those high cliffs … about a mile and a half under full packs, hot as ‘blue blazes’ — till finally a Jeep picked us up …,” Ruth Hess, wrote to her hospital colleagues back home in Louisville, Ky., about her experiences in France as an Army combat nurse arriving just days after the D-Day invasion in June 1944.
She described the nonstop work tending to the gory wounds war makes while machine gun bullets whizzed overhead.
Four hundred thousand women served in the military during World War II, a small fraction of the 6.5 million American women who mobilized to support the war effort by taking paid employment or the more than 4.5 million volunteers for the Red Cross and other organizations.
The war immersed the U.S. in an unprecedented conflict that demanded innovation across all parts of society.
As millions of men entered the military, the country had to produce the equipment, weapons and food they would need, while keeping the civilian homefront supplied at the same time. Women, with the encouragement of the federal government, stepped into vacancies on assembly lines, in farm fields and in jobs across the economy.
Outside of paid labor, as Red Cross volunteers and members of the American Women's Voluntary Services (AWVS), they fought fires, delivered telegrams, and sold war bonds, and they were aircraft spotters.
The work women did during WWII not only helped win the war but laid the foundation for future advancements in women’s opportunities.
Thanks to the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster created for Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse Electric Corp., it would be easy to assume women in the 1940s were clamoring to step out onto factory shop floors where they were welcomed with open arms. As with most events in history, the full story is more complex.
Before the war, women working for wages were restricted to low-paying jobs as domestic servants, clerical workers, telephone operators, teachers and other occupations labeled by male employers as suitable for females. Most of these jobs were only open to unmarried women and were further subdivided by race.
Factory work, which offered higher wages, particularly if it was unionized, was reserved for men. Old habits die hard, and it took federal legislation to force many companies to hire women and more government intervention to open these opportunities to Black and Hispanic women.
For their part, some women were loath to abandon what culture defined as feminine to don overalls, slacks or dungarees to work in dirty factories. In stepped the government-funded War Advertising Council whose admen worked to produce print, radio and newsreel ads promoting the patriotism of the female workforce.
Women who did wrap their hair in a bandanna (some workplaces required women to cover their hair for fear of men being distracted) and pull on a pair of pants found in themselves a new confidence and love for working life.
Edith Speert of Cleveland, wrote to her soldier husband, “I want you to know now that you are not married to a girl that’s interested solely in a home — I shall definitely have to work all my life — I get emotional satisfaction out of working …”
Many others discovered they could manage more than they first thought. Rhode Islander Katherine O’Grady left her $15-a-week soda fountain job for a $27-a-week position at a woolen factory making blankets and cloth for the military. Like many young women, she married her sweetheart before he shipped out, and she became a mother during the war.
“I was lucky in that there was a Salvation Army day nursery (a forerunner of today’s day care) on the street I lived on. They only charged $3 a week,” she said. “After I moved to my own little apartment in East Providence, I used to have to take my son on the trolley car, bring him over to the nursery, and leave him there, and go back down the street and get on another trolley and get to work, and the same thing at night.”
Volunteer organizations like Salvation Army, Red Cross and others offered needed support for working women, as well as soldiers preparing to leave for the front. They provided opportunities for those who could not — or did not want to — enter the world of paid work a place to “do their bit” for the war effort.
The women's volunteer service was organized in 1940 by Alice T. McLean, who modeled the organization on Britain’s Volunteer Women’s Services. Attracting nearly 350,000 women, AWVS members drove ambulances; assisted the Red Cross and Civil Defense organizations; worked in scrap drives; and helped with other homefront support tasks.
They wore distinctive blue, military-styled uniforms, and, from the beginning, the organization welcomed women from all backgrounds, as McLean said, “regardless of race, color or creed” — a rarity in a heavily segregated American society. Black women joined AWVS chapters in New York City; Chicago; Omaha, Neb.; Durham, N.C.; Pittsburgh; and other cities, even Hollywood.
Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her role in “Gone with the Wind,” was a member, as was future movie and TV star Betty White.
Meanwhile, in the countryside a literal army of women were working to keep food on the table.
The Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA) was another adaptation of a British idea initiated during the first World War and was brought back during WWII.
Farm labor shortages were keenly felt across the country as 16.5 million men joined the military. Efforts to assist farmers in producing crops and livestock, and getting them to market included hiring migrant workers from Mexico, the Caribbean and Newfoundland; using prisoner of war labor; and granting Japanese Americans leave from the internment camps they were forced to live in. None of these efforts provided enough help to enough farmers to be effective.
Enter the WLAA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture headed by Florence Hall. The organization fielded 1.5 million women (more than the population of the state of Nebraska in 1940) in support of American farms.
Leslie Tresham wrote in 1944 of her experience on the farm as a member of the WLAA: “I had promised a farmer, whose only son had enlisted in the Marines, to haul corn from a picker to the (grain) elevator. … I hooked a full load of corn to the tractor and started for the elevator. As I neared the hoist I became frightened … there was only 3 or 4 inches clearance on either side of the wheels. If I made a mistake I might upset the hoist. … I managed to put through without mishap. … As I swung the empty wagon alongside of the picker … the farmer shouted, ‘Have any trouble?’ ‘Not a bit,’ I lied, ‘It was easy.’
“And, so it went, load after load, day after day, until I have now hauled over 10,000 bushels of corn. Tired? Of course, I get tired, but so does that boy in the foxhole. That boy, whose place I'm trying so hard to fill.”
Freeing up more military men for those foxholes was the rationale for the War Department (today called the Department of Defense) to encourage women to enlist.
Until WWII, there were limited opportunities for women to serve in the military and they were not recruited to join any branch. That changed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when tens of thousands of women signed up for every branch of the armed forces, albeit in their own distinct units.
A veritable alphabet soup of acronyms distinguished them: WAC (Women’s Army Corps), WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services), WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots), SPAR (Coast Guard Women’s Reserves) and WR (United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve).
Over the 200 duty assignments open to women, they performed clerical support; flew new and repaired airplanes (fighters and bombers) from factories to military airfields; were photographers on Naval and Coast Guard station staff; drove trucks; and were nurses.
Aside from patriotism, many were attracted by the equal pay they would get doing the same work as men — unheard of in civilian life. The military also welcomed Black, Japanese and Native American women into its ranks.
As was the case for Black men in the armed forces, Black women served in segregated units and a quota was set on how many African American women could join.
While women were not trained for combat, some like Ruth Hess in France in 1944 were close enough, “At nite — those d_d German planes make rounds and tuck us all into a fox hole — ack ack [antiaircraft guns] in the field right beside us, machine guns all around — whiz — there goes a bullet …”
In the Pacific Theater, 77 Army and Navy nurses were taken prisoner in the Philippines and spent nearly three years in POW camps. They became known to the people at home as “The Angels of Bataan and Corrigador,” but not as prisoners of war.
When peace finally came, military women were encouraged to stay in their roles to serve in the occupation forces in Europe and Japan, and their demobilization was similar to that of men.
Some female veterans used the G.I. Bill, which provided for educational opportunities and other benefits, to get college degrees.
Women’s work on the homefront helped the U.S. produce the materiel and food needed for victory. Like their military counterparts, they learned new life skills as well as job skills, and millions of women were profoundly changed by their experiences.
When peacetime came, the same admen who encouraged them to enter the workforce now worked to convince them to return to their prewar lives — to be satisfied with the waitressing or secretarial jobs they had before. Or even better, to stay home and keep house.
The work world was a man’s world was the gist. Many women did heed these messages, particularly since millions of them were now new mothers. Those mothers, however, did not forget their wartime experiences and instilled in their daughters a new attitude toward education and work.
The flood of women into the workforce during the war did not result in drastic changes in women’s opportunities for paid employment after the war, it laid the foundation for the fight for a variety of women’s rights in the decades that came after.
Heidi Campbell-Shoaf grew up in Butler County and attended Slippery Rock University for her undergraduate degree in history. She holds a Master of Arts degree in American history from Kent State University; and she is museum director and chief curator of the DAR Museum in Washington, D.C.
