Women on Pittsburgh's Home Front in World War II: Mills, Safety Hats and Recruiters

In October 1942, the U.S. Employment Service in Pittsburgh was quietly going plant by plant, job by job, working out which jobs women could do. If the draft took as many men as Selective Service director Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey expected — 10 to 13 million — war plants would have to release every man they could, and women would have to replace them. Pittsburgh, now an American World War II Heritage City, is a good place to see how that played out.

Planning for women in the mills

According to a Pittsburgh Press report of October 10, 1942, Employment Service technician Alvin D. Snyder was surveying 12 to 14 plants that would hire about 70% of the district's future war labor, examining every job for its suitability for women.

The 1944 poster, “Soldiers without Guns,” includes a picture of a woman welder. Welding was one role women had in Pittsburgh. Adolph Treidler, artist; Library of Congress.

• The limits were mainly weight and lifting — and could sometimes be overcome with better leverage. In manual dexterity, Snyder said, tests showed no appreciable difference between men and women.
• The changes he foresaw: wage gaps between men and women would have to break down, employers' restrictive hiring specifications relax, laws on women's hours and working conditions change, and in-plant training and job simplification become standard.
• Pittsburgh's challenge: because its heavy industries relied on semi-skilled labor requiring great strength, the area employed a smaller share of women than Philadelphia or the West Coast. But Snyder predicted that heavy drafting could put women in more than half the district's jobs.

The numbers did rise. By 1943, women made up 6% of workers in blast furnaces, steel works and rolling mills (up from 1% in 1939), 39% in aircraft and parts factories (from 1%) and 28% in aircraft engine production by that summer (from 1%). By September 1943, more than 30,000 of U.S. Steel's roughly 340,000 workers were women — just under 9%.

Keeping women safe on the job

In March 1943, Mary Anderson, director of the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, set out what women war workers needed. Work clothes, she said, should suit the job and its hazards — not too tight, not too loose, no jewelry, hair fully covered, and sturdy, well-fitted shoes. "No article of personal protective equipment is of more immediate importance to women workers than the headgear designed for safety," she wrote; hairnets alone would not do.

Safety, she said, depended on training and supervision — and would suffer if foremen or male workers resented women's presence. Beyond the plant gate, young women far from home, crowded into rooms without decent meals or recreation, faced illness such as tuberculosis. "Women are on the job in the war industries," Anderson wrote; "they are turning out the quality and quantity of work the war demands."

A recruiter's Pittsburgh

Marcella Irene (Jones) Martin served in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and Women's Army Corps from 1943 to 1945, rising to sergeant. In a 2015 interview for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, at 91, she described recruiting in Pittsburgh from spring 1944 for a short-lived hospital unit called the Blue Angels, caring for wounded soldiers.

“Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lillie Smith, working as a car washer in a garage, earns fifty-five cents per hour. She formerly did housework but likes this much better; she has one brother in the U.S. Army,” June 1943 Marjory Collins, Library of Congress.

Mornings, recruiters phoned women from a phone book; afternoons, a squad car dropped them at homes across the city. Parents who had already given sons to the war often refused to let their daughters go — until the recruiters began bringing along a wounded soldier. Martin recalled how sooty the city was, and how hard it was to keep cream-colored gloves clean; she remembered that most recruits failed their physicals, which she blamed largely on the pollution. There was little time for fun: everyone, she said, was focused on ending the war.

Women in the mills recalled resentment too. One steelworker later said men weren't ready for them — there weren't even bathrooms — though they came to respect the women, while seniority that let some women become better-paid inspectors bred more resentment.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Women's Contributions to the Home Front in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, WWII Heritage City," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson draws on Douglas Naylor, "Victory Belles," The Pittsburgh Press (October 10, 1942); Mary Anderson, "Basic Needs in Workers' Togs Given," Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph (March 16, 1943); Burt P. Garnett, "Women Wage-Earners," The Pittsburgh Press (November 4, 1943); the Veterans History Project interview with Marcella Irene Martin (2015); and Leona Dobis Farmerie (1992). Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.