An essay for the National Park Service by Donna Graves, a Berkeley historian and cultural planner who directed the Rosie the Riveter Memorial project, retold here in hubnx's own words.
Woman power
As men left for the military, government, industry and civic groups recruited women to the war effort with appeals to patriotism, guilt and the promise of new skills and chances. Women were the decisive resource in President Roosevelt's "Arsenal of Democracy", the plan to overwhelm the enemy with industrial output. About 12 million women worked in defence industries and support services — shipyards, steel mills, foundries, warehouses, offices, hospitals and day-care centres — welding, riveting and running cranes while still keeping house and raising children.
Nowhere were the changes clearer than on the West Coast and around San Francisco Bay. The western states had the highest share of women industrial workers in the country, and women outnumbered men among the migrants from the South and West who flocked to Bay Area war jobs — drawn by the work, and by the chance to be near men posted at the region's many military bases.
In the shipyards
The Bay Area's shipyards hired the most women: by late in the war women were 27 percent of the workforce at Richmond and 20 percent at the Moore yard in Oakland. Yet like most industries the yards held out until labour shortages forced them, and women pushed for the well-paid jobs — including a protest outside the Boilermakers' union headquarters in San Francisco. Not everyone was welcomed equally. African American women were usually kept in lower-paid shipyard work and more often found jobs in canneries, railways and military supply depots at half the shipyard wage. Even so, the war moved many Black women out of domestic service — as one woman put it, it was Hitler who got them out of the kitchen.
The double burden
Most women, of every background, carried a "double burden" of work and home, made heavier by wartime shortages of goods, transport, child care and housing. Bay Area women war workers were more often married than single, and the largest yards estimated that up to half of their women workers had children at home. Plants ran around the clock and many women worked six days a week. For the thousands who had moved west, finding decent housing in the boomtowns was one of the hardest parts. Housework itself was recast as war work: the victory garden, meals planned to keep the family fit, and shopping turned into a campaign of swapped ration coupons and carefully timed purchases.
Beyond Rosie
"Rosie the Riveter" in her overalls became the icon, but women's war work ranged far wider. They drove cabs and delivered mail, refitted railway cars to carry troops and plotted enemy aircraft. Bay Area women ran war-bond drives and civil defence, promoted public health through the Red Cross and hosted troops at canteens in buildings such as San Francisco's Ferry Building and Native Sons' Hall. Lena Horne sang for Richmond shipyard workers and the Andrews Sisters for soldiers recovering at Oak Knoll Hospital. Staff at the Berkeley Public Library collected and mailed 11,000 books to servicemen in the 1941 national Victory Book Campaign.
The YWCA in downtown Oakland turned part of its building into dormitories for servicewomen passing through and offered dances, forums on women in war production and Red Cross first-aid classes. New groups such as the American Women's Voluntary Service trained women to drive ambulances, run mobile kitchens, give first aid, watch for fires and sell bonds. Factory work carried more prestige, but boosting morale and organising communities through wartime problems was also seen as vital.
Families under strain
The war drew people together and pulled them apart. Family was praised as a refuge from wartime strain, yet the war upended roles within it. New jobs and earnings for women strained many marriages. Wives and children left behind by men shipping out from the Bay formed new households, often with grandparents or friends in the same situation. Women and teenage girls lived under less scrutiny, and public anxiety about female sexuality grew; young women thought to be too close to servicemen were derided as "Victory Girls".
Mothers and children were held up as what the war was being fought for, yet they bore the brunt of upheaval. Schoolchildren collected scrap and bought Victory Stamps, but also worried the public as "eight-hour orphans" — which spurred the first large federal–local partnerships to provide day care for working mothers. Communities and companies such as Richmond's Kaiser Shipyards used federal Lanham Act funds to build pioneering child-care programmes.
Struggle and exclusion
The "good war" at home was also a place of conflict. Women fought barriers such as exclusion from unions even as new doors opened. Women of color faced added discrimination and the contradiction of backing a war for freedom while their own freedoms were curtailed every day. Japanese American women suffered, with their families, economic ruin and forced removal from Bay Area communities to the camps, while still bearing the task of holding family life together. Women in Berkeley and San Francisco organised to support those incarcerated and to publicise their conditions — work some called unpatriotic, as they did the efforts of women in Bay Area pacifist groups.
After the war
As the war ended, policy and rhetoric turned against women working. Women — women of color first — were the first laid off as contracts ended, while government, unions and business gave returning veterans priority and pushed families back to the prewar "norm". Many women welcomed a renewed focus on family; many did not. A U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau survey found that 70 percent of Bay Area women wanted to keep their jobs in peacetime, and although a fifth of working women were their family's breadwinner, most lost their jobs. Still, the independence women had found, and the civil rights people of color now expected, meant the West would never be the same — and women, migrants and natives alike, had not just lived through those changes but helped to make them.
Sources
- Donna Graves, "Tending the Homefront: The Many Roles of Bay Area Women during World War II," National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/tending-the-homefront.htm
- More: World War II in the San Francisco Bay Area; Women in World War II.
- Photo: woman welder at a Richmond shipyard, Library of Congress.
- Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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