• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1367 0

less than the Soviet Union, but quickly conscripted them under the pressures of siege. Some thus found a fulfilment they had not known in peacetime: Peter Baxter’s fifty-five-year-old mother worked as a clerk in the British Ministry of Supply, ‘and is, I suspect, enjoying herself more than she has done for years’, her son wrote. ‘She has a quick brain, and it is stimulating for her to be using her wits instead of toiling through a load of housework … I can’t help thinking that, much as my mother has loved her children, she might perhaps have been happier all these years if she could have kept on with a business career as women do in Russia.’

Many girls suffered, however, when thrust into a male-dominated, shamelessly chauvinistic factory world, as was Rosemary Moonen: ‘My initiation into factory life was shattering. Being a hairdresser in a high-class salon situated in a select area of the town, I was a somewhat genteel, reserved type of girl. To be plunged abruptly into a world of coarse, ill-bred men and women, where language was foul and bluer than the bluest sky, was an experience … harsh and unreal.’ The foreman to whom Moonen was first introduced tossed her a broom contemptuously, saying: ‘Here! Take this! And sod around!’

I was stung to humiliation before the rest of the girls … He returned thirty minutes later to find me sitting on a box doing nothing. Furiously he demanded ‘What the blankety blank I thought I was doing?’ Summoning all my courage I retorted that until he had the decency to show me the job I had to do, presuming it was to help the war effort, I intended staying where I was. Somewhat taken aback he treated me to a stream of foul language, calling me some of the filthiest names imaginable. I was so angry and disgusted by this time, that I brought up my hand and slapped him hard across the cheek … He apologised grudgingly, and took me to a machine, and demonstrated the pedals, handbrakes and rollers for me to operate … At the end of that shift I went home and wept bitterly. How was I ever going to stand the atmosphere?

Sarah Baring was a peer’s daughter whose sole pre-war occupation had been that of a dancing debutante. Now she found herself drilling alloy sheets in an aircraft parts factory, which she hated: ‘The airless workplace, the indescribable food, the damp floors which even soaked through the wooden clogs we wore on our feet, the twit of a shop steward who hadn’t the courage of a flea … the bullying and oppressive attitude of the manager … I had to take the odd day off and lie in bed fighting constant fatigue.’ Baring was fortunate enough to be able to exploit her fluency in German eventually to gain a transfer to Bletchley Park.

Every nation sought to elevate and glamorise the role of women war workers, as a stimulus to recruitment. In America in 1942, Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb composed a popular ditty:

All the day long,

Whether rain or shine

She’s a part of the assembly line.

She’s making history,

Working for victory,

Rosie the Riveter.

The original of Rosie the Riveter, who became an American feminist icon, was twenty-two-year-old Rose Will Monroe from Pulaski County, Kentucky. Like millions of Americans, she relocated to war work – in her case on the Willow Run B-24 and B-29 assembly lines at Ypsilanti, Michigan. She was made the star of a propaganda movie, and in May 1943 Norman Rockwell produced a famous painting of Rosie the Riveter, published as a Saturday Evening Post cover, though his physical model was an Arlington, Virginia, telephonist. By 1944, twenty million American women were working, a 57 per cent increase on the 1940 figure. The progress of black civil rights in the US, though extremely sluggish, was importantly enhanced by the recruitment into factories of African-American women, often working alongside whites. All female workers, however, remained severely disadvantaged by lower pay, earning an average $31.50 a week against the male average of $54.65. Many were employed in shipyards, which briefly spawned a ‘Wendy the Welder’ propaganda