Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [86]
One female worker recruitment film, entitled To the Ladies, and shown as part of newsreels throughout 1942 and ’43, opens with an establishing shot of fictional Middletown, USA. The camera pans the sidewalks, town squares, store windows and finds only women. They’re young, hair down, in flowered dresses, or they’re older, more professional-looking, hair piled up, shoulder pads piled up nearly as high. We intercut between life scenes: girls at a drugstore counter giggling over sodas and twirling in their seats…women buying nail polish…women having lunch…women going to the movies in the afternoon. The Voice of Authority asks us to compare this lackadaisical portrait with others from around the world.
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