• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1414 0

panels than men, due to general carefulness and a greater attention to detail. The authors of this survey felt confident in stating that women could perform 80 percent of all war-industry jobs and all but 80 out of 937 jobs in civilian industry. Boeing Aircraft in Seattle utilized squads of superwomen for moving and lifting heavy loads. Sperry Gyroscope announced: “Women can and do work in every capacity possible.” Tough individualized women, reflections of this stunning assessment, began to appear in the popular culture. Wonder Woman, after Brenda Starr, was the most popular cartoon strip of the period, and movie serials—the cartoonish and cheaply made “B” movies—tracked exotic creatures such as Ruth Roman in Jungle Queen, Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka,” deeply embattled in the endless Perils of Nyoka, and Marguerite Chapman as Spy Smasher. For the first time since its introduction in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was voted three times to the Senate floor.

Throughout the war years, an unusual number of actresses worked playing single women in films. Olivia De Havilland and Ann Sothern played aircraft workers in Government Girl and Swing Shift Maisie. Lucille Ball played a rich girl turned defense plant worker in Meet the People. Lana Turner played an unlikely war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You and an heiress turned WAC (the Women’s Army Corps) in Keep Your Powder Dry. Movie girls also contended with what had become a housing crisis. In The More the Merrier Jean Arthur shared an apartment with two men. In The Doughgirls Ann Sheridan pretended to be married so that she could keep a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Ginger Rogers starred in Tender Comrade, as one of several women who chip in to share and fix up a large house. And they get along beautifully, with no trace of the competition and bitchiness of Stage Door (1937), in which some of the above-mentioned stars lived in a boardinghouse for actresses, battling one another for auditions, dates with producers, and walk-on parts.

But as early as 1942, a campaign was under way to prepare the workplace for men by planning—and I paraphrase an actual headline—how to get rid of the women. A Time story complained that women flirted at work and, as evidence, reported that Douglas Aircraft had been forced to close its Santa Monica bomb shelter due to “lovemaking” during the lunch break. It seemed that women wore transparent blouses and “peekaboo” sweaters that distracted men.

Other publications quickly leapt on the story. There was an excessive powdering of the nose on company time. Absenteeism due to menstrual periods or constipation or both. Rampant gossip. Business Week, once so enthusiastic about this addition to the workforce, reported in 1943 that single women had been caught “soliciting” for extra cash, although it was unclear where the alleged munitions-plant prostitution had occurred. WACs were the target of endless jokes and nasty cartoons. Suddenly everyone knew the acronym “PWOP” (pregnant without permission). The subject of their underwear, specifically, what color it was, became a conversational topic. There were more than 300,000 WACs, and not a week passed without some newly invented scandal, very often involving suspected mass lesbianism. As if to purge the last impression, a 1944 Tangee lipstick ad showed photos of seven uniformed women and this declaration: “We are still the weaker sex. It’s still up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible.”

The New York Times Magazine apparently agreed. In 1943 it ran a piece called “What About Women After the War?” The question was answered, primarily, by a female personnel manager who adopted the tone of an advice columnist. “Different women want different things,” she wrote. “I think most of them—whether they admit it or not—want only to marry, have a home and a man to do their worrying (and sometimes their thinking) for them.”

The Labor Review for September 1945 casually reported that the Department of Labor was now “laying down recommendations on separation of women from wartime jobs” and the “ways and