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By Root 1398 0

and Britain, though Adam Tooze has shown that Germany also used female workers more widely than formerly supposed. The Japanese social ethos precluded the elevation of women to positions of responsibility, but they played a critical role in factories, and by 1944 provided half of Japan’s agricultural labour force. Prewar Britain used women workers much 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 prewar 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 to eventually 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, Viriginia, telephonist. By 1944, 20 million American women were working, a 57 percent increase on the 1940