Women on the Homefront During World War II, 1940s

From Mark Jonathan Harris. The Homefront: America During World War II. New York: Putnam, 1984. 118-121, 129, 131.

SYBIL LEWIS

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I began to look for a job. I decided I didn't want to do maid work anymore, so I got a job as a waitress in a small black restaurant. I was making pretty good money, more than I had in Sapulpa [Oklahoma], but I didn't like the job that much; I didn't have the knack for getting good tips. Then I saw an ad in the newspaper offering to train women for defense work. I went to Lockheed Aircraft and applied. They said they'd call me, but I never got a response, so I went back and applied again. You had to be pretty persistent. Finally they accepted me. They gave me a short training program and taught me how to rivet. Then they put me to work in the plant riveting small airplane parts, mainly gasoline tanks.

The women worked in pairs. I was the riveter, and this big strong white girl from a cotton farm in Arkansas worked as the bucker. The riveter used a gun to shoot rivets through the metal and fasten it together. The bucker used a bucking bar on the other side of the metal to smooth out the rivets. Bucking was harder than shooting rivets; it required more muscle. Riveting required more skill.

I worked for a while as a riveter with this white girl, when the boss came around one day and said, "We've decided to make some changes." At this point he assigned her to do the riveting and me to do the bucking. I wanted to know why. He said, "Well, we just interchange once in a while." But I was never given the riveting job back. That was the first encounter I had with segregation in California, and it didn't sit too well with me. . . .

So I applied to Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica and was hired as a riveter there. On that job I did not encounter the same prejudice. As a matter of fact, the foreman was more congenial. . . .

I worked in aircraft for a few years, then in '43 I saw an ad in the paper for women trainees to learn arc welding. The salary sounded good, from a dollar to a dollar-twenty-five an hour. I wanted to learn that skill and I wanted to make more money, so I answered the ad and they sent me to a short course at welding school. After I passed the trainee course, they employed me at the shipyards. That was a little different than working in aircraft, because in the shipyard you found mostly men. There I ran into another kind of discrimination: because I was a woman I was paid less than a man for doing the same job.

I was an arc welder, I'd passed both the army and navy tests, and I knew I could do the job, but I found from talking with some of the men that they made more money. You'd ask about this, but they'd say, "Well, you don't have the experience," or "The men have to lift some heavy pieces of steel and you don't have to," but I knew that I had to lift steel, too. . . .

It was interesting that although they didn't pay women as much as men, the men treated you differently if you wore slacks. I noticed, for example, that when you'd get on the bus or the streetcar, you stood all the way, more than the lady who would get on with a dress. I never could understand why men wouldn't give women in slacks a seat. And at the shipyards the language wasn't the best. Nobody respected you enough to clean up the way they spoke. It didn't seem to bother the men that you were a woman. During the war years men began to say, "You have a man's job and you're getting paid almost the same, so we don't have to give you a seat anymore, or show the common courtesies that men show women." All those little niceties were lost. . . .

The war years had a tremendous impact on women. I know for myself it was the first time I had a chance to get out of the kitchen and work I industry and make a few bucks. This was something I had never dreamed would happen. In Sapulpa all that women had to look forward to was keeping house and raising families. The war years offered new possibilities. You came out to California, put on your pants and took your lunch pail to a man's job. In Oklahoma a woman's place was in the home, and man went to work and provided. This was the beginning of women's feeling that they could do something more. We were trained to do this kind of work because of the war, but there was no question that this was just an interim period. We were all told that when the war was over we would not be needed anymore.

SHIRLEY HACKETT

I had a job with the telephone company and I was making thirteen dollars a week, but I immediately realized that I could not continue to support myself on that salary. I had to make more money because I was on my own, had to pay rent and everything else, so I applied for a job at a was plant.

I knew nothing about what it was like to work in a factory. I remember the first day I walked in there. It was a real shock to my system. The factory made ball bearings and it was extremely dirty. There was oil on the floor, and the area where we worked was very crowded; every inch of the plant was covered with machinery for vital work. The noise was so bad that you could not hear each other without yelling. I thought, I'll never get used to this.

The job I had was previously a man's job, very tough and very dirty. I worked inspecting ball bearings. Some were small and some of them were so big you could barely handle them. We had to put them on a gauge to see if they met the specifications they were supposed to. The ball bearings were made out of steel, and we wore heavy gloves, but it didn't make any difference. The ball bearings weren't the finished product, they were rough steel and ripped the gloves. You had to work very fast--this was piecework--and within three hours these thick gloves would be in shreds. By the time your foreman would bring over new gloves your hands would be bleeding all over the place. That was one thing you had to watch constantly--that you didn't cut your hands so badly you couldn't work.

The trays of ball bearing weighed a lot, and the women were not allowed to lift them. So the men had to bring your work to you, but they didn't like us in their taking their jobs. They didn't like that at all and let us know about it. In order to make life miserable for us and get us to quit, they would do everything they could to delay bringing the ball bearings to you. And we were doing piecework where speed was essential. Another thing the men tried to do was take advantage of you sexually. As they reached over to give you a tray of ball bearings, they'd rub against you any way they could, try to feel or touch you. If you didn't let them get smart with you, they'd let you sit there waiting for that tray. It was really a bad situation, o consequently I began to lift my own trays, until one day I got smart. Some of the women who were there before me knew the ropes, and one of them said to me, "If you're going to be crazy and pick up your own tray, just lift it and drop it. Do it two or three times and spill the ball bearings all over the floor. Then the big man will come down, and you know who's going to get it."