WWII Women's Roles?

Question:involvement in war effort? [importance/how they helped]
family life? (extra work of being head of household while husband was away in war) [details/examples]
careers that women typically had?
after the war, did women continue working? or did they stay at home while their husbands worked?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: involvement in war effort? [importance/how they helped]
family life? (extra work of being head of household while husband was away in war) [details/examples]
careers that women typically had?
after the war, did women continue working? or did they stay at home while their husbands worked?

There are a lot of good books written about the new roles women took up in support of the war effort during the Second World War. Some of these roles include flying as pilots as America struggled to manufacture an entire new Army Air Corps. Women entered factories and built ships and planes.

There have been a number of television programs that depicted the way women became heads of households while their husbands were away.

But the sad truth is that after the war, the women did not continue working. They were expected to give up their jobs for the returning war veterans and return to their homes while their husbands worked.

one of the most famous artworks is the poster "we can do it" it shows a woman flexing her muscle with the words i think around her. Meaning the boys are away and we gotta do it and we can do it. They worked in factories, farms, did everything they had to do while their men were away. Not many women worked after the war most went back to their home lives. The feminist movement in the late 60s and 70s is what got women into the workforce. Betty ferdan's the feminine mystystic book is really what did it.

Most single women were already working before the war, as single women have always had to earn a living. In 'America's women' Gail Collins writes:

'About 6 million women did take jobs during the war, joining the 14 million who had already been working and doing everything from paving roads to operating cranes. By the time fighting ended in 1945, women made up more than a third of the national workforce. Although most of them held clerical, sales and other pink-collar jobs, the idealized female employee was Rosie the Riveter.

The first women to volunteer for the defense jobs had already been working, in low-status, low-paying positions, and they grabbed at the chance to make better salaries. Peggy Terry, who got a job with her mother and sister at a shell-loading pnat in Kentucky was euphoric "we made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week" she said "To us it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing." As a result of the great migration of women to defense jobs, 600 laundries went out of business in 1942, and in Detrioit, a third of the restaurants closed because of the lack of help.

Although most unmarried women were already working when the war started, a number of college students quite shcool to join the war effort. Among the other early volunteers were the wives of servicemen. "Darling. You are now the hsuband of a career woman - just call me your Ship Yard Babe!" wrote Polly Crow to her husband overseas. Rose Kaminski of Milwaukee, whose husband served in the navy, left her young duaghter with an elderly neighbour when she learned that crane operators were needed at an ordnance plant to move the huge howitzer gun barrels. "Well, I was running one in three days" she recalled much later "It just came to me, I loved it."

The shortage of teachers impelled most school boards to drop their rules against married women, and some actually applied to married ex-teachers to return. for a few women on the home front, the war opened up opportunities that might otherwise have been unimaginable. People began dancing to all-girl bands. The owner of the Chicago cubs started an All-American girls League, which required its players to wear uniforms that featured short skirts and satin briefs - a combination that led to enldess bruises for women who had to slide into bases barelegged.

by late 1942, unemployment was virtually non-existent, and the government projected a need for 3 million more workers in the next year. child labor laws were suspended for children over twlelve. Handicapped Americans were given opportunities to enter the workforce, as were black women and older women. But the prime pool of potnetial workers were married women. However, even when the war was at its height and the need for workers was most desperate, nearly 90 percent of the housewives who had been at home when Pearl Harbor was bombed still ignored the call.

One of the reasons undoubtedly was the lack of child care. Unlike england, where the government provided all sorts of support services for women who worked, the US government left them to their own devices. But there were other less tangible reasons for the unenthusiastic response to recruitment campaigns. Defense work, although more rewarding than waiting tables, was not all that pleasant.

whether women worked or not, their lives werer made infinitely more complicated by rationing, which restricted the availability of sugar, coffee, butter, certain types of meat, and canned goods as well as things like gasoline, tires and stockings. Unable to find stockings, women began wearing leg makeup instead. And since the stockings of the 1940s had seams down the back, women's magazines ran guides on how to draw a realistic-looking line down the calf.

civilians got stamps every month that gave them the right to buy different products. "My mother and all the neighbours would get together around the dining-room table and they'd be changing a sugar coupon for a bread or meat coupon. It was like a giant Monopoly game" said Sherin Cunning, whoo was a child in Long Beach, California, during the war.

The Women's Army Corps (WAC) was established after legislation was passed by Edith nourse Rogers, a Republican representative, who had been a Red Cross volunteer during WW1, and who remembered how badly the military had treated the American women who did its clerical and communications work in Europe. Most of the other military services had smaller women's units. More than 350,00 women wound up enlisting during the war, mainly in the WAC and the nursing corps.

When the war ended, the nation welcomed the men home and began enforcing the promise that women workers had made - or the country had decided they had made - to give up their jobs for the returning soldiers. "They always got priority and they wouild replace us, one by one" recalled Rose Kaminsiki "Finally the fellow that I replaced came, and I remember him coming back and i was laid off. it didn't bother me...I think we kind of looked forward to it."

Three million women left the workforce in 1946, and many of the younger ones wre indeed eager to set up households and get on with the postwar baby boom. But most of the women who had worked during the war were older, with children who no longer needed them at home. They either needed to supplement their husbands' pay or they were the sole support of their families. Surveys showed 70 percent of the female war workers wanted to stay at their jobs, but few were given the choice.

it was inevitable that many of the women would lose their jobs - the defense industry was shutting down, and the employees that the heavilyunionized factories were going to keep were the most senior, male workers. The enlisted men had been guaranteed their jobs back, and sentiment for hiring the men was so high that new male applicants were given jobs over women with seniority. the public rfelations machine that had gotten the women into the factory worked double-time getting them out.

minority women had been changed by the war too. "We got a chance to go places we had never beena ble to go before" said Sarah Killingsworth, who had begun the war cleaning the ladies' room at an aircraft plant, and then went on to open her own restaurant in Los Angeles "For a person that grew up and knew nothing but hard times to get out on my own at eighteen and make a decent living and still make a decent person out of myself, I am really proud of me." '

I think the important thing to remember about WW2 is that most single women were already working before the war, and continued to work after the war. the majority of married women did not take jobs during the war, and did not appear to want them. the married women who took jobs were mostly those who had older children who didn't need them at home, or women who were really hard up and needed the money.

Married women who had to work from economic necessity were generally quite happy to give up work when their husbands' economic situation improved. In the fifties, a lot of men were better off than they had been before, and many women were able to give up work. Ebony magazine ran an atrticle called 'Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom' which celebrated the ability of African american women to stay in their own kitchens rather than cleaning someone else's.

having to do a full-time job, and then go home and do all the cooking, cleaning, childcare etc, is not something that many women found a particularly inviting prospect in those days.