Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  More than eleven million men went overseas from the United States to fight in World War II, leaving a severe deficit in manpower for noncombat military-support positions, jobs in munitions factories, and many other occupations throughout the war industry, just when the need for manufacturing production increased. Desperate to fill these vacancies, companies targeted people they were not used to recruiting: women and people of color. It wasn’t difficult to get Black and Latinx workers to line up for jobs. Their communities had long been excluded from the higher pay and employment security of skilled factory work, and many leapt at the chance. The harder part was convincing factory owners, managers, and employees to work alongside people of color. Many white workers protested, and riots broke out over the new workplace diversity.22

  But there were not enough workers of color to fill all the open positions. Even if there had been, people of color would probably have wanted to keep their jobs after the war ended and the white soldiers returned home and looked for work. The US government needed a workforce that would happily give up their employment once the war was over. Officials found those potential employees in their own homes: women. In particular, married white women. Married women, demonized for working during the Great Depression because they obviously didn’t have to work, became the ideal candidates for wartime employment for the very same reason—they didn’t have to work! Not motivated by personal need or ambition, married women would work both because doing so was their patriotic duty and also to support their husbands’ efforts overseas. Furthermore, they would, it was assumed, happily give up their jobs once their men returned home. And women did go to work: 6.5 million women entered the workforce during the war years, with nearly one in four married women working outside the home. Not only were women working—they were working in roles that had been closed to them before the war. According to Maureen Honey in Creating Rosie the Riveter, “By the end of 1943, women comprised 34.2 percent of all ammunition workers, 10.6 percent of those in steel production, 10 percent of all personnel in shipping, 8 percent of railroad workers, and 40 percent of people employed in the aircraft industry.”23 Women were an essential force in the domestic war effort.

  So how do you encourage women to work after having spent the last decade encouraging them not to work—while also making sure they won’t want to work for any longer than the government needs them to? Well, getting magazines like True Story to stop telling women that employment would only lead to divorce, infertility, and sexual assault was a start.

  The Magazine Bureau started reaching out to publishers to coordinate stories. It used its Magazine War Guide to help shape war coverage and to provide tips to popular women’s magazines on how to help improve social opinions about women workers. First to go was the idea that women who were engaged in war work would meet the scandalous fate that many women workers had met in past True Story confessionals. Officials at the bureau wrote, “May we suggest that care be observed not to create the impression that women engaged in any phase of war work, whether with the military services, in civilian war agencies or in war industry, are more tempted or more susceptible to extra-marital dalliance than others?”24

  The confessional magazines were asked to tweak their formulas to inspire women workers to find excitement in doing their patriotic duty as well as deeper and more satisfying love in supporting their men overseas—instead of the death and destruction they had foretold in past stories. Loathe to completely give up their reliable model of sin-ruin-redemption, however, True Story created two new story types: the selfless woman who would find satisfaction, joy, and love in working to help bring men home sooner, and the selfish woman who worked only for personal advancement and was met with the usual heartbreak, miscarriage, and assault.

  Here’s an example: in “Make Believe Marriage,” published in 1944, a wife struggles with balancing the needs of her marriage and her work supporting the war effort. But she takes pride in knowing she’s supporting soldiers and strength in the knowledge that as soon as the war is over, she can go back to being a housewife. By contrast, the selfish woman working as a surgical nurse in “A Solemn Promise,” published that same year, seeks only to fulfil her ambitions, stating, “At 23, I had no life beyond the great walls of mercy—desired none. My work was meat and drink to my soul.” She falls in love with and marries a patient, but her commitment to her career causes her marriage to fall apart, and she miscarries their baby. She is left lamenting, “We might have prolonged the rapture of our honeymoon indefinitely had I stayed in the shining little rooms and devoted my time to making a real home.”25

  Many of the government’s attempts to recruit and keep women workers for the war effort enforced this same dichotomy. Women who had never expected to work had to be recruited and kept happy while working. But they also had to leave their jobs as soon as men returned. To that end, working conditions for many women suddenly became much better than they had been before the war. Recognizing that women would still be expected to care for their families and homes while working, factory owners started adding daycare centers. Facilities were adjusted for women’s comfort, and training programs were created just for them. To protect women’s supposed sensibilities and purity, they were primarily hired at facilities that had few or no male coworkers (outside of supervisors and managers, who were still predominantly male). Fearful that the low wages typically paid to women would keep employers from firing them when the war ended, unions pressed for competitive wages for women. These gains were often denied, and most women still earned a good deal less than men—but their wages did increase once unions got involved. Women were living a workplace dream they had never seen before—and wouldn’t see again.

  To stave off massive unemployment once the war concluded, government officials began preparing for the millions of soldiers who would need work when they returned, mapping out a plan as early as the beginning of the war. All studies, surveys, and strategy meetings conducted to work on the issue of postwar unemployment were based on the idea that the only workers who counted were men—in particular, white men. No strategies were put in place to deal with the future of women workers, beyond how to most quickly and easily transition them out of work to make room for men.26 The US government commissioned studies on existing attitudes toward women workers and what should be done with them when the war ended.

  Not content to just gauge public opinion, government officials aimed to shape it. Propaganda was targeted to women (like that developed by the Magazine Bureau), but pamphlets and short films were also produced to mold male opinions on working women. One pamphlet commissioned from the American Historical Association (AHA) by the War Department, titled Do You Want Your Wife to Work After the War?, was a discussion guide of sorts that endeavored to get GIs thinking about how they would handle the presence of women workers when they returned home. Covering historical opinions, the pamphlet highlighted flaws in past hostility toward women workers (while reaffirming how understandable those attitudes were) in order to soften men’s views toward women’s employment. It featured a fictionalized discussion between two soldiers on the pros and cons of women workers. One soldier argued that while most women were happy to be wives and mothers, many also needed the excitement and purpose of outside employment. He talked about the financial benefits and security of having a wife who was also bringing in income. The second soldier argued that women workers would be in direct competition with returning soldiers for employment, and that they would abandon their wifely and motherly duties in order to keep a job that should go to a man. “How about competition from these women that are staying on the job to support guys like you?” the second soldier argued. “They’re going to make it harder for me to do it my way.”

  The debate on the surface seemed to evenly represent the issue—if we ignore the fact that the entire debate is situated within the needs, desires, and opinions of men. The final section of the pamphlet—titled “Some Attempts to Solve the Women Problem”—lists possible ways to deal with wome
n workers after the war, including those who wanted to keep working. Possible solutions include treating housework and child-rearing more like “a profession” and establishing training programs on household management. Another is to pay women not to work. The prospect of women staying in the workplace so long as men helped them with household chores in order to lighten their burden is briefly floated but immediately dismissed as too upsetting to the “traditional scheme of things.”27 While the pamphlet was initially framed as an impartial document in support of the war effort, the American History Association now acknowledges that it and other organizations like it were a part of the war machine intended to shape public opinion instead of merely gauging or reflecting it. The AHA admits that it “tailored its pamphlets to paint an idealized image of a postwar world that was essentially free of minorities, where women happily moved out of the factories and back into the kitchen, and where America would largely dominate the world stage.”28

  I’m sure that many in the War Office congratulated themselves on the success of their propaganda campaigns (and celebrated them as proof of the suggestible nature of women). But it is likely that a large percentage of the 6.5 million women who worked did so because they needed to support themselves and their families. Perhaps they had always wanted to work but had previously been denied decent-paying jobs.29 Regardless of why they started, once the war was over many women wanted to keep working. The efforts of the US government may have helped cement public opinion overall against women working after the war; studies showed that when asked what to do with women workers postwar, 48 percent of respondents said “fire them” and an additional 36 percent said “fire them, unless they have dependents, or are war widows, or there are plenty of jobs.” The government was far less successful in getting the women who were doing the work to eagerly give it up.30 Studies and polls conducted in 1944 of working women showed that 75–80 percent of them wanted to keep their jobs after the war ended.31 Apparently, they decided to risk the possibility of divorce, infertility, and death that True Story had warned them of for daring to want to work for any other reason than to bring soldiers home.

  Regardless of how vital the work of women had been to the war effort, the only jobs that the US government and factory owners cared about saving after the war were the jobs of men—even if a large percentage of the men returning had never worked in plants or factories. A million women were fired as the war ended, two million more left the workplace, and many were funneled into lower-paying “women’s” roles. White women were steered toward clerical work and lower-paying, low-skilled manufacture work, and Black women were placed in domestic service and laundries.32 Women who tried to stay in other fields and were not immediately fired found that the daycare services and welcoming work environments disappeared, unions weren’t interested in protecting their wages, and they were stripped of the promotions they had worked for. Often they were demoted to the lowest-paying and lowest-skilled positions in their plants and factories. As women were shoved out of higher-paid positions, many of which hadn’t existed prewar (especially in factories and plants built for the war effort and those utilizing newly developed wartime technologies), men quickly moved into them—and up the employment ladders that women had helped build.

  Returning soldiers who failed to land these promising positions were not left out to dry. The GI Bill provided education, training, financial relief, home loans, small business loans, and more. Between those benefits and the new skills and businesses that had been opened up by wartime production, and with the financial support of the US government, many men found themselves on the path to financial security—even prosperity. Enrollment in college, which prior to the war had been a place still mostly reserved for wealthy and socially connected sons, skyrocketed, as did home ownership. Almost half of all veterans started their own businesses.33

  Women were almost completely cut out of GI benefits. Of the eight million WWII veterans who used the GI Bill, only about sixty-five thousand were women.34 That’s 0.8 percent. Meanwhile, the average Black veteran found that the GI Bill simply returned him to his lower economic caste. College aid was offered to Black veterans, but it was moot; the vast majority of US colleges and universities refused to accept Black students, and those that did accepted so small a number that most Black veterans were unable to use the tuition benefits. Homeowner’s assistance was of even less use to Black vets, since banks refused to work with Black buyers, and cities redlined Black families into neighborhoods designed to keep the return on their investments as low as possible. The GI Bill was legislation designed to benefit only white men.

  Even unemployment assistance worked against Black veterans. When they returned home to find that among the new, promising jobs, the only positions offered to them were the most dangerous, the lowest skilled, and the lowest paid, they were forced to accept them. If they turned down these hazardous and poorly compensated jobs, they were reported to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and their benefits were cut, leaving them with nothing.35

  In nearly every instance of notable social progress and opportunity for women and people of color, we see immense efforts put forth by white men to build further guarantees of their power into those advances. Many still view WWII as a turning point for working women because it was an era when more women worked than ever before. And it’s true that many women continued to work after the war, helping to normalize the idea of women in the workplace. But when we look at the huge effort and expense the government expended on developing propaganda, as well as at legislation like the GI Bill—still so celebrated today—we can also see that it was a time when sexist and racist norms were modernized and cemented into the postwar economy. Due to the combined efforts of the federal government and business owners, the rigid definition of “women’s work” was scaled up to ensure that it could accommodate rising numbers of female employees—even if those low-paid and low-skilled jobs were not the ones they sought. People of color were once again forced into jobs and neighborhoods that continued to guarantee the conditions of poverty they had always known. And white men were given more opportunities than ever before to access highly skilled and well-paying work, education, secure housing, and entrepreneurial opportunity—simply because they were white men.

  WOMEN ONLY AS A LAST RESORT, AND THEN NOT REALLY: PUSHED OFF THE GLASS CLIFF

  When the New York Times announced in the summer of 2011 that Jill Abramson would become the next executive editor of the nation’s paper of record, few people were surprised. She had been established as the heir apparent in her previous role as its managing editor, and after scandals involving white male executive editors and struggles to adapt to a digital news world, Abramson represented both the change and the stability that the Times needed. Usually, when the person that everyone knows is going to get the job gets the job, it doesn’t make headlines. But Abramson’s promotion was widely talked about and celebrated.

  Why? Because the Gray Lady had managed to operate for over 150 years without a single woman at its helm.

  You’d think the New York Times would be embarrassed that it took so long to place one of its many talented women in charge. You’d think the paper would have gotten to it at some point in the thirty-five-and-counting years since it was sued by multiple women employees for harassment and discrimination. But instead of the promotion being viewed as underscoring the sexist legacy of the paper, the Times was celebrated for taking only sixteen decades to decide that a woman could lead it. And when you look back over the last few hundred years at how other companies have treated women, it makes sense that Abramson was regarded as a unicorn instead of as a hardworking, competent, and highly qualified employee earning a well-deserved promotion.

  Although no American company in this era can be openly against women workers without facing customer backlash and major lawsuits, women in general haven’t enjoyed the extraordinary gains in the workplace that those who were fighting for the right to work in the 1940s hoped for. Women are still paid significa
ntly less than white men; Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic women barely earn half of what white men make. Surveys show that between 30 and 80 percent of women report having been sexually harassed in the workplace. Most women still work at companies that don’t provide daycare assistance or adequate family leave to care for sick children. This country’s average maternity-leave programs are an embarrassment when compared to those of most European countries. In Washington, my home state, new parents are guaranteed only twelve weeks of paid leave following the birth or adoption of a child.36 In Sweden, new parents are given sixteen months of paid leave.37

  I know these truths personally. I remember tearfully leaving my son at daycare for nine hours a day just four weeks after he was born because I couldn’t live on the 50 percent maternity pay my company offered. I remember pumping breast milk in a supply closet in the women’s restroom because there were no sanitary or private accommodations offered. Outside of one brief stint at a women’s clothing store in my early twenties, I have not worked at a company where I wasn’t sexually harassed by a manager or coworker. I have been groped, kissed, propositioned—all without invitation or consent. I’ve been passed over for promotions because I wasn’t “strong enough to lead” and uninvited from meetings because I was “too opinionated.” And I’ve watched the same things and much worse happen to countless women friends and colleagues over the decades.

  Even though there are more women in the workplace than ever before, even though women are now more likely than men to get a college degree, and even though we can look up just about any corporate values statement and see something about “gender equality” written there—workplaces across the country are still, by and large, antiwoman. American business today is still a world run by and for white men. Women are ignored at best, treated like hostile intruders or sex objects at worst. After many decades of struggle, we are still so far away from gender equity that we can’t even see it.