America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Although nurses worked near the lines of battle in North Africa and Italy, and six were killed after the landing at Anzio, they were generally kept well away from the front. Corpsmen attempted to stabilize the wounded on the battlefield and removed them to hospitals in the rear. That policy was inspired, at least in part, by a disaster during the first moments of the war, when nearly 100 army and navy nurses were caught in the Japanese assault on the Philippines; most spent years as prisoners of war. They were not women who had gone to the East for combat duty. Before the war, a posting in Manila was one of the military’s cushiest assignments, a world of houseboys and maids, palm groves and orchids, tennis courts and weekly polo matches. “We lived high on the hog,” said Minnie Stubbs, one of the nurses.

  In the disarray following Pearl Harbor, the army and navy could not hold the Philippines, nor could they rescue their personnel. The Americans decided to retreat to the Bataan peninsula, from which they hoped eventually to be evacuated. The nurses served for months in makeshift hospitals set up in the jungles of Bataan, under constant Japanese bombardment and fear of imminent attack. “Little did I dream that we would be always hungry, always frightened,” said one of the nurses later. As Japanese warships shelled American positions, nurse Sally Blaine looked around her and saw patients lying on the jungle floor as far as the eye could see. “I can remember doing dressings, starting right after breakfast and continuing throughout the day,” said Hattie Brantley. After a while, she found that her back would not straighten up between patients, “and I’d get down on my knees, finally not even bothering to arise but crawling to the next cot.” The officers noticed how uncomplaining the nurses were. “I was continually amazed that anyone living and working under such primitive conditions could remain as calm, pleasant, efficient and impeccably neat and clean as those remarkable nurses,” wrote a military surgeon after the war.

  A small number of the nurses were evacuated, and when they arrived back home, they found themselves feted in a peculiar, distancing way. They were either portrayed as superheroes, who drove through enemy fire to deliver vitamins to men on the front, or as fluffy little things intent on keeping their noses powdered. Brunetta Kuehlthau, a physical therapist, managed to send a letter to her family through the blockade at Bataan. She assured them she was “comparatively safe” and mentioned some homey details that she thought would not disturb her mother. The New York Times reported on the letter under the headline “Nurse on Corregidor Finds It ‘Not Too Bad’: Letter Says Hairpin Shortage Causes Women to Cut Hair.” Hollywood cranked out a string of movies about the Bataan nurses. In the most famous, So Proudly We Hail, Veronica Lake sacrifices herself to save her fellow nurses from a group of rapacious Japanese soldiers by detonating a grenade she had hidden in her breasts.

  Thinking of the Bataan nurses as action heroes with thermometers or as coeds on a bad vacation concealed the grim reality of what was actually going on. The soldiers who the nurses tended to in Bataan wound up being driven on a death march during which Japanese guards shot anyone who fell by the wayside from exhaustion and disease. Most of the nurses were taken as prisoners of war and held with 3,000 American and British civilians captured in Manila. They were even kept from taking care of the American soldiers, who were interned separately. When they emerged from their camp three years later—miraculously all alive, although many of their fellow prisoners had died of malnutrition or tropical diseases—the stories about them almost always focused on things like their eagerness to buy cosmetics and investigate the newest hairstyles. Unlike male prisoners of war, they were not treated for the psychological effects of their ordeal—the doctors seemed to assume that the women’s clinical training made them invulnerable to posttraumatic stress.

  Physicians who had served with Maude Davidson, the crusty head of nurses in the internment camp, urged that she be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. General Jonathan Wainwright, who had commanded the troops on Bataan, rejected the idea, arguing that her position was not high enough to merit the army’s third-highest award. During the fall of Bataan, Wainwright had told the American people that the nurses’ names “must always be hallowed when we speak of American heroes,” but after years of grueling imprisonment himself, he had apparently raised the bar on heroism. To add insult to injury, the major general in charge of the awards board concluded that although Davidson must have had to take some independent actions in keeping her nurses together and working through the evacuation, bombardment, and years of internment, “a large share” of the initiative and responsibility “must have been carried by doctors and commanders.”

  “SHE’S MAKING HISTORY, WORKING FOR VICTORY”

  Meanwhile, back at home, more than 13 million people had left for the service, and the same women who had been told to stay out of the job market during the Depression were now being begged to go to work. 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 of the 1940s was Rosie the Riveter, a mythic creature celebrated by Norman Rockwell on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post with a famous portrait that showed her perched on a steel beam, munching a sandwich and displaying her muscles while she casually ground Nazi propaganda under her heel.

  “While other girls attend a favorite cocktail bar,” went a song of the hour…

  Sipping dry martinis, munching caviar;

  There’s a girl who’s really putting them to shame—

  Rosie is her name.

  All day long, whether rain or shine

  She’s part of the assembly line,

  She’s making history, working for victory,

  Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie the Riveter.

  The number of women actually munching caviar during the war was hardly extensive, but still, for the first time the country was singing the praises of women who did hard labor. Women’s magazines, with a great deal of prodding from the federal government, applauded women who held down jobs in the same way they had always celebrated women who stayed home. Ladies’ Home Journal ran a story about a female surgeon who called off her engagement when she discovered her fiancé expected her to quit working. On the radio, Stella Dallas and other soap opera heroines signed up for defense jobs. (It was only one of the contributions soap opera heroines made to the war effort. Several lost fictional sons or husbands in combat, and Helen Trent fell over a cliff while trying to save a truckload of war supplies.) In many ways, this was an old story. In the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, women had taken over their husbands’ farm duties, and plowing a field was certainly as tough a job as slinging rivets. The difference in World War II—as it had been in World War I on a smaller scale—was that a huge number of women had to be recruited to do jobs that were not part of the family business.

  The first women to volunteer for 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 plant 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.” Even when the chemicals they were handling turned the women’s faces and hair orange, Terry said, they weren’t fazed: “The only thing we worried about was other women thinking we had dyed our hair.” As a result of the great migration of women to defense jobs, 600 laundries went out of business in 1942, and in Detroit, 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 quit school to join the war effort. Among the other early volunteers were the wives of servicemen. “Darlin, You are now the husband 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 daughter with an elderly neighbor 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.” At her old job at a machine shop, she said dismissively, she had handled “piddly little pieces” of the guns, whose function she never understood. “This seemed like part of it. You were doing something.”

  The shortage of teachers impelled most school boards to drop their rules against married women, and some actually appealed to married ex-teachers to return. The Office of War Information suggested articles it would like to see in print to newspapers and magazines, urging, among other things, “stories showing the advent of women in logging camps, on the railroads, riding the ranges, and showing them not as weak sisters but coming through in manly style.” 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 endless bruises for women who had to slide into bases barelegged.

  By late 1942, unemployment was virtually nonexistent, and the government projected a need for 3 million more workers in the next year. Child labor laws were suspended for youngsters over twelve. Handicapped Americans were given opportunities to enter the workplace, as were black women and older women. But the prime pool of potential workers was married women. Ads and movie newsreels constantly emphasized how defense work was just like housework: “instead of cutting the lines of a dress, this woman cuts a pattern of aircraft parts…a lathe holds no more terror than a sewing machine…after a short apprenticeship, this woman can operate a drill press just as easily as a juice extractor.” 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 U.S. government left them to their own devices. Congress didn’t appropriate money for federal day care centers until 1943, and even then it was used so ineptly that only about 10 percent of the defense workers’ children were ever enrolled. And while married women were being criticized as unpatriotic for failing to work, they were being denounced as bad mothers if they did. Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, published a report on latchkey children that was quoted everywhere: “In Los Angeles a social worker counted 45 infants locked in cars at a single parking lot while their mothers were at work in war plants,” she wrote. “Older children in many cities sit in the movies, seeing the same film over and over again until mother comes off the evening ‘swing’ shift and picks them up. Some children of working parents are locked in their homes, others locked out.”

  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. In 1943, two San Diego high school teachers, Constance Bowman and Clara Marie Allen, wrote about their experiences during the summer, when they volunteered for the swing shift at a factory that built the B-24 bombers. At the end of the first shift, Bowman wrote, “I was tireder than I have ever been in my life and also dirtier. My hair was tinseled with tiny shavings of metal, my hands were grimy, and my fingernails were bordered in black…. My uniform, my bright blue uniform of yesterday afternoon, had a tear in the knee, a streak of grease across the blouse and a large dusty circle on the seat of the pants where I had sat on the floor.” Being forced to wear pants to work instead of skirts made Bowman and Allen feel that they had lost their position in the universe. Men no longer offered them seats on the crowded buses; they were snubbed by clerks and ticket agents and leered at by strange males on the street. “It was a great shock to C.M. and me to find that being a lady depended more upon our clothes than upon ourselves,” Bowman wrote. (Though women wore slacks for athletics, they were not yet common for street wear. When four WASPs were grounded by weather in Americus, Georgia, in 1944, they were arrested by local police for violating a rule against women wearing slacks on the street at night.)

  Throughout American history, the concept of the woman as a protected homebody went hand in hand with the reality that most women—poor women—were expected to work and were not given any special deference because of their sex. By going off to sling rivets or weld airplane wings, middle-class women lost their status and joined the other part of American womanhood that was expected to fend for itself. “Whether they are dust-bowl mothers buying butter and eggs for the first time, or former dime store clerks making more money than army majors, or war wives who feel they must keep them flying because their husbands are flying them, or school teachers putting in a summer vacation on a war job,” Bowman concluded, the defense factory workers had all been leveled: “they are women who wear slacks instead of skirts.”

  “VARIETY MEATS: THEY ARE GOOD,

  ABUNDANT, HIGHLY NUTRITIOUS”

  Whether women worked or not, their lives were 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. New appliances were not being manufactured, and children who were promised a bicycle on the eve of World War II were sometimes licensed to drive by the time it became available. 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.

  American rationing was mainly a matter of inconvenience. By eating less sugar and being forced to walk because of the gasoline shortage, the population was arguably in better shape than it would ever be in again. “Never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation as in the United States in World War II,” sniped John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked at the Office of Price Administration. But for the American middle class, long accustomed to prime cuts of beef for dinner, the appearance of government-issued recipes for “Tongue Rolls Florentine” or “Tripe à la Maryland” was traumatizing. A government-issued magazine article entitled “Variety Meats: They are Good, Abundant, Highly Nutritious” explained in the most irritating manner possible that the army did not serve things like kidneys, livers, or tripe “because they spoil easily, take time to prepare and the men don’t like them. These objections, valid for the Army, make no sense when cited by civilians.”

  Civilians got stamps every month that gave them the right to buy different products. “My mother and all the neighbors would get together around the dining-room table, and they’d be changing a sugar coupon for a bread or a meat coupon. It was like a giant Monopoly game,” said Sheril Cunning, who was a child in Long Beach, California, during the war. The Office of Price Administration raised or lowered point values to encourage people to consume things that were in oversupply, notably eggs. At times, the government’s enthusiasm for getting women to buy more eggs was so intense it seemed as if Hitler could be stopped only if everyone ate an omelet a day. Some housewives noted bitterly that if they were given a larger allotment of sugar for baking, they could find plenty of ways to get rid of the eggs that were currently causing rebellion at the dinner table. “Give us housewives more sugar and watch the eggs disappear,” wrote Mrs. George Coffey of Montana. “People can only eat so many cooked eggs or they will become nauseated of them….” Commercial bakeries got a much more generous sugar allotment than individual citizens, encouraging the trend away from home-baked goods.

  All the wartime propaganda about nutrition gave Americans far more kn
owledge about the food they ate. Despite the diet-conscious 1920s, most people still did not know the difference between a vitamin and a calorie. It was in World War II that housewives were introduced to the food pyramid and the “basic seven” kinds of food necessary for a healthy diet. It was a fat-friendly listing that gave butter a category all to itself.

  “WE WOULD GO TO DANCES

  AND GIRLS WOULD DANCE WITH GIRLS”

  Even as women were being urged to the factories, they were being warned to remember that this was just for the emergency, and not to get carried away. A Seattle paper told them to avoid going “berserk over the new opportunities for masculine clothing and mannish actions.” A Des Moines Register cartoon showed a giantess of a woman in overalls, her pocket stuffed with “her own man’s size pay envelope” marching off with her toolbox while a tiny husband in apron and broom calls out: “But remember you gotta come back as soon as the war is over!”

  “Oh yeah?” sneers the hulking female war worker.

  The war actually did a great deal to restore men’s Depression-battered position as the most important member of the family. The nation’s entire attention was turned to the fate of husbands, brothers, sons, and boyfriends fighting overseas. Meanwhile, the men who remained back home were a rare and valuable commodity—perhaps a little bit like those southern women of the seventeenth century. Dorothy Zmuda of Milwaukee remembered one male coworker in her office who never did his share of work. When she discovered he was making more money than she was, her boss told her: “This is this time of our life that men earn more than women. They are considered more important, and even if you do the same thing he does and even if he doesn’t even do it, he gets more money than you do and this is our world today.”