America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Depression-era girls who were too young to identify with Scarlett gobbled up Nancy Drew mysteries, the most popular of a horde of girl detective novels that made their appearance in the 1930s. Nancy was about eighteen years old and was free of the constraints of school. She did not have a regular job, although she did assist her father, a wealthy lawyer, when his clients required a mystery solved. She was strong and mind-bogglingly competent. As novelist Bobbie Ann Mason pointed out in a tribute to the “Girl Sleuth,” Nancy could, on a moment’s notice, perform as a bareback rider in a circus, take over the part of the leading lady in a play, assist a doctor doing brain surgery, and “lie bound and gagged in a dank basement or snowed-in cabin for as much as twenty-four hours without freezing to death or wetting her pants.”

  One of Hollywood’s stock heroines was the girl reporter, tough as nails on the outside but with a secret romantic streak. Perhaps 15,000 women actually worked for newspapers in the era—fewer, possibly, than could be found riding the rails as hoboes. But the reporters were a lot more fun to think about. In 1940, Howard Hawks introduced the ultimate gal reporter, Hildy Johnson of His Girl Friday. Hawks took the venerable script of The Front Page, a comedy about a manipulative editor and his (male) star reporter and cast Rosalind Russell in the reporter’s role. It worked perfectly. Meanwhile, Brenda Starr, ace reporter, took her place on the comic strip, and in the ultimate B-movie fusion, Hollywood made a movie called Nancy Drew, Reporter.

  Most of the women who worked in journalism were confined to the women’s department, or small-town community papers. But reporting was still one of the professions where, early on, a few women had been able to have adventures in full public view. Dorothy Thompson became an incredibly influential columnist in the 1920s after she went to Europe and sold freelance stories on the German political situation. At the time, international reporting was a new field, not particularly prestigious or well paid—fertile territory for ambitious women. Thompson’s analysis of what was going on in Germany and Eastern Europe was must-reading in the years before World War II, and when she married novelist Sinclair Lewis she also became half of one of the nation’s top celebrity couples. She wrote her three-times-a-week newspaper column out of a New York apartment with nine telephones and three secretaries. She also lectured all around the country and made frequent radio appearances. “I had a wife once but she vanished into the NBC building and has never been heard of since,” grumbled Lewis. (The marriage didn’t last.)

  17

  World War II: “She’s Making History, Working for Victory”

  “I AM GOING TO ASSIST IN BUILDING

  A PLANE TO BOMB HITLER”

  World War II was an emergency on an epic scale. Although American women weren’t shelled and driven from their homes as some were during the Civil War, the country needed their participation more desperately, and in more different ways, than it ever had before. If housewives had paid strict attention to the barrage of demands and warnings from government propaganda machines, they probably would have gone mad with anxiety. They were told that it was their duty to take over for the men who had gone to the front, filling in as bus drivers, bank tellers, and defense workers in the aircraft and munitions factories. They had to support food rationing by shunning the black market, buying only the amounts of meat, sugar, and butter their ration cards allowed. But their meals had to be healthy and tasty—otherwise they and their family might succumb to “hidden hunger” and slow down war production at work, thus endangering the soldiers in combat.

  Women who failed to volunteer for a factory job were dogged by pictures of idle equipment that warned a “soldier may die unless you man this machine.” If they did go to work, every moment counted. One of the many propaganda films slipped in between the movie features was called Conquer the Clock, and it showed a soldier being killed because a female defense worker slipped off for a cigarette, allowing some cartridges to go through the assembly line uninspected. Constance Bowman, a worker assigned to install safety belts at an aircraft factory, was told that if she took a day off, the planes might roll off the assembly line without seat belts, endangering fliers’ lives. Copywriters for public service ads came up with so many scenarios for how civilian women could wreak havoc on the casualty rates that an official at the Office of War Information warned his subordinates: “threatening women with the death of a soldier is poor psychology with which to attempt to drive them into the labor market.”

  Married women, who formed the main target of the propaganda barrage, were supposed to volunteer for defense jobs, save pan drippings and turn them in to the nearest butcher, contribute to metal scrap drives, grow victory gardens and can the harvest, and above all, continue to nurture the family and keep the home fires burning. Those who worked—and wrestled with the painful bus commutes made necessary by gasoline rationing—were still supposed to respect rationing regulations even though they had virtually no time to shop. (In the movie Tender Comrades, five soldiers’ wives have a spirited argument about what to do when the butcher sends them more meat than their ration stamps permit. The star, Ginger Rogers, takes the position that accepting the bacon could endanger the lives of their husbands overseas.) The government and the media uncovered a host of role models, like Mrs. Chris Laukhug in Defiance County, Ohio, who canned 2,000 quarts of forty different kinds of food, dried bushels of fruit and vegetables, and made her own maple syrup. In Atlanta, Helen Dortch Longstreet, eighty, became a star when she was discovered working in an aircraft plant. Mrs. Longstreet, the widow of a Confederate general (it had been a May-December romance) assured her interviewers, “I am going to assist in building a plane to bomb Hitler…to the judgment seat of God.”

  “A WOMAN’S ARMY…

  THINK OF THE HUMILIATION”

  In 1940, Jeanette Rankin, the Montana Republican who had been the first woman ever elected to Congress in 1916, resumed the career that had been derailed when she voted against World War I. Rankin was elected to her old House seat, once again on a pacifist platform. “By voting for me…you can express your opposition to sending your sons to foreign lands to fight in a foreign war,” she told her audiences. At the time, most Americans shared her antiwar sentiments, but after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, national opinion changed overnight. Congresswoman Rankin rushed back to Washington, “driving to my execution,” as she remembered it. On December 8, the House voted 388–1 to declare war on Japan. Again, she had been elected just in time to vote against a world war. Police had to escort Rankin back to her office through the angry crowd. “Montana is 100 percent against you,” her brother cabled from home. William Allen White, the legendary editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, editorialized that his paper “entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position” then added: “But Lord, it was a brave thing.” At the end of her term, she would retire, consistent and unrepentant.

  Rankin was not the only American woman with limited enthusiasm for armed combat. Two months after Pearl Harbor, a survey found that 57 percent of the male respondents favored war with Japan “even if our cities would be bombed” while only 36 percent of the women were willing to go that far. Still, it was becoming clear that the nation was going to require women not only to support the war effort, but also to join the military itself. The army needed them to do clerical work and other noncombatant jobs, to free up more men for fighting. But most of the top brass was adamant that the women should only be there temporarily and should not receive full military status.

  The generals marched headlong into Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, who was equally determined that women would get the same rights and protections as other members of the service. Rogers had gotten to Congress by the traditional route, succeeding her husband when he died in office. But unlike most House widows, Rogers won reelection in her own right. (She died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine, campaigning for her seventeenth term.) She had gone overseas as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and she r
emembered how badly the military had treated the American women who did its clerical and communications work in Europe. Refused military commissions, they “received no compensation of any kind in the event they were sick or injured—and many were,” Rogers told her colleagues. After a series of compromises, she managed to pass legislation establishing the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Most of the other military services had smaller women’s units. More than 350,000 women wound up enlisting during the war, mainly in the WAC and the nursing corps.

  The army still went out of its way to stress that it hoped the WACs’ role would last no longer than the hostilities. For a while, the War Department adopted the slogan “The WAC who shares your army life will make a better postwar wife.” Officials also stressed how mundane the women’s role would be. Assistant Chief of Staff John Hildring echoed a familiar sentiment when he said that “we have found difficulty in getting enlisted men to perform tedious duties anywhere nearly as well as women will do it.”

  The attention given to women far outweighed their numbers; they were never more than 2 percent of the armed forces. But while they were celebrated in endless newsreels and magazine photos, they were also denigrated. Frieda Schurch, a WAC assigned to Drew Field in Tampa, remembered that the regular army folk did not feel it was appropriate to have women on base “so they put us five miles out, off the base, in a swamp that wasn’t drained and had mosquitoes.” Although Drew Field had only about 100 WACs, she said, “We always averaged 14 in the hospital for infected mosquito bites.” The area was drained only after the women were evacuated and the barracks became housing for prisoners of war.

  From the beginning there were rumors that the women were sexually promiscuous, that the WACs in particular were a sort of geisha corps recruited to improve the “morale” of the troops in the most basic way possible. There was a widely reported rumor that thousands of pregnant WACs had been evacuated from North Africa, a story that turned out to have grown out of the evacuation of three women, one who was ill and two others who were married and pregnant. “It raised hell,” wrote one company commander. “Long-distance calls from parents began to come in, telling the girls to come home. The girls all came in crying, asking if this disgrace was what they had been asked to join the Army for…. It took all the pride and enthusiasm for the Army right out of them.” The FBI was called in to determine if this was some sort of enemy disinformation campaign and found that most of the talk originated with male servicemen.

  The idea that American men were fighting to protect the women back home was extremely powerful during the war, and many servicemen felt diminished by having women in the military. True, women were restricted to noncombatant duty, but most of the men never saw combat, either. The only thing that identified them as defenders of the homeland was their uniform, and now women wanted to wear that, too. “A woman’s Army to defend the United States of America! Think of the humiliation. What has become of the manhood of America that we have to call on our women to do the duty of men?” asked a congressman from New York during the debate over Representative Rogers’s bill. Black male soldiers, who had plenty of other assaults on their dignity, were unhappy about the arrival of black women. “The efforts of the women to be supportive of the men was mistaken for competition and patronage,” said one African American WAC. Even the idea that women were simply stepping in to free up men for the front lines drew a decidedly mixed reaction, depending on how enthusiastic the soldiers were about getting the chance to risk their lives for their country. A WAC in Birmingham ran into the man whose job processing payrolls she had taken and was told: “Thanks for letting me go.” But Evelyn Fraser, a former Indiana reporter who volunteered for the military, said that a lieutenant she had been sent to replace refused to explain how to do the job, for fear that once she learned, he’d be sent overseas.

  “THREE HOLES IN THE TAIL, BOYS,

  THAT’S A LITTLE TOO CLOSE”

  The first five WACs flown to Europe had been trained to serve as executive secretaries. They arrived in England and were promptly put on a boat for North Africa, which was sunk. Although all five were rescued, Oveta Culp Hobby, the Texas newspaper publisher who had been appointed head of the WACs, flew to the training center at Daytona Beach to warn the women about the dangers of going into a combat theater. After her speech, the WACs were given a break to eat and were urged to think about whether they still wanted to volunteer for duty overseas. “We didn’t go to dinner, we all got in line to sign up,” one woman wrote. “The whole battalion, one behind the other…. The officers were walking around with tears running down their cheeks, especially Colonel Hobby.” Of the 300 women at Daytona Beach, 298 volunteered.

  Not all the overseas assignments worked out well. More than 5,000 women wound up in the Southwest Pacific, mainly performing post office duties, like sorting and censoring the soldiers’ mail to make sure it didn’t reveal military secrets. They went through endless piles of letters from young men to their friends and lovers, much of it obscene. They worked ten hours a day seven days a week, and since no one was willing to give them special permission not to wear their uniforms, their heavy clothing was constantly wet with sweat and gave them skin diseases. The only alternative was light cotton shirts that left them vulnerable to mosquitoes and malaria. Some of the officers were so worried about the women’s safety that they kept them virtual prisoners and after a year or more of close confinement, WACs in New Guinea were reported to be guilty of “resentment, disobedience and immature conduct.” Other women, who landed after the troops in Italy, North Africa, and Normandy, got better treatment and more meaningful work.

  The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done. The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was created to free male fliers for service overseas. The 1,000 women who were accepted flew 60 million miles during the war, in every type of plane manufactured by the military, including experimental jets and the B-29 Superfortress. Male pilots, who often felt they should not have to risk their lives on domestic flights far from the glory of combat, cheerfully turned over dangerous assignments to the women. Originally, the WASPs were supposed to simply fly new planes from the factories to the ports, but they also wound up towing targets so the artillery could practice, flying past long lines of guns being fired by inexperienced trainees. Sometimes when the WASPs returned, their planes were riddled with the bullets that were supposed to be directed at the targets they were towing. The male pilots at Camp Irwin in California refused to tow targets for tank gunners, who tended to fire wildly as they raced their cumbersome vehicles across the desert while attempting to aim and shoot. The next time the tanks were taken out for a drill, they heard a female voice over the radio calmly saying: “Three holes in the tail, boys, that’s a little too close.” The male pilots also were happy to hand over the job of testing planes that had been grounded for safety reasons and had theoretically been repaired.

  Early on, the women pilots had to fight against military attempts to ground them when they had their periods. An army flight surgeon, Nels Monsrud, conducted a rigorous study of the women’s performance and produced scientific evidence that menstruation had no effect on their capacity to perform as pilots, putting an end to a legend that had bedeviled women fliers since the days of the Wright brothers. (It wasn’t the only theory about female biology circulating in the corridors of power. Men in both the military and Congress still believed that as women approached menopause they lost their reason, and the Surgeon General was called in to beat back an attempt to require women with military commissions to retire before their fortieth birthday. )

  Although the WASPs’ safety record was better than that of men doing comparable jobs, thirty-eight of them were killed in service. (One of them was crushed when her plane crashed after someone put sugar in the gas tank.) When a WASP died in the line of duty, her friends raised money to send the body home, because their corps was ne
ver given official military status. The dead flier was not even eligible to have an American flag placed over her coffin, although the women who accompanied the bodies of their comrades home never had the heart to tell the families that their daughters and sisters could not have that military honor. The WASPs believed that eventually they would get their commissions, but as the war went on, the military developed a surplus of pilots, and male fliers stationed at domestic bases were suddenly faced with the possibility that they might be transferred into the infantry. Jill McCormick, a WASP who once survived a midair explosion of a battered dive bomber she was ferrying to a reclamation center, was sitting in a Raleigh hotel lobby when she was surrounded by men in uniform, calling her a slut and shouting at her to go back home. Under pressure from the male pilots, Congress rejected a bill to militarize the WASPs, and future training classes were canceled. The program was deactivated at the end of 1944, and the women were unceremoniously sent home.

  “LITTLE DID I DREAM THAT WE WOULD BE

  ALWAYS HUNGRY, ALWAYS FRIGHTENED”

  No one questioned what the more than 70,000 women who served in the army and navy nurse corps were doing in the military, although female doctors had to fight tooth and nail to get commissions, just as they had in World War I. (The secretary of war’s niece, who was a physician, wound up enlisting in the British medical forces out of frustration.) Toward the end of the war, Congress was actually preparing to draft registered nurses because the need was so great, but hostilities ceased before the plan was put into operation. However, the nurses also suffered from a torrent of rumors that they were promiscuous. There was a mean streak in the national character that presumed women who willingly went to live among thousands of soldiers could be after only one thing. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, one nurse in training explained that few of her classmates were enlisting because they feared their reputations would be ruined. “Everywhere one turns—on trains, streetcars, at social gatherings or the USO—men of our armed forces debase the very organization that protects and heals them in their afflictions,” she complained.