by Gail Collins
Marriage rates jumped. “The pressure to marry a soldier was so great that after a while I didn’t question it,” said Dellie Hahne of Los Angeles, who wound up unhappily wed to a man in uniform. “That women married soldiers and sent them overseas happy was hammered at us.” Single Americans yearned for someone who was waiting for them, or for whom they were waiting. Dorothy Zmuda was casually dating a young man who suddenly offered her a ring when he was drafted. When she told him no, he found another girl who accepted it a couple of weeks later. “The girls that I knew all had boyfriends who were in the service and we didn’t date because we were ‘tagged’” said Emily Koplin of Milwaukee. “We didn’t do any dating—those were the years where we would go to dances and girls would dance with girls.” The Baltimore Sun noticed that “Women who never ventured out at night without a man sally forth in twos and threes without a qualm. Late movies have a large female audience.”
The forties was a time when women rediscovered the community of other women. “It was very important to have somebody to lean on, to have somebody to talk to,” said Koplin, who felt that parents “were worried about their sons being overseas, not necessarily the daughter that was left back home.” That sense of female solidarity was probably strongest among the women whose husbands were away in the service. Jean Lechnir was pregnant with her third child in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, when her husband was drafted. She banded together with nine other women in the neighborhood whose husbands were away at war. They pooled their ration stamps and played cards for a pound of butter or bag of sugar, and once a month, when the serviceman’s pay came in, they left their children with relatives and went out to eat. “Maybe a top meal was $2.50…and maybe we could have a cocktail or glass of pop or something for another twenty-five or fifty cents. That was our evening. But we’d extend it long enough to sit and watch other people dance or just sit and reminisce and compare notes of the letters we got from our husbands.” The friendships she formed in that group, Lechnir said, extended on for the next half century.
“WELL, OF COURSE, SO WERE THE JAPANESE”
World War II had a way of cracking open America’s tight-knit immigrant communities. While the sons were serving in the military with people from all parts of the country, the daughters, who might normally have dropped out of school to get married, stayed on to graduate and went to work in factories where they made friends with people from different backgrounds. Anne Dinsmore, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants, stayed in the Italian community in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband’s family while he was in service. When the sons went off to war, she noted, “their fathers fell apart…Just fell apart. And it was the women who stood very strong and kept the families together.” Dinsmore remembered the Italian women worried that the country would turn on them when Italy allied with Germany and became an enemy nation. “And I kept saying ‘No, that can’t be. You see, your sons, our brothers, are fighting in this war,’” said Dinsmore. “Well, of course, so were the Japanese.”
The Japanese were different. Earl Warren, the future Supreme Court Chief Justice, was attorney general in California when 110,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and taken to live behind barbed wire for the duration of the war. He assured the nation that Italian Americans and German Americans did not need the same treatment. “We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race…we can…arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they live in the community,” he said. After all, Dwight Eisenhower, who was leading the Allied forces, was of German descent, and some of the most popular American celebrities, like Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, were Italian. But most Americans had never met someone of Japanese origin.
When the Japanese Americans were interned, they were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry. Many of the men had been taken away first, because they were suspected of being enemy agents. “These poor women whose husbands were rounded up by the FBI, they were all fairly young and they had small children and no one to help them and they had to somehow make ready to leave…in forty-eight hours,” said Fred Fujikawa. “This was in December so a lot of the families had already brought their Christmas presents, like new phonographs or radios, refrigerators…. These guys wouldcome in and offer ten or fifteen dollars and because they had to leave, they’d sell.” Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old when her father was taken off by FBI agents and her mother was forced to move the family to a camp. When a dealer offered her $15 for the family’s heirloom china “blue and white porcelain, almost translucent,” her mother lost control and began breaking the plates, sending the dealer racing for the door. “When he was gone she stood there smashing cups and bowls and platters until the whole set lay in scattered blue and white fragments across the wooden floor,” her daughter remembered.
Yoshiko Uchida and her sister and parents were sent to a center in California where they were quartered in a stable, each family assigned to one horse stall. “The stall was about ten by twenty feet and empty except for three folded Army cots lying on the floor,” she wrote later. “Our stable consisted of twenty-five stalls facing north which were back to back with an equal number facing south, so we were surrounded on three sides.” Neighbors not only could hear a family’s conversations, they knocked on the wall to ask that someone repeat a comment they failed to catch. The latrines in most of the camps were a line of open toilets and many of the older women were humiliated at the lack of privacy. Some held newspapers over their faces. Others dragged large cardboard cartons to the latrine, and set them around the toilets like a screen.
Once the internees were relocated to permanent camps, the Japanese Americans created lives as best they could. The Department of the Interior boasted that the camp residents, who included some of the West’s most successful produce farming families, “are now producing practically all the vegetables needed by the 90,000 people residing at the centers.” Meanwhile, 33,000 young Japanese American men were serving in the army, many fighting with great distinction overseas. Japanese American women, eager to prove their patriotism, volunteered for the WACs. But the army did everything it could to downplay their presence. When one of the first groups of Japanese WACs was sworn in at a ceremony in Denver, a reporter covering the event was forbidden to take a picture, and WAC officials later successfully lobbied to kill the story entirely.
“HITLER WAS THE ONE THAT GOT US OUT
OF THE WHITE FOLKS’ KITCHEN”
In San Francisco, when the call went out for women to fill in for the men who had gone to war, a young Maya Angelou decided that she wanted to be a streetcar conductor. “I’d pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter,” she wrote later. Her mother warned her that although the city was advertising desperately for conductors “they don’t accept colored people on the streetcars.” Angelou stubbornly determined that she was going to get a job anyway, even though she was systematically ignored whenever she applied. “My trips to the streetcar office were of the frequency of a person on salary,” she said. “One day, which was tiresomely like all the others before it, I sat in the Railway office, ostensibly waiting to be interviewed. The receptionist called me to her desk and shuffled a bunch of papers to me. They were job application forms.” Thanks to Angelou’s persistence, and the city’s pressing need for workers, she did become a conductor—although one with some of the worst schedules of shifts in San Francisco. In New York, other black women with a similar stubborn patience finally broke the color barrier in 1944 and got jobs as telephone operators.
For black women, the war years were a combination of opportunity and frustration. The high-paying defense factories were the hardest to crack. In 1943, at the height of the labor shortage, the United Auto Workers surveyed 280 factories that employed women workers and found that only 74 were willing to hire an African American. When light industry went out recruiting, it turned to whi
te women while heavy industry targeted black men. Most employers, when challenged by government or civil rights groups, claimed they could not hire black women because white women refused to work with them. That was often true, although companies that took a firm line and forced their employees to choose between integration and loss of their lucrative jobs generally managed to overcome the problem fairly quickly. White women seemed to have a different reaction to integration on the job than white men. Studies suggest that men were not threatened by the presence of African Americans in the factories, but they reacted angrily if black men were promoted to jobs with higher salaries or more authority. The white women, on the other hand, seemed intent on keeping a physical distance. They sometimes demanded separate bathrooms, claiming black women carried venereal disease.
The war was a complicated matter for black women. When hurtful things happened—like a South Carolina resolution announcing that Americans were overseas “fighting for white supremacy” or the Red Cross’s insistence that blood donations be segregated by race, or the Boston USO’s rule that black women could serve as hostesses only if they promised not to dance with white soldiers—they must have been tempted to wash their hands of the whole business. But they also understood that although there were plenty of things wrong with America, there were none that Hitler was going to fix. “Despite all the bad things that happened in the country, this was our home. This is where I was born. It was where my father and mother were. So there was a feeling of wanting to do your part,” said Gladys Carter, one of the first black WACs to serve overseas.
One way some black women made sense of all this was through a campaign called Double V, in which African Americans pledged to work for both victory overseas and social justice at home. Pauli Murray, a student at Howard University, recalled that when the male students joined the service, those who were left behind targeted a small segregated cafeteria in the heart of a black neighborhood “which had long been a source of mortification for unsuspecting Negroes.” While volunteers sat in at the tables, demonstrators carried signs reading “We Die Together, Why Can’t We Eat Together?” The owner was forced to close for the day, and eventually the restaurant was integrated. But the administration at Howard University, frightened by all the publicity, forced the students to cease and desist, and the restaurant quickly went back to its old ways. (A decade later, when black college students in the South began sitting in at lunch counters to force integration, Murray realized that she had been a woman ahead of her time.)
It was not until 1944, under heavy pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt, that black women were welcomed into the military. (Elsie Oliver, who unsuccessfully petitioned to be among the African American women assigned overseas, called the First Lady’s office and left a message registering her complaint. Mrs. Roosevelt was on the phone within the hour and Oliver was shipped out the same day.) The WAC eventually enlisted 4,000 black recruits. Despite its grave shortage of nurses, the army was reluctant to take black RNs—particularly if they would be treating white soldiers. The corps eventually took 500 and then enraged the black community by assigning some of them to work in prisoner-of-war camps.
The military’s policy—articulated as seldom as possible—was to give the black women separate but equal accommodations. Major Harriet West, the highest-ranking black in the WAC, felt that the African American women in the army could have borne the segregation better if people had not insisted on rubbing her soldiers’ faces in their status. When the first class of the WAC Officer Candidate School arrived at the reception center at Fort Des Moines, the women were waiting to be assigned quarters when a male officer walked in and ordered “all the colored girls” to move over to one isolated corner of the room. A black journalist traveling with Major West to Fort McClellan in Alabama reported that they were required to travel in “a dirty, segregated coach” where Major West was insulted by a white conductor “whom she had asked to hand her baggage from the train.” At Fort Devens, black women who had been trained as medical technicians were assigned to work as orderlies, scrubbing floors and windows. When they complained to the commander of the hospital, he said that they were there to do the dirty work. Nearly sixty black WACs refused to report to work in protest, and though most were persuaded to give up rather quickly, four continued their work stoppage and were court-martialed and sentenced to a year of hard labor. The resultant outcry forced the War Department to reverse the verdict, reinstate the WACs, and transfer them to a new post.
In civilian life, black women moved into whatever slots white women left. They often took over low-paying jobs like elevator operators and car cleaners on railroads, but whatever the job, they saw it as an improvement over domestic work. “My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,” said Tina Hill, a Los Angeles aircraft plant worker. The white housewives who were left scrambling for domestic help blamed the government—particularly the Roosevelts—for encouraging the black women to look for higher-paying opportunities. Rumors were rife, particularly in the South, of secret “Eleanor Clubs” that encouraged former servants to flaunt their new equality by showing up at the grocery store when their ex-mistresses were doing their shopping.
“IT JUST ENDED OVERNIGHT”
“Ohh, the beautiful celebrations when the war ended,” said Peggy Terry, the defense plant worker from Paducah, Kentucky. “Everybody was downtown in the pouring rain and we were dancing. We took off our shoes and put ’em in our purse. We were so happy.”
When the war ended, the nation welcomed the men home and began enforcing the promise the 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 would replace us, one by one,” recalled Rose Kaminski. “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.” But after a few years of “normal living” and the birth of another daughter, she called her old boss and took a “temporary” job at the factory. It wound up lasting thirty-one years.
Three million women left the workforce in 1946, and many of the younger ones were 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 just ended overnight,” said Marye Stumph, a single mother who had made three times her previous salary as an assembler at an aircraft factory. She was on weeklong vacation in New Mexico when the war ended, and by the time she returned to her home in California, a telegram was waiting “saying that the job was over. A ten-word telegram.” William Mulcahy, who supervised women at an electric parts assembly factory in Camden, remembered “the day after the war ended. We met the girls at the door, and they were lined up all the way down Market Street to the old movie theater about eight blocks away and we handed them a slip to go over to personnel and get their severance pay. We didn’t even allow them in the building, all these women with whom I had become so close, who had worked seven days a week for years and had been commended so many times by the navy for the work they were doing.”
It was inevitable that many of the women would lose their jobs—the defense industry was shutting down, and the employees that the heavily unionized 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 relations machine that had gotten the women into the factory worked double-time getting them out. But as usual, the national theory about a woman’s place ignored the fact that many women didn’t have husbands to go out and work for them. “I happen to be a widow with a mother and son to support,” Ottilie Juli
et Gattus wrote to President Truman after she was laid off from a job at Grumman Aircraft. “I am a lathe hand…classified as skilled labor, but simply because I happen to be a woman I am not wanted.”
If defense work did not lead to a career for most women, it was still a transforming experience for many. Peggy Terry, the Kentucky woman who worked in a shell factory, had so little knowledge of the world that she barely understood what being at war meant. Her horizons expanded when she wound up in Michigan, working at a plant with a large population of Polish workers. “They were the first people I’d ever known that were any different from me,” she told journalist Studs Terkel years later. “A whole new world just opened up…. I believe the war was the beginning of my seeing things.”
The country thought of itself as far more tolerant after the war, and in many ways it was. The dozens of movies about army squadrons made up of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Anglo-Saxon soldiers reflected an image of America that society wanted to believe in. It was glorious, but of course only half a picture—blacks, Hispanics, and Asians were generally left out of the new egalitarian view of the American community. Minority women were doubly ignored, but they had been changed by the war, too, and to see the glass as empty would be to dismiss their accomplishments. “We got a chance to go places we had never been able to go before,” said Sarah Killingsworth, who had begun the war cleaning ladies’ rooms at an aircraft plant, 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 years old and make a decent living and still make a decent person out of myself, I really am proud of me.”
