Unknown Speaker  00:02
I'm going to be cutting out something so excuse the illusion sometimes I'm just pressed here, squeezing out my favorite material. I had an action plan in my life to get interested in the question of women during World War Two, it kind of happened to me rather than choosing to do so. The way it happened was that I came across some very curious passages when I was doing my general, more general work on the history of women's work. And I'll give you a few of those just to give you an idea of the sort of things that were beginning to strike my curiosity to people had studied the sociology of the Willow Run defense plant, and they made this remark. Realizing the working mothers needed to be sold on the advantages of using daycare industries. Mrs. Edsel, Ford had arranged for educational movies on the subject to be shown in the women's restrooms at the bomber plant. When Henry heard that he vetoed the idea instantly. So that was that more than 10,000 women were actually working in the Obama plan at the time, Mr. Ford made no move to get rid of them. But in his view of 1870s, women have no business working in factories. So working mothers who had no business in the factory anyway, continued working in blissful ignorance of the advantages of daycare nurseries. That was one passage, then I read back over Sunil Karstens essay crazy for this democracy. And she starts out wondering whether FDR had really meant to call America the Arsenal of Democracy, or whether he wasn't meaning that British arts and all since she couldn't see fighting to protect the French right to subjugate the Indo Chinese or the Dutch right to crush the Indonesians, or the British right to control the Malaysians and the Burmese was this really what democracy was about, as she put it, the essence of democracy has shouldered the load of subjugating the dark world completely, and she goes on. Then I read those accounts of the growth of lesbian communities both in civilian and domestic life. We have a quote from a whack officer in 1944. The Surgeon General's office in the latest circular letter, particularly for soldiers overseas, stressed that homosexual relationships should be tolerated as long as they were private, sensual and did not disrupt the unit. The war emergency apparently made a lot of things possible. I read row rose spells account with Sophie Collins it the patriotic immigrant household worker with a heart of gold.

Unknown Speaker  02:51
Her daughter Irene had gotten into trouble and was pressuring her boyfriend marry her. crying and begging hadn't worked. So I really learned from what unions did. And this is how Sophie tells it. She knew there'd been many strikes in Bridgeport in front of the factories, men and girls would you call them pickers? No pickets, walk with signs, and then the boss is settled, right? She put a sign which says George Adonis is fair, unfair to baby banner, I have the this is Sophie in front of the factory gate with her baby carrot. I remake the sign herself and put it over the carrot. Every day, lunchtime, all dressed up fine. She go to the machine shop and she walked this way and that before the door, all the men would work with George they come out and when they see her, they laugh and they Pat her on the shoulder. They say she's a great girl. At first George you get mad like hell and then when you see the other men think Irene is pretty smart. He come out one day and he say okay, kid, you when I started to read more and more of these accounts, which did not fit into the received wisdom, Mr. Ford's patriotism didn't extend to allowing information about daycare centers, which might become a permanent fixture after the war. And Hurston was speaking for a lot of blacks in this country around 35% Because estimated, we're not sure they'd be treated any worse. If the Japanese conquered the US, who felt it more important to make democracy work at home, and to concentrate on beating the axis and Sophie's Irene adopting union tactics to shame her boyfriend into capitulation. I began to wonder about this Rosie the Riveter. So I went to some of the secondary literature, the granddaddy of which is, takes the American woman in 1972. And there he argues that World War Two was a watershed event in the history of women's work and American values. The female labor force patterns decisively altered paid work for women became more normal. More older married women would enter the labor force from then on, and for taping this laid the ground work for the 60s, women's liberation movements. Now this sort of glass half full approach provoked its own half empty chorus. Trey's women in the war economy World War Two detailed the discrimination against women war workers and the way their expulsion was planned by the authorities. The emphasis emphasis is on women's need and desire for paid work, and the need for women to have that kind of outside work for developing liberated consciousness. There was Patti quick and her 1975 Rosie the Riveter, myths and realities that laid out the competing mythologies that arose who is a happy housewife drawn by patriotism into war work, but gladly going back home at the end of the war. The new Rosie was a frustrated housewife who had always wanted to work on your husband and the rest of the boys being government unions and business wouldn't let her the war labor demand meant that she could finally get a chance and she loved it. And so when the war was over, and the boys pulled her out of the factory, she was kicking and screaming.

Unknown Speaker  06:06
Quick is satisfied with neither of these myths base that they are on the ideology of the White was a woman, not the typical woman work. She won't by those accounts have a dramatic increase in women's labor force participation with the war, since much of the increase could be due to the reentry of discouraged workers from the depression years back into the labor force. The war had a major impact on black women's labor force prospects, since not all returned to household work after the war. But in general, the post war period saw the commodification of housework. Thus, wives worked in the paid labor force to produce the vacuum cleaners, for example, that they buy with their wages to speed up the housework. This could only be considered liberating in that double Marxist sense to be liberated to be enslaved by the wage. Meanwhile, Tobias and Anderson publishing, they're finally argued what really happened to Rosie the Riveter, which took up the demobilization question in depth. They argue that women were involuntarily pushed out of their better paying more jobs by returning veterans, which was felt to be reasonable, but were denied fair treatment for their seniority and the layoff lists which did angered a lot of women. They buttress their argument with a shopping set of excerpts from Union management collective bargaining arrangements, where you see how women workers were sold out by their union brothers, as well as management. They detail were women workers resistance, the grievances the strikes and demonstrations, but these brave Rosie's are condemned to jobs get back to their low paid pink collar work. By 1978. Ralph is focusing on the propaganda literature recruiting primarily white middle class women into the war industries comparing the effectiveness of the German and American recruiting efforts. And Heartland in her survey of the advice literature to women on how to treat the returning veteran is able to uncover the ideological underpinnings of the demobilization problem. If one believed the propaganda and women's magazines, the sheer burden of soothing the war torn souls and returning veterans looked to be a full time job for any woman movements 1980 article organizing the sexual division of labor put women's more time experienced in the broader context of the creation and recreation of jobs segregation by sex. Again, the unions are party to the process, and women are pushed out of their preferred jobs. Then Ken Anderson came out with her book length study wartime women, which examined in depth women's experiences in three major defense areas Baltimore, Seattle and Detroit. While she notes the tremendous changes women underwent in the relatively brief span of the war years, she is aware of how quickly employers reverted to their pre war prejudices about women workers, women emerged as the ideal reserve army of labor, which was not to be needed in a post war economy nervous about the unemployment aspects of reconversion Susan Hartman tread some of the same turf in your 1982 book, although there is more national perspective and there's more coverage of the ideology and popular culture. And then there is honies article on class differences in recruitment propaganda, a comparative look at the Saturday Evening Post and true story. While this is an interesting approach, class differences readership match certain hypotheses about differences in wealth prescriptions for middle class women, it was okay to drive for equalitarian roles, but for blue collar women there is no gender advancement stress, it has some instructive shortcomings. The first relates to her understanding of the function of these magazine stores, as she says, well, because formula stories are expressions of culturally shared ideas and myths. I felt that they were revealing maps of consciousness. But given that the opposite more information has been creating all these plots. What we are dealing with in this literature is really propaganda culture and not popular culture. The difference between these two in a period such as this is often the most revealing aspect of the material overall. This distinction will be made further later on. A second problem with your study is her admission that and I quote, such a study ignores the popular culture of minority women upon whom more work had a dramatic effect. The way in which propaganda class and gender interacted with race on a cultural level has yet to be explored. To assume that it was even possible to understand white women's experience of the war without knowing the relevant ideology of race relations is difficult enough. But considering how large the question of minorities really was on the homefront, this exclusion is particularly damaging. The problem of trying to deal with the contradictions of the war experience without understanding what was going on with minorities is linked to this problem of not distinguishing between propaganda culture and popular culture. Propaganda was fashioned around the white middle class woman. So it is not for us to understand why these problems have gone hand in hand. But as soon as you do investigate the war, from the point of view of minorities, some different interpretations begin to emerge. To begin with, this focus on legal entitlements to equal treatment becomes a lot less important. minorities were already used to that gap between paper rights and civil rights that white women had yet to experience to the same degree. They consider the passage or chapter in almost every one of the war diaries on the question of race relations. And you start to realize the degree to which women had to change their own consciousness of racism and sexism. Women came out of the womb with a much higher opinion of women's worth, and a much better idea of what women of other ethnic racial groups were like. But the majority of women in this country had never before had such extensive contact with each other. The most important insight from considering the minority of women perspective is on this question of why the Rosie the Riveters lost their footing in the demobilization while black men that is, we're able to hold on to more of the wartime gains. The main difference seems to be that blacks had to struggle for all the rights they got. Blacks let it be known that the price for cooperation with the whole war effort was the end of gym prolapse, their civil rights, the mainstream women's movement made no such bargains for their enthusiastic support. It was not a movement making struggles. win games have to be fought for they see more capable of resisting eradication. These insights emerge from an admittedly eclectic set of sources. But it's not always easy to locate popular culture. When the Office of War Information has you served some of the normal channels of expression for its own propaganda. The attempt to explore the contours of consciousness is not a straightforward process. It's more like spreading out all the pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle on the table, sorting out all the sky pieces from all the tree pieces. So the evidence which follows here is meant to be suggested and not definitive.

Unknown Speaker  13:26
Okay, let's look at some of the evidence. minority women made a remarkable shift during the war in their labor market position, out of marginal farm work in domestic service and into blue collar or clerical work. This translated into much higher wages and much less isolated working conditions. The proportion of black women workers and domestic service dropped from 72% to 48%. During the war, weekly wages for servants before the war average $9. And while that went up to 12 and $20, better money could be made an industry. When sites estimates that the earnings of the average black urban worker went from about $400 to over $1,000 per annum. The overall average female weekly wage by 19.4 was $31 compared to a male $54. In light of the war emergency, black women's abandonment of domestic service for defense plant jobs could hardly be condemned by racists. Although the southern press fed rumors of so called Ellingworth clubs have servants scheming for higher wages. But consider this account. Quote Barnesville Georgia has its own brand of worker fight order, issued by the mayor of the town in a circular address to all domestic servants, all domestic servants and Barnesville according to the NAACP, Atlanta branch and negros, the odor reads as follows those living in the city of Barnesville whether men or women who have been employed as cooks and nurses and who are not now void will be arrested and prosecuted and no excuse except a certificate from a physician will be accepted. Those who do not like the terms of this warning must realize that we are, regardless of financial means must either work, fight or leave the city. This is the final warning the booth, police force of the city has been instructed to enforce this morning. So much of the leading domestic service, the move into the better paying job ranks, while backed by paper guarantees of equal treatment was rarely done without a struggle, if at all. Outright exclusion of black or other minority women depending on the area was often the rule. The literature is full of these accounts. This is a typical one. This is just one I could read. Many suit was brought against two board plans, wondering Swayze company and Thompson products, charging them with refusing to employ Negro and workers solely because of their power. Several Libra women testified they told how they had gone to trading schools and machine shop work then applied to the two companies for machine shop work. In each case, they were told that there were no jobs for them. Although the companies were at that time advertising in the paper for women workers. During the trial itself, company executives were forced to admit that discrimination did exist. Their excuse for it was that the union or individual white workers had objected to the employment of Negro Women, a charge which was hotly denied by the union officials involved. At the end, no one disputed the contention that the employers had ever even attempted to hire a single Libra woman from machine shop work. Nevertheless, the judge hearing the case refused to do anything about it. Thus, for the first time a Court confirmed the officer may charge that executive order 8802 is completely truthful. That was the executive order which said that if your plant was doing roadwork, you had to have equal employment opportunity. Just to get a sense of how the same incident would get reported in the propaganda culture. Consider this excerpt from a rural diary of journals now Giles from punching Susie.

Unknown Speaker  17:03
Here she goes. But the other night, the big boss had something on his mind. He came to our bench watched us a while and said, we are thinking of hiring a few Negro girls. Is that okay with you? One girl said, will they use our toilets? The boss said and why not? And that seemed to be the answer. I heard no more discussion about it that night, but later I heard that a negro creature had called up the boss and made a big fuss because he wasn't hiring one Negro girls. As nearly honest an answer as I could find is that there is a percentage of all racism types to be employed here. And the Negro girl who passes her manual dexterity test and the physical exam will be dealt with just as poorly as any other American citizen. Okay, that's a contrast between the propaganda culture and what was going on. Giles is implying there that liberal minded management was being rather unfairly pressured by black leaders, all anyone had to do to pass the tests. Yet even a brief look at the detailed division of labor in more plants reveals how black women and old women were very carefully slotted into the industrial pyramid. Erickson's report on the steel industry provides a typical picture. While there were many different types of jobs in any given steel plant. Black women were only hired for the lowest ranks and each if at all, these were mostly at the rank of labor and wages were below the male minimum level. This description of work in the receiving department is typical. This is straight out of the women's group report. But labor gangs go down into the bottoms of the boats that was coming by boat and sweep and shovel up the leavings of Warren to little piles from removal with special hoists a crew of women chiefly Negro, with a woman gangling or has been employed for several months going from boat to boat as needed. When there are no boats ready for cleaning, they're employed around the docks and stock yards as part of the general cleanup labor game. Only the strong and Husky woman who does not mind close association with dirt can be placed on such work, and she goes on quite a few number of women in sintering plants work on dumping the cars of oranges inspecting along the sides of the conveyor to remove lumps of slag and foreign material shoveling up shoveling up spills along the conveyor line screening colon dust carrying tests laboratory and so forth, or other work is classed as labor. Most of the women are Negro and they are reported as removing as much dirt materials as men siderosis from exposure to such dust may cause pulmonary difficulties, but the workers we're seeing were not wearing respirators, nor did they wear goggles. And I can cite you for this

Unknown Speaker  19:41
not only with job segregation, more the rule than the exception. Black women also face difficulties using the plant facilities, past reports incidents in the locker rooms and on the company buses, not to mention of course more infamous race riots in Chicago, Detroit, New York, etc. Now whether you're looking at Harriet arnaz mountain woman in Detroit, or Chester Himes is Bob Jones in the West Coast shipyard wherever there was war production wherever there was a nearby military base. The influx of migrating workers strained the capacity of housing, schools, movie houses, restaurants, transportation, etc. Given the segregated residential patterns of most urban areas, overcrowding was a major problem of daily life. One sense is the claustrophobia of wartime America, a claustrophobia both physical and mental, as people learn to watch what they said, and civilian life collapsed into the military model. It is significant that black popular culture seems to have been a lot more assertive than mainstream culture. As women put it, my quote, right America reacted musically to the war with a bland singalong ballads and songs of pruners like Bill Bing, Crosby and Carrie karma hits such as white Christmas, the biggest seller of the war, were meant to relieve more time tension and anxiety, and were completely lacking in excitement or emotion. Black Music gained an aggressive edge as the blues went electric into what would become rhythm and blues as various regional styles migrated and melded. Jazz went into bebop and Bebop was not swing, Bebop was jagged, militant, committed music. flamboyant clothing styles, particularly zoot suits of the young men were another form of social assertion. Not only had the black community gotten behind some very effective protest movements, the March on Washington movement and the Double V campaign for victory at home against racism, in addition to victory against the axis, but the black press was filled with news of that second war. Richard Burns is common color craze and ego digest reported racist incidents of the no comment necessary variety. Another column this is the army printed apparently humorous anecdotes of black military life, and the most had to do with racism in one form or another. As the Fortune magazine researchers found the black press was filled with black news, not white America's news. I quote. The news is news of Jim Crow regulations. So frequently is the phrase that some headline right writers spell it Ji MCR Oh, it is news of Negroes winning scholarships of Negroes and Battle of Negroes denied permissions of Negroes running for local office of neighbors sitting on committees with rights of white men speaking up for negros of white men embarrassed because they have neglected negros and except when it is news, thus angle, there is no news of National Affairs of the War of Congress of the President of industry. The Negro press deal single mindedly with the problems of being a Negro in the US. And that was in Fortune magazine survey. Massive migrations blacks, Southern whites, mountain people from Kentucky and the Ozarks. Chicanos etc. Brought some groups in contact with each other for the first time. The literature is full of these first encounter stories. In the doll maker, the heroine 30, a Kentucky mountain woman meets her first black person on her way to Detroit, I quote, The woman's head swung slowly lifting fully into the light, and Gertie realized she was a negro. She had never seen a negro until in Cincinnati, they had left their separate places and mingled with the whites. She'd heard Clover say they would Negroes in town, but she had so seldom been there. She'd never seen one. This woman did not look the way she thought a negro would shoot black with great thick lips and mash down the nose. Her skin was brown and full of gleams that made dirty think of the Cherrywood Her eyes were large below a high thin template forehead, and when she looked at Gertie, all her face in the crowd for way she held her head was somehow queenly. But bigger than anything else about her was the joy inside her that curved her lips and smiles and brighten to naturally somber eyes, the to begin of cautious conversation, their children and their curiosity join them together. It is the last calm moment for Gertie before embarking on her Calgary, Detroit. These first encounter stories turn up throughout the oral history accounts were known as Spinoza was training to drive transit buses. Here's how she

Unknown Speaker  24:26
told it, quote, in Grand Junction, there were no blacks at all. So I had my first contact with them in San Diego. I remember in transit school, they taught us in a lot of states, the colored people had to ride in the back of the bus, and then in California, they could ride wherever they wanted to. I had a lot of Colored People get on and asked me if they had to sit in the back of the bus. I guess they came from the shop, and weren't sure what the rules were. Black accounts of these first encounters emphasize this unwritten but powerful presence of Jim Crow in the supposedly integrated more than the western areas. Sybil Lewis's account of working in California hints at the wide range of hostility encountered by blacks. I quote, a lot of the people came from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, they'd come on here, just as I had looking for a job to make big money. We had all been reared in segregated towns and states, they had never been around negros. I had never been closely associated with whites. So as we work together, we began to experience some of the same things I left and support but you'd find go back to archy. Or go back to Oklahoma written in the restrooms, and you'd see signs will win without the who will win the war without unit and you knew what in I met it talking with some of the white girls at work though, I found that to say nigger was just a way of life. Most of them had never been near, let alone touched a negro. So slowly, we learned to work together. But in many ways, California was no different from Oklahoma, or the South because people brought their feelings with them. Catherine Archibald wartime shipyard analyzes the day to day racism in the shipyard she studied more dry dock in Oakland, which is mostly aimed at blacks but also against labs Portuguese Jews, Okies, Japanese and others. Unlike the propaganda literature, Archibald makes no attempt at a happy ending. Her personal frustration is obvious. She gives the story of her attempt to talk with Beulah the classical okie, which is not only misunderstood, but results in a barrage of racist attacks on Archibald yourself. Southern mirror this is Archibald southern Buren had given her an extreme and blatant hostility to the Negro. On the other hand, she was abnormally sensitive to the ridicule which her origin brought upon. On the morning of the incident Bueller came to work with unusually agitated a bystander jostled in a crowded streetcar had turned to her Numark. With only a few of the shipyard Okies would go back to where they came from. There might be room for the people who belonged in California to ride to work in comfort. It was a root of front, and I was quick to agree that she should resent it. I tried to indicate unhappy Bueller, the similar injustice in her hatred of the Negro. The effort is failure, Beulah defends her rights to be superior to blacks. Archibald later analyze it the dynamics of this racist hatred of the Negro was no simple product of chance perversity on the part of the white shipyard worker, it was rather indisputable constituent of a sense of well being, and the very foundation on which his estimate of his own importance was erected his conviction that the Negro was inherently inferior, carried with it the assurance of the white man's God given right to the more prominent place in the sun. This even the most ignorant white shipyard worker whose post was at bottom might, by virtue of racial heritage alone, look arrogantly down on his black skinned companions and toil.

Unknown Speaker  28:00
It is no surprise, the black women filed over a quarter of the discrimination complaints received by the FPPC from July 43 to December 44. Most scholars of the period agree that the double oppression of race and sex held back black women significantly, race and sex were certainly key variables in manpower planning by union and company officials. They decided often jointly whether blacks would be hired for particular jobs, whether women would be hired, what the ceiling ranks would be, and so forth. The historical record only reveals the product of these discussions that pattern of segregation by race and sex which resulted. There are some accounts of this process, which have survived in the fiction of the period. In her autobiographical novel of work on the Pennsylvania Railroad, Edith Anderson describes the conferences between the union officials, the brotherhood of railway treatment, and the railroad owners over manpower needs for the war. Should they hire women or blacks? Well, we could hire Negro said Marshal one of the vice presidents with a shrewd smile, we've considered it and see nothing against it. hire one of the two brotherhood men wiping his sweating red forehead with a large Hank widget demanded, who's wasting time now. Are you serious? The fact is, I'm not joking, said Marshall. From my point of view, negros would be far more valuable workers than women, we wouldn't have to worry about they're hurting themselves and baggage cars are on yard duty. If these jobs were given to negros, they would be so anxious to prove themselves that they'd be more efficient than the white men. Their fantasy of hordes of women taking over the railroad was blotted out by the far more terrifying fantasy of Negroes taking it over. Ultimately, the company lawyer breaks the union men suspense by reminding them the black men was subjected to the draft to so they'd have to rely on women. They settle back to work out a separate seniority system so that the lady trained and won't have to stay with the war's over Anderson's wartime railroad A is not only a battle of the sexes, it's a look at women's battles with each other. The suspicions women have of other women, women different from themselves. It is a classic Homefront experience the first encounter with others. Women had a lot to strain out about their own misconceptions about what women were about. All the divisions among women have to be dealt with before women themselves can get an understanding of what sex oppression is about. What was the women's movement doing all this time? In feminist circles, a break seems apparent between the Lillian Smith pro Buck back pacifist feminists and the Mary Anderson Francis Perkins, women's Bureau patriotic feminists. While the ladder focused on the role of women in the national interest, not on women's interests, per se. The former were mounting a critique of war and male chauvinism that made a feminist argument out of Freud's death, which theory, not only would women not get progress from integration into your work, it would set

Unknown Speaker  31:11
her back tonight, let's look at a teacher the story that I think there's not really much attention, which was changes that went on serving domestic wife or whatever, and how that relates to regard to a women's movement or the lack thereof. I also want to start with a quote, you're going to get to the this is from a letter to the editor, printed in PM, which is a progressive newspaper that was published in Europe. It was this letter appeared the week after the J day, right after the war ended. And it's from Lieutenant rLf with a mission. I'm hoping you're on a furlough. Where do we go from here, boy, and I just discovered an unexpected coastal town that was that we're going to have to say reconversion of our lives. I've been away from home for pretty nearly three years and my wife, we have no children yet, has been working and living by herself and our small apartment. Now when I went into the Army shoot now you will call a cleaning vine sort of jobs. But it takes information is there a cabinet one of her charms for me was that she did seem to depend on me for a lot of things. I used to worry a lot overseas about how she's going to get along by herself. And just shipped me off someplace for another few months disappeared right after the agenda. He clearly wrote it before it was purely rolled over. I'm going to stop worrying. She's got an altogether too damn aggressive. For instance, the other night just after I got back, we decided to go out on the town by ourselves. Because this guy's from New York. We go into a restaurant, but she's picked out I admit, I haven't been around enough to know where the good places are. Right? After we sit down, she caught the waiter over and she ordered a drink before I get a chance out of my mouth. Now, of course I really want as a dry martini. But

Unknown Speaker  33:12
why can't she let me get the order. Then she calls for the check and run a check for

Unknown Speaker  33:16
my wife also Mariana, the person asked me if I've done enough to pay it. This time, I'm feeling a little hot about the situation. So when we get out on the street, I find a taxi quick, they couldn't walk to the movie. But I thought it was time for me to show I was wanting to tell the driver where to go out. That evening, I've spoken to my wife about this. And she says she will try to stop me from Boston. And I suppose it will take a little time to get adjusted. I just thought I would like to tell you about it. And maybe you can put an article in the paper telling me soldiers lives coming to life and not to be happy. Oh, this is a real life. I mean, you know, he's obviously. Anyway, I mean, this points to a dimension of the word screams but I think has really so far received relatively little attention from feminist scholars writing about the period. Part of the questions is very hard to get turned around. And I only have fragments as well. But I just thought I'd raise general questions and hopefully this will come up. So the main focus of interest in in this area has been the public sphere, the incorporation of women into war jobs. That provision of childcare and saw in the family and domestic life reappears as central in the analysis of the post war transition, of course, and the sort of obliteration of Rosie the rise of the feminine stake and so on. But actually, we now I mean, from what little has been written about because it's very clear that there were quite dramatic changes in gender relations On the homefront. as well, I mean, in a family of domestic life, which paralleling the empowerment of women in the public sphere and was equally fleeting, feels like there's a sort of temporary period of you mentioned this to have growing opportunities, and more powerful women. And also, you know, in spite of the fact that isn't material terms, there's an economy, erosion of male power, if you live or anyway, the growth of more options for women in their own family life, the society really offered no support for this transformation in cultural terms, other than patriotism itself. In other words, the courage to, you know, keep the home fires burning and all that, but there wasn't any, like, or today any kind of cultural support for women choosing different ways of life. Instead, actually conventional prescriptions as to what women should be doing, and a certain amount of alarm about family breakdown on crisis due to married women's employment, the sort of backlash that we tend to associate with the past four years, it's very much an evidence already. At least, that's my picture of what's happened. And if that's if that's correct, I think it raises the larger question, which, you know, I think is poorly understood. And I'm really gonna pose it rather than answer it, which is why the, the dramatic shift in women's material situation during the war didn't lead to any, any kind of parallel cultural shift during this period. You know, there's a more generally kept, why is it that so called traditional or patriarchal ideology, culture persists, or even intensify alongside the rotation of what's often presumed to be its ultimate base, and that is women's subordination within the family? And obviously, that question is relevant not just to the 40s, but to our time. So there were some important differences, which I'll come back to, I think that the sort of standard answer to this question in, at least in the Marxist feminist literature is a sort of functionalist answer that says, an I myself has been excellent in all kinds of government, though, I'm not so sure about it now, which says that the ideology of, of women's place, so to speak is more necessary when traditional bonds of male domination are loosened that you need more and more emphasis on investment, women's places on the hop, and so on, and women got to work. And that the function of the of the sort of traditional cultural prescription is to ensure that women continue to remain in the home and perform unpaid labor and watching them others and so on, in spite of the fact that material circumstances increasingly offer alternatives to that. But I think that's really not a very adequate resolution of the question that and that, perhaps, rather than presuming that

Unknown Speaker  38:01
patriarchal culture or ideology will always be able to sustain male domination, despite the kinds of material changes, we've seen pop, you know, present a basis for something different. I think we need to look more closely at the historical conditions under which that ideology remain supreme, and also the conditions that generate challenges to it, like feminism. You know, and I think rather than sort of a historical and not very interested to just point out ideology as a sort of black box that explains the persistence of male domination is vital. So I'm not sure I can offer this more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ideology and the actual circumstances of women. But by comparing the sort of wartime transformation of women's relationship to the family, and in the post war reconstruction, to contemporary events, I think we got at least some insights into that question. What I want to do is just use the the, again, the wartime cake as a way of exploring this broader question. And here's what I'll do, I'll talk a little bit about just the general contours of family change, and women's empowerment, if you like within the domestic sphere, and then just give you some evidence that the so called feminine mystique that we tend to associate with the post war period actually is very much around during the war as well, despite the kind of disruption of family life that that Mystique celebrates so, so directly, and then I'll try to make some suggestions about the social and political conditions that sustain this conventional feminist ideology during the war. And really, I think the key thing of this is very similar to what you write, in comparing women and black is the absence of a popular mass movement experience. is really critical in both of our stores actually. Anyway, not just end with a few sort of comparisons in contrast to the current period, which where we see some very parallel changes in women's work and family lives, but with the important difference that there isn't one that has substantial influence so. So that's we've done in demographic terms that US entry into the war seem to at least initially have a positive impact on the institution of marriage, rather than undermining marriage rate, which has fallen during the 30. For obvious reasons, searched, the average age of marriage fell dramatically, young women rushed to the author, anticipating husband shortage as a result of the war. There were many so called War brides women married men, they hardly knew. The birth rate rose significantly, although not as much as it would after the war, very different, obviously, from the contemporary so called family crisis, but nevertheless, a big change from what had happened before. Despite that sort of initial seemingly, well, it seems like initially, the institution of families being strengthened, actually, as the war goes on. There are many parallels to the situation today, women's power in in the household grows pretty dramatically relative to men. And it seems clear that that's a lot because of the big increase in women's empowerment in the labor force, especially the growing employment of married women and mothers, which is a trend that begins to warn men continuing much more dramatically. More recently, divorce rates soared during a war soda, the number of so called female headed family. Patina already mentioned new rounds of sexual freedom opened up for young people, the possibility of living independently outside of sort of traditional familial constraints expanded quite dramatically after a period when they had actually contracted dramatically during the Depression. You know, you could argue that the, the just the simple influx of women into the labor force, which of course, was, was happening during this time, including, for the first time large numbers of married women that by itself should have increased women's power and independence of thought in the family. But the war times, circumstances have actually amplified the effects of this beyond the simple fact that women were employed, because spouses were frequently separated into highly sex segregated situations, not just at work, but also as a result of military conscription, obviously, on the one hand, and the extensive labor migration that Katina mentioned, also separating any hassles. Now, on the one hand, the fact that men were in the military,

Unknown Speaker  43:00
that many men were called into the military, that produced obviously a much greater disparity in between the experiences of women in math, and in peacetime, and a more rigid sexual division of labor. At the same time, it meant that the absence of man on home continent that women enjoyed more power and autonomy there. And again, that was true not just in the workforce, but also in the less visible, private world of family life. The letter I started with gives you one example of that from the perspective of returning veteran. The Oral History material, which there's now quite a bit up from the war gives us some glimpses of what this meant to women. pick just one example from a woman called Gertrude Pennington, this is Rosie the Riveter almost, I mean, find the movie but collected for the research for the family. She remembers, quote, very few men were around and she's talking about the housing project she lived in during the war. People do their own cooking, but sometimes women would sit out and back on Saturday nights, we buy a bottle of plant cards and sit around and talk. Most women talks about their jobs, like all of them are concerned about when their husbands would come home because they knew there was going to be a battle. Somewhere used to their own paychecks were independent, and husbands enlisted. They were the sole voice of authority. There was more than one argument. Several divorces are caused by men coming on and picking they're going to be the law of the land. My sister had that problem. They were divorced within a year and a half after he came home because the kids were used to going to her for permission. She was used to handling the car paying bills. And my sister's husband came home she changed he thought everything would fall in a spot like before, but it didn't. In 1946 just after the war, there were 18 divorces per 1000 Married women which is double the free world right and at that time, a record level that was no longer a record

Unknown Speaker  44:49
Okay, so only a minority of working women as we know we're actually Rosie the Riveter. You know, the most dramatic story most women were still in traditional woman's job. Similar I think the experience of change within family life was limited to a particular group of women. It's it's certainly not everybody's experience. Many contemporaries noted that there was a direct association effort today as well between paid employment for women and divorce. As one court clerk noted, in most cases, there were working wives and mothers, otherwise, they probably wouldn't choose to go in the room. Although, so, you know, there's that dimension of it. More married women did work outside the home during a war than they ever had been the case before in the United States, but three quarters of married women in the US did not work out. So you know, we're talking about a limited group. But I think that this experience, even though it was a minority experience, so to speak, that is it wasn't everybody's experience, by any means. So presented a sort of specter of family disintegration, and there's a lot of alarm about it, in commentary at the time, and especially people were very disturbed. And I think this again parallels more recent events, by the fact that family instability as they like to call it was great among young women. So when the latest sort of cohort of entrants into the institution of family and marriage in this group included most service men's wives and also as young women were over represented among servicemen, as well as and also they were more likely to be in the workforce. Among unmarried with young women also, there were unprecedented levels of so called Sex delinquency, as they called it. In the first year of a war of arrest rates for girls under 21 rows 55% With drunkenness, disorderly conduct prostitution, and other sex related offenses leading a list of their crimes. There were also the so called V girls need for victory. much discussed in the wartime media. These were young women who served hanging around in places where servicemen might be concentrated and aggressively propositioned venereal disease, where X ray especially among teenagers, and there are some avenues as well of increased marital infidelity among young wives. Of course, already told you about these marriages being hastily contracted, it's not that surprising. So you might have seen this recent Goldie Hawn movie that sort of shows some of those, which I thought corny, but that's a difficult point ship, you know, regular Hollywood movie last

Unknown Speaker  47:25
year. A majority of the people who migrated that 69 people migrated from one part of us to another during the war years, the majority of them were women. That doesn't not include people went to the military. For the for these migrants, all community ties were severed, and with them many, if not all, reward social and sexual restriction. In the large cities and the booming war production centers where migrants gravitated, many of them especially those who are unmarried or separated from their family with the following new opportunities and possibilities of sexual freedom. Alan bear Bay pathbreaking research on the gay experience during a war has sort of demonstrated this I think best he writes about the way in which the sex segregated workprint opens up new opportunities for homosexual relationships. He said that women he comments, quote, women found a new opportunity to leave male run households and live in all female worlds as wage earners working in well paying defense jobs wearing men's clothes to do men's work, and living working and relaxing with each other. Many women for the first time fell in love with other women, socialize with lesbians and explored the gay nightlife that flourished in a crowded city. And for heterosexual women as well, were offered all kinds of previously nice possibilities for sexual experimentation or whatever. Today we associate the kinds of changes by just sort of sketch in family, personal relationships, sexuality, with feminism and movements for, you know, sexual liberation and so on. That that the two coexist, the kind of social demographic trends and the existence of a movement and both friends and foes of the women's movement often assign it the credit or the blame, depending on your point of view, higher divorce rates, more open homosexuality, more open heterosexuality, no longer confined to marriage for women. And I guess in our own time, this issue is, you know, perhaps debatable, but it seems to me that today also feminists and acts to to reinforce and legitamate changes that are basically rooted elsewhere. And I would argue, you know, in changing material circumstances that open up certain possibilities during the war, certainly the disruption of traditional forms of family and personal life occurred in the absence of anything we could reasonably competitive. I mean, it's true that there are individual feminists who are still around them, you know, see themselves that way, but they're really have a different generation for Muslim people who are going through these experiences and not very influential in the in the world as a whole in the country in the popular culture. And I think it's sort of tempting to, you know, a lot of people have done this is a reconstruct women's empowerment not only in the workforce, but also at home as some kind of feminist achievement for years. That seems to me apocryphal, I mean, that just doesn't happen. That actually, and I'll try to show this right now with the 40 instead, so a strong defense on the cultural level of conventional family arrangements and sexual standards. You know, the sacred tradition for women's play for fun, even though there's a big and growing gap between sort of cultural, ideological prescriptions and what was actually happening in women's lives. As I said before, that sort of back but we think of it, the post war, backlash against women's wartime incorporation begins well before the war's over, the rising divorce rates, juvenile sex, delinquency and sexual promiscuity, were repeatedly cited as the price to be paid for the massive movement of women, especially married women and mothers into the labor force. This was all, you know, clearly considered to be necessary to win the war. But the social consequences of it made unacceptable to most social commentators, except as a temporary emergency measure, ideologically. Women's war work was as the literature on popular culture that patina reviewed earlier demonstrates quite well. Women's Work was clothed in the flag. It was presented as an extension of domesticity not an alternative to it. That's not reality, of course, for many women, but the ideology was you work to help onboard. The woman behind the man has that right. That was what it was all about. And the fact of course, that working class Rosie's had been in the labor force before the work would continue to be afterward was completely unacknowledged. And that shows you I've helped him straight up quite well. You know, as far as that world showed it in the film about Robin, remember that? Effectively, all roses were middle class women who were working to paycheck.

Unknown Speaker  52:15
Social workers and sociologists filled many pages of professional journals, which at that time had more of a, a real connection to what's actually going on in the world. Today, with articles on the threat the family presented while I worked on developing the magnum opus of the pro family professionals, lung Limburg and farms, popular Neo Freudian trees, and some of you probably seen Modern Woman The last set which appeared just after the war ended, when it was published in 1947, but was really forged in the crucible of concern which the war for both and meanwhile, as we know, from the literature on popular culture during the war, there's this unrelenting effort to reconcile the wartime role of women in the workforce with their traditional domestic position and, you know, unrelenting assurances to the nation that in the post war the threat to the family that you know, Rosa, the respect to her mom was just going to vanish. There's also a strain within wartime popular culture, that kind of gives expression to a special version of the old double standard in terms of sexuality, a lot of sympathy for the laxity of soldiers and condemnation. On the other hand of the victory girls on the lonely soldiers wives, who indulged in any kind of sexual infidelity. This is emphasized as some of you may have read superpartner. Now classic, I think economic literature on women's obligations to returning veterans prescriptions for for now, if you remember that. And there really was no significant visible, you know, wrestling while lifting and fair, there was there wasn't any significant opposition to this sort of celebration of the conventional family arrangements at this time. That was in any kind of public arena. Obviously, lots of people made individual choices that the five but prescription there were some voices heard. So there weren't very many of these either defending women's rights to post war jobs. But even the people who are most ardently defending women's job rights never challenged the cultural consensus with regard to family and sexuality. On the contrary, they bolstered their defensive women's right to post war employment by pointing out that women's earnings were in fact bottom a family supporting her and I consulted some patina already on the idea that women should have the right to work for its own sake the same way as men should, was not legitimate at this time. And certainly even less so was the assertion of women's right to self determination in a personal sphere and I just simply was not in a car. Instead, the you know, the actuality of women's empowerment of family and women's sexual freedom existed, you know, as a product of cultural over judgments. So you could do these things, but there was no cultural support for them. And, you know, part of the problem, of course, was that this period occurs between the two waves of feminism, like the feminist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries had become fragmented and really pretty much invisible by this time and have no real social base. Anyway, as you all know, this generation of feminists had at least publicly been quite conservative on these kinds of issues anyway, on top family and sexuality, even when I did represent a significant social and political force and how they survived into the 40. Finance, I mean, I could have embraced the dominant pro family cultural view themselves. But the second wave of feminism, which of course did challenge this consensus was not yet to emerge for quite a while. Nor did the left or the for the union movement, which were both quite strong, unlike the women's movement to offer any kind of political support for personal freedom for women. Um, insofar as they were concerned with women's issues that all these movements were pretty much narrowly confined to taking economic equality. Below labor movement was still very much steeped in the ideology, the family wage, which equated family cohesion and working class power. And the left never really challenged this idea. There really was just no political space for a politics of personal liberation and time for either women or men. Just after the just before the war, the family wage ideology had actually been strengthened considerably by the experience of the Depression, people felt like there was, you know, they're gonna be all these men employed that women shouldn't be in the workforce that would make it harder to support families. And, and, of course, many people fear that after the war, they were returned to depression conditions. And so that specter was was right there, it was quite enough to get support for women's for sexual equality in the labor force under the circumstances. And virtually nobody ventured until the unfamiliar at that time to write up asserting women's rights to personal and sexual freedom.

Unknown Speaker  57:13
I don't think nobody ever has done that before. But it was clear that was part of what was acceptable and public culture. It's not very easy to reconstruct what women themselves want during this period and into other wars. You know, even though it's a very dramatic period, it's a few years. So when when women found themselves with new possibilities and new choices, obviously, many did seize the opportunities in the moment, but we don't really know what that meant. We know from Paul's taking the time that we want to stay in your word jobs. But the post never inquired into the personal ramifications of that. Again, that's another example of sort of reflection of the fact that the issue was not a legitimate, complicated discussion. It wasn't defined as the personal and political as an insight that came later on. Feel like I'm repeating myself. But it's just to emphasize this point, that instead of any kind of ideological or political vehicle for defending the new personal possibilities that are sort of fleetingly available during the war, the post World War, the female, very, was constructed, reconstructed on pre war lines, watching the reconverted along with the rest of the society and our tenants that we started with hope they would be only, although, you know, there were all these posts were more significant on an individual level, not until the 60s when we see a political movement, giving aspirant giving expression to women's desire to define their lives in different terms than those offered by the feminine. So, you know, I think what the flip to is, in terms of contrasting the period of the war years with today, that is that of the sort of material changes are really very similar in a lot of ways the war does anticipate what's happened since the 1960s, in terms of changes in work as well as family. The crucial difference, I think, is that the, you know, in the 1940s, there was now legitimacy for alternative lifestyles, if you like today, I think the most impressive achievement of the women's movement is not that I don't have all the time, but is that it has successfully challenged this cultural consensus on these issues. If the if gender inequality remained largely intact, it doesn't have a legitimacy it previously enjoyed and I think that can take credit for but just the existence of feminism as an oppositional ideology and as a political movement. You know, is often seen as a response to the sort of gap between the traditional ideology of what women are supposed to be doing and the changing Reality of women's lives. What we learned from the 1940s was that there's nothing automatic about that. About that kind of political response, despite in the, in the 40s, a much more rapid incorporation of married women into the workforce, accompanied by trends in terms of, you know, divorce, right, and other indexes of family change. Very much like those that have occurred more recently. No ideological or cultural. No oppositional ideology emerged in this period. And so, I guess what, you know, I think that race is I'm really going to end with a question is that well, obviously, we have to take seriously the the importance of structural shifts and women's economic growth. The incorporation of married women into paid work might be a necessary condition for the emergence of the kind of oppositional culture that exists today around personal life question. It's not a sufficient condition for the emergence of that. I think the work experience shows very clearly. And I guess, I think that means that we need a much more complicated analysis of the sources of power of the power of traditional ideology, that women's role an analysis that takes into account not simply economic factors, but also social and cultural and political forces, which, you know, I think would both illuminate the reasons for the famous break that the war on the post war, we conversion periods in the recording, and may also help us understand why today despite the existence of a popular consciousness, versus instead of feminism is not identified as feminists. Traditional ideology I'm just gonna stop there I guess we have to answer the question because I think there's something out okay, let's do that.