From Working Girl to Working Mother by Lynn Weiner

Author:Lynn Weiner [Weiner, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General
ISBN: 9781469610283
Google: LLQ0DgAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2016-08-01T03:16:45+00:00

The Working Mother during World War II

At the time that the United States entered World War II, the popular domestic ideology still prevailed over feminist proposals for social change. The Women’s Bureau noted in 1941 that although the public recognized the need of paid work for widows and single women, it “still has to be convinced that married women have the right to work … and that they can work without harm being done to the home and to the working standards of men and women wage earners.”58 But the imperative need for labor caused by the military mobilization of the nation’s men led the government to conduct a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the public that wives could and should replace their husbands in factory and mill.59 Yet even at the same time, this campaign appealed to those who valued women as preservers of the home, and although it eased the way for the employment of wives, it reinforced the ideology that mothers of young children should spurn employment.

Rosie the Riveter—the symbol of working women during the war years— appeared as a housewife in factory overalls in posters, magazine articles, and in such popular songs as “The Janes Who Make Planes,” and “The Lady at Lockheed.” She was expected to work for patriotic reasons and to support the war effort of the men in her life. She was just as strongly expected to gratefully trade in her factory goggles for an apron at war’s end. The War Manpower Commission and the Office of War Information sold the idea of work to married women by casting Rosie the Riveter as a housewife who worked temporarily in order to preserve domestic values. One government publication declared that women’s primary instinct “has been, and still is, to cherish their greater interest in the protection of the home, the family, and the community.”60

Many books and magazines emphasized the new sanction of work for married women. Some authors, such as the grandniece of Susan B. Anthony, continued the earlier theme that a woman could be productive outside the domestic sphere; Susan B. Anthony II argued that “the key to Victory in this war is the extraction of women—all women—from the relative unproductivity of the kitchen, and the enrolling of them in the high productivity of factory, office, and field.”61

The propaganda campaign paid off, both in expanding the numbers of wives who kept factory assembly lines rolling and in changing the attitudes of the public. Whereas 82 percent of those surveyed in 1936 had disapproved of married women working, only six years later, in 1942, 60 percent of the respondents in a National Opinion Research Center poll believed that married women should work in war industries. Other wartime surveys also found the objection to working wives eased during the 1940s.62

But the new social sanction of the employment of married women was limited. Although wives without young children were urged to work, official policy, as articulated by the Manpower Commission, mandated that mothers of young children stay at home.

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