Rosie the Rubber Worker by Kathleen L. Endres

Author:Kathleen L. Endres [Endres, Kathleen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Labor, General, Industries, Women in Business, History, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780873386678
Google: SGxDJ41513cC
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2000-01-15T03:13:27+00:00

On most jobs, women were not required to wear uniforms—provided their clothing did not pose a safety risk. How that was defined depended a good deal on the department. Many women rubber workers wore slacks. “Thelma McClung” humorously explained the reasoning behind this: “I have to wear pants because they tell us dresses are hazardous to women workers. Of course, the trouble with wearing pants is that a girl can’t show her individuality. How is anybody going to know that a girl is a glamour girl if she’s garbed in mechanized attire? Yes, I’m strong for slacks for girls working on war materials. We can’t crawl over the floor and on piles of stock conveniently if we wear … dresses or other ‘accountrements.’ If we do, we’re liable to break a leg.”

When Margaret Cooney was in the balloon room, she wore jeans—something that took some getting used to. “I never thought I’d get used to wearing them but after we wore them for a while—it’s just like everything else, you get used to it.” When she transferred to gas masks, there were no restrictions on clothing. “Sometimes I wore pants, sometimes I didn’t,” she remembered. Isabel Moran wore only trousers when she worked at Firestone.

Tressie McGee preferred to wear a uniform and bought two from Goodyear’s employee stores. The uniforms came in two varieties: “natty, navy blue stock suits and farmerette coveralls.” By 1943, Goodyear Aircraft required women to wear uniforms. The one-piece suit, available at the employee store, cost $4.35, and a matching hat sold for $1.25.

Thelma Bolen never wore a uniform. She always wore trousers, usually topped off with a sweater. Wearing a sweater to work, however, was not necessarily the patriotic thing to do. The Office of War Information called sweaters an enemy of output: “It isn’t just a rumor that a tightly sweatered working companion takes a man’s eyes off his machine.” Thelma wasn’t concerned about sex appeal. She was just trying to keep warm in the drafty Goodyear Aircraft plant that “didn’t have a lot of heat.”

Women had more trouble in the summer in the rubber factories than in the winter. The rubber plants were hot—very hot. “Winters I don’t mind,” Betty Pinter said, “but the summers were intolerable. For me, I pass out in extreme heat. I always did, even as a child. I can’t stand heat.” The salt tablets didn’t help much, and rubber itself made the situation worse. Betty remembered that “rubber keeps the heat and you were surrounded by it.”

Individual departmental supervisors did not have much control over the temperature, but they did have control over many aspects of the women’s workday. In Akron’s rubber factories in World War II, supervisors were important authority figures. The largest number of those supervisors were men—white men. Whether the women represented a minority of the workers in the department or the greatest number of the operatives, the supervisors were most likely to be male. Women supervisors were in departments traditionally associated with a female labor force.

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