World War II Rhode Island (Military) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

8

Women at Work Outside the Home

By Christian McBurney

Before World War II, men and women employed outside the home worked at vastly different jobs. For example, in the 1930s, 84 percent of insurance companies and 65 percent of banks would not hire married women. School committees routinely fired female teachers when they married or became pregnant. Women did lower-paying clerical work, worked on the lower scale in a factory or worked as domestics in other people’s homes. The Great Depression, which ravaged the country during the 1930s, made matters worse.

The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent role in fighting on the Allied side in World War II changed all that. Many of the state’s young men volunteered to join the army, navy, marines or merchant marine. The involuntary draft came soon afterward. In Rhode Island, women by the thousands were needed to fill the jobs left behind in manufacturing plants, most of which had been converted to making materiel and weapons supporting the war effort. New or enlarged military bases gave rise to a demand for clerical and other white-collar work.

Women met this increase in demand, joining the workforce outside the home in droves. Many of them were the wives of servicemen, effectively taking their places at factories. Others were the wives or children of farmers or millhands.

Of course, many women during the war performed the traditional and important role of caring for children and elderly family members, which had been the lot of adult women for generations. Even here, work changed. Many stay-at-home mothers helped neighbors working outside the home by looking after their children or elders, and they made the best of rationing and grew vegetables in their victory gardens. But this chapter focuses on the changing landscape of the workforce for women outside the home.

Some Rhode Island women contributed to the war effort in direct ways, by volunteering to serve as nurses or in other posts in the U.S. Army with the WACs (Women’s Army Corps), in the U.S. Naval Reserve’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) or with the U.S. Coast Guard’s SPARs (Semper Paratus, or Always Ready). Most of these women served outside Rhode Island, including overseas or at hospitals on nearby Cape Cod that cared for returning wounded soldiers and sailors. At the Newport Naval Hospital, women served as officers in the Navy Nurse Corps, and other women served as technicians, nursing assistants and in other posts.

Naomi Craig, a black woman who had operated an elevator at the Outlet Company prior to the war, in 1988 summarized how work opportunities in private industry expanded for women during the war:

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