
          Women and 'Men's Work' During the War Years.
          By Thomas, Mary MarthaMary Martha Thomas
          Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 31, 38-39
          
          Riveting
and Rationing in Dixie: Alabama Women and the Second World War
by Mary Martha Thomas. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
	       1987.145 pp. $16.95, cloth.)
          Beyond the dull, dull, dull style there's an
	       impressive research job and an intriguing view of
	       social change in Riveting and Rationing in Dixie.
          Some women, of course, had always worked outside the home, notably
blacks and poor whites. But the war, for the first time, created a
large need for women to fill tradition-

ally male occupations. Thus the
female labor force increased by 6.5 million from 1940-45, and the
proportion of women who were employed increased from 25 to 36
percent.
          As always, race mattered. "Before the war, white women had
worked in laundries, restaurants, hotels, and retail and wholesale
trade. These are all fields characterized by low pay and poor working
conditions." During the war, white women moved up to higher-paying
male jobs. Some black women moved up from "from agriculture and
domestic work to the trade and service jobs that the white women had
vacated."
          The engineers of the war effort--all male, naturally--faced two
large problems: first, to convince housewives to take jobs in
manufacturing and labor; second, to convince the women to give the
jobs up when the war was over and the heads of households had come
home.
          This inherent conflict led to rather schizophrenic
recruitment. Some ad campaigns depicted welders--helmets 

pushed
back--applying lipstick, to show that femininity could be undiminished
in a temporary male job. Meanwhile, women workers at the Huntsville
Arsenal were being called "modern Amazons." A foreman bragged on "a
slim girl, weighing merely 105 pounds but 'can take it' better than
any man he ever saw."
          Author Mary Martha Thomas, a history professor at Jacksonville
State University, observes a "certain uneasiness about women
assuming these new roles." Early in the war effort, she writes,
Alabamians supported the effort to recruit women to the war effort
with a great concern over day care and other obstacles to working
women. But by 1943, "social workers, the press and the public
shifted their concern to what they saw as the rising tide of juvenile
delinquency" and called on women to "pay more attention to
their maternal duties." Similarly, women's leaders began as early
as 1942 to argue that women, substituting so well in other areas for
men, should be allowed to serve on juries. But a committee of the
Alabama House of Representatives defeated such a proposal in 1945.
          By 1950, statewide female employment was only slightly higher than
in 1940. In short, says Thomas, the "forces of continuity seem to
have prevailed over the forces of change during the war years in
Alabama."
        