national world war ii museum W r i t i n g

In World War II, the major combatants recognized that victory hinged on the ability to increase industrial production. With so many men serving in the armed forces, nations called on women to work in jobs traditionally reserved for men. In this account, Elizabeth Hawes describes her experiences in an American airplane engine plant in 1943.

Now that I’ve worked a few months in a plant—on the graveyard shift too—the only wonder to me is that all the women in the USA aren’t storming the factory gates. I’m convinced that any healthy woman can work in a factory—and like it. My biggest regret is that I had to leave because I’d agreed to do some writing. My biggest ambition is to get back.

It was a great pleasure to me that nobody gave a darn who anyone was…. Of course, there are little discords. The foremen and subforemen are honestly scared to death of us women. When first you arrive they look at you out of the corner of their eyes…. Every woman machinist has to endure sheer torture from her fellow male employees at one point in her career….

The men see that now you think you’re a mechanic. Some honestly don’t believe the Lord ever intended women to be mechanics. Others are infuriated by your presumption that you can do their work…. [The women] are working for money—money to feed their kids, money to keep their homes together—so their sons and husbands can fight….

I want to go back to Wright’s new plant because I think the women who work in war plants, and the men who first help them and then work with them are the luckiest people in the world. There’s equality developing there unlike any I’ve ever seen. Joe was an Italian—Nel, a Negro—Suzy, Irish—there were Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Gentiles, Jews. Slowly you could see there was no difference between any two of us. Gradually everybody was beginning to work as one unit. When you see something like that happening you feel you’re not just doing a job to help win the war. You also have the profound pleasure of seeing the future peace being worked out before your eyes.

from: Elizabeth Hawes, “My Life on the Midnight Shift,” Woman’s Home Companion (August 1943), pp. 24, 27.

Part D

From the Eugenics to the Holocaust – discuss the cumulative radicalization of a deadly idea by the Nazis in the late 1930s and during WWII.

Please visit the special traveling exhibition – Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (which was in New York City a few years ago).