Learning Objectives
- Understand the multiple ways women contributed to the war effort during World War II
- Learn about discrimination and racism at home including
- the “Double V Campaign”
- Japanese Internment
- Gain knowledge of women’s work in the maritime field during the war
- Consider how women’s work changed from pre-war times to post-war times
Rhode Island Social Studies Standards
Inquiry Topic 4: World War II Compelling Question: Was the “good war” good for all?
- SSHS.USII.4.1 – Isolationism and the eventual involvement of the United States in World War II
- Analyze the United States’ attempts to remain isolated from global crises and the reasons for its eventual involvement in World War II
- SSHS.USII.4.2 – The effects of the War on American society
- Argue how World War II impacted different groups of people in the United States
- SSHS.USII.5.3 – The American economy and post-war affluence
- Argue how the ways the economy changed after World War II affected different individuals and groups
Common Core Standards
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas:
- CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.7 – Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.
Women engine builders pose in front of a completed engine at Hooven, Owens, Rentschler Co., an Ohio-based steam and diesel engine manufacturer. They built engines for various shipyards, including the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. General Machinery Corporation Collection, SSHSA Archives.
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When people hear about women’s role in World War II, the image of Rosie the Riveter typically comes to mind; and while many did take industry jobs, American women and other minorities helped with the war effort during World War II in several ways. Women served on the home front in wartime industries, in uniform, and at home. More women than ever entered the workforce with men off fighting as the United States entered World War II. This caused changes to societal roles for women, Black Americans, immigrants, and other minorities.
While America went to war, the ideals of democracy and freedom were not fully realized at home. Racism and discrimination persisted toward women, immigrants, and non-white Americans. Many parts of the United States were still heavily segregated with Jim Crow laws in place and discrimination toward Blacks was rampant. Often, they received less pay or were barred outright from working in various companies. Many Black Americans participated in the “Double V Campaign,” which sought to win the war and address the systemic inequality in race in America. In 1942, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 ordered the removal of over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast and placed them in internment camps for much of the war, often treating them as criminals and enemies of the United States without evidence. Even facing this racism at home, Japanese Americans fought in World War II with an estimated 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military in famed segregated units like the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Watch this clip from a larger two-part interview with Dr. Kelli Nakamura on the experience of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Dr. Nakamura talks with Education Director Aimee Bachari about the reasons behind internment and the differences in internment on the Hawaiian Islands versus the mainland. She also discusses Japanese Americans who served during the war and citizenship issues.
Over 200,000 women served in non-combat roles within the armed forces. Women’s auxiliary branches were created for every branch of the military, including the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Women in the armed forces also took office and clerical jobs to free men in those roles to fight. They also drove trucks, repaired airplanes, rigged parachutes, flew military aircraft across the country, test-flew newly repaired planes, and even trained anti-aircraft artillery gunners by acting as flying targets. Women also served as radio operators. Three million women volunteered with the Red Cross.
At home, women helped by rationing food and clothing. Others planted Victory Gardens to grow their own produce and stretch rations. Towns held scrap drives to collect household goods made of rubber and aluminum to provide materials for the defense industry. Many people also contributed financially by purchasing war bonds from the government.
On December 10, 1941, just three days after the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i, Frank Knox, Secretary of the US Navy, send the following message to all shipbuilding facilities:
“The enemy has struck a savage treacherous blow. We are at war, all of us! There is no time now for disputes or delay of any kind. We must have ships and more ships, guns and more guns, men and more men – faster and faster, there is no time to lose. The Navy must lead the way. Speed up – It is your Navy and your nation!”
When the United States entered the war, work opportunities for women significantly increased from pre-war levels. More than six million women took wartime jobs in factories. The demand for labor provided new job opportunities for women that paid more than the pre-war jobs women available to them like teachers, domestic workers, secretaries, or nurses. At the time, society viewed women as wives and mothers. Men would work outside the home and women would take care of the children and housework. The war also created new opportunities for Black Americans to enter the labor market in jobs previously unavailable to them because of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring practices for the defense industries.
In 1936, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act, creating the U.S. Maritime Commission to oversee “… that the United States shall have a merchant marine…to provide shipping service essential for maintaining the flow of such domestic and foreign waterborne commerce at all times, capable of serving as a naval and military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency, owned and operated under the United States flag…, composed of the best-equipped, safest, and most suitable types of vessels…, and supplemented by efficient facilities for shipbuilding and ship repair.” Most of the ships in the merchant fleet at this time were over twenty years old. The original plan was to build fifty ships per year for ten years. In the United States, only ten shipyards were capable of building ocean-going vessels in 1936.
With the declaration of war in Europe in 1939, Great Britain needed more ships and appealed to the United States to supply commercial vessels. Under the Lend-Lease program (which enabled the president to transfer arms and equipment to any nation deemed vital to the defense of the United States), the U.S. agreed to build commercial ships for Great Britain. Adapting existing British plans, American naval architects developed a new design that became known as the Liberty ship. Quick to build, relatively cheap, and nicknamed the “ugly duckling,” this 441-foot emergency cargo vessel could carry over 10,000 tons. When the United States declared war in late 1941, cargo ships were already being produced, but only as fast as the existing facilities allowed. U-boat attacks destroyed twice as many merchant vessels as were built in 1942 alone. The Liberty ships constructed between 1941 and 1945 were assigned to private companies and Allied governments to operate for the duration of the war. In total, 2,710 Liberty ships were produced in eighteen different shipyards across the country.
In 1943, the United States started a new emergency cargo ship program to replace the Liberty ships. Victory ships were newer, bigger, and faster with better engines. While the Liberty ships were designed to be the workhorse of the war, Victory ships could continue to be used after the war as part of the regular merchant fleet.
The Liberty and Victory ships were adapted to suit the operational needs of each branch of the military service. Many carried cargo, others served as troop carriers, hospital ships, or to transport enemy prisoners of war. Some were even used as tankers, carrying fuel for ships, vehicles, and aircraft.
Examples of Women and Minorities in Shipbuilding
Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown, Massachusetts
The Boston Navy Yard (also known as the Charlestown Navy Yard) hired women and Black men, but men typically overlooked for employment in the maritime field like retirees, men without specialized training, and disabled men were also hired. By mid-1943, over 50,000 civilians came to work each day at the Boston Navy Yard and its annexes in Chelsea, South Boston, and East Boston. By 1943, estimated at over 8,000, these women workers assumed roles in shipbuilding that they would have been unavailable to them during pre-war times. By the time war ended in 1945, workers in the Yard launched over 6,000 naval vessels and destroyers that normally took a year to complete were finished in just three to four months.
Women pose at Hooven, Owens, Rentschler Co., an Ohio-based steam and diesel engine manufacturer. They built engines for various shipyards, including the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. General Machinery Corporation Collection, SSHSA Archives.
Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts
Because of the large wartime demand for ships, all of Bethlehem Steel’s shipyards were running at maximum capacity. Hingham was close to deep water, had a utility railway running throughout it, was close to an airport, and had many jobs available for eager citizens. The company employed workers to clear 150 acres of land and construct a steel structure for the shipyard.
At the time, only 8,000 people lived in Hingham. Almost all men over eighteen were fighting, so many young boys and injured men did the work. As it took thousands of people to build a single ship, Bethlehem Steel transferred 400 men who had worked for the company for many years to the new shipyard. By the end of the first year, 15,000 men and boys were at work on the ships. Soon, more than 23,500 people were working daily at the Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard, more than the current population of the town. After the first year, more than 2,700 female workers were employed at the shipyard. The Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard built 227 ships to help the war effort.
J.A. Jones Shipyard in Brunswick, Georgia
On November 4, 1944, the J.A. Jones Shipyard in Brunswick, Georgia, launched the Liberty ship SS Richard Randall. As was typical for any shipyard, a public celebration would occur to watch vessels launched to mark a ship’s move from land to sea and to test its seaworthiness. Maritime tradition dictated that in addition to a large crowd of spectators in attendance, a small group of dignitaries would assemble on a raised platform to christen the ship by breaking a bottle of champagne on its bow. Among those participating in the Randall launch was Nanelle Surrency, a member of the shipyard’s waterfront production crew. For each ship, a woman worker was selected to participate in the launch in her workday attire.
Ida Mae Lawson, a black woman in her thirties, was working as a housekeeper and nanny when she saw an advertisement for work at the Brunswick shipyard. The job paid significantly more, but she recalled: “It was kind of good and bad. Some work was real heavy, and maybe you’d go on a shift and they’re cutting light pieces, and it wouldn’t be so heavy.” She and others carried pieces of steel that needed welding by other women like Nanelle Surrency. She said, “I felt like I was helping when I was hired to work,” but felt that “African-American women were always hired to do harder work than the white women.”
After the War
As the war drew to a close, many women wanted to keep their jobs, but often they were forced out as men returned to civilian life. There were less jobs available since the need for war materials was no longer in demand. The years immediately following World War II actually saw a resurgence of women taking on more traditional roles as wives and mothers, creating a baby boom (your students may know this generation as “boomers”). Some women did try and fought to stay in their jobs. For example, in 1945, women workers at a Ford Motor Company plant in Michigan publicly protested when the company fired them in exchange for less experienced male workers. While they were unsuccessful in their demands for full equality with male workers, several hundred were able to keep their jobs. Some people think that women’s experiences in WWII help spur the Women’s Rights movement of the 1960s, but most historians give credit to the Civil Rights movement in helping to spur the drive for equality for women.
Lectures in History: Women in the Workforce After World War II from C-SPAN.
Discussion Questions:
- Explain why the U.S. entered World War II and why was the government already building additional ships before entering the war.
- How did women and minorities fair in the United States pre-World War II?
- Explain how the war provided for additional rights for women and minorities.
- How was that different for Japanese Americans?
- Did the “Double V Campaign” work? Why, or why not?
Additional Resources:
This interdisciplinary lesson plan, The Art of Camouflage teaches students about art history and Picasso, war, camouflage, and women’s contribution to the war effort. In New York City, a group of female art students joined the National League for Women’s Service and trained to serve in the Camouflage Department of the United States Navy. On December 3, 1917, newspapers picked up a wire service report about a camouflage school set up by the U.S. government in Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts. Women artists participated in a month-long training camp to learn how to camouflage cars, locomotives, and battleships for the war effort. In 1918, the Army formed the American Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps. Beginning in March of 1918, the United States Navy painted a total of 1250 vessels in dazzle camouflage. After that date, the Germans sunk ninety-six ships but only eighteen were camouflaged.
This series of the Records of the Women’s Bureau, contains images depicting women and their contributions to the war effort during World War II. The photographs show women for the first time on a mass scale and from every social and economical background preforming jobs that have been traditionally considered as men’s work. In addition to the clerical and secretarial fields, women are seen working in the aircraft industry, the metal industry, ordnance, the railroad, the shipyards, as well as the military services. There are approximately 94 different occupations shown in this series where women were preforming the work.
Women’s Roles during World War II, National Women’s History Museum.
Women in Shipbuilding, SS United States Conservancy.
Tupperware! Women and Work After World War II.
Sources:
“Ladies Who Launch: Women of the Brunswick Shipyard,” the National WWII Museum New Orleans, 2021.
“History At a Glance: Women in World War II,” the National WWII Museum New Orleans.
“A Different Kind of Victory: The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion,” National Museum of the U.S. Army.
“The SixTripleEight: No Mail, Low Morale,” the National WWII Museum New Orleans.
“We Can Do It!” – Shipbuilding Women invade the Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston National Historic Park, National Parks Service.
