Hell Hath No Fury (25 page)

These developments took place against the background of a War Manpower Commission projection that in 1943 at least two million women would need to be introduced to the American workforce, particularly in the armaments sector, to offset the growing shortages of male workers and meet the administration's ambitious production targets. A concerted recruiting drive was launched, but in the final analysis, financial factors were to play as important a role as patriotic sentiment. Nowhere was this more evident than in the aviation industry: at the massive Boeing plant in Seattle, where the assembly lines ran twenty-four hours a day, women were to make up over 50 percent of the workforce. Tools and equipment were modified to accommodate the female physique, and working conditions were vastly improved.

By 1944, 475,000 women were employed in the US aviation industry. It is significant that it was only in the aircraft industries of southern California that African-American women were able to work alongside white women. In many other plants they were segregated. Another sector in which African-American women made limited progress was the munitions industry, which for reasons of safety tended to be located in remote or rural areas and drew from a different labor pool than the Lockheed or Consolidated Vultee plants in California. Even so, African-American women were often the beneficiaries of these conditions only when the supply of white labor had been exhausted.

Of enormous significance in the American war effort was the shipbuilding sector, which from 1941 experienced a growth spurt of over 200 percent. The average construction time of a cargo-carrying Liberty Ship was forty-two days, and the record construction time for these maids of all work was five days from the laying of the keel to launch. These feats of mass production could not have been achieved without the introduction of female labor and the breaking down of managerial and union resistance.

Hiring and training of women to work in the shipyards began in the autumn of 1942, and within a year the workforce in some West Coast yards was 30 percent female (in 1939 the total number of women working in US shipyards had been thirty-six). Women also made up some 65 percent of new workers in the shipyards. The women riveters and welders became the heroines of wartime propaganda and the “Ships for Victory” campaign. Nevertheless, they had to be psychologically tough in the face of male hostility and sexual harassment. In the shipyards women eventually filled a wide range of jobs, which included pipe fitters, riggers, painters, electricians, and metal burners.

In some war plants, women were banned from wearing makeup to minimize flare-ups between the sexes. Boeing sent fifty-three women home for supposedly wearing their sweaters provocatively tight in the manner of Lana Turner. The long “peekaboo” hairstyle popularized by the elfin Veronica Lake in the movie
This Gun for Hire
(1942), was considered a safety hazard and was replaced by the turban. When Lake herself set a patriotic example by cutting her hair short, her career went into a decline from which it never recovered. Ever-resourceful advertising campaigns sought to glamorize women's work clothes—welding leathers or loose-fitting dungarees—and to sell beauty products by showcasing models driving cranes or tractors, thereby encouraging women to preserve their femininity in a “man's world.” They were, in effect, expected to remain feminine but not too attractive.

In reality, many women experienced immense difficulty when attempting to run a home, look after children, and work on a production line. The result was a worrying level of absenteeism, but efforts to introduce a universal system of child-care facilities were blocked by Congress in response to the popular prejudice that it was wrong for the mothers of small children to be at work. There were private initiatives to remedy the problem, including the establishment of a branch of Bloomingdale's at the Sperry plant on Long Island to cut down on the time women took off to go shopping.

More tangible benefits of women's experience in war industry were lessons some of them learned in the use of organized labor to achieve better working conditions. By the end of the war, over 22 percent of the female labor force—some three million women—had joined a union. By the end of the war, discriminatory pay differences for many—but not all—women had been eliminated and maternity leave and other benefits had been secured.

Reference: Miriam Frank,
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter: The Story of Three Million Working Women in World War II,
1982.

SOVIET WOMEN IN WAR INDUSTRIES

World War II

In the opening phases of Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the Soviet Union—the Soviet collapse in the summer and autumn of 1941 resulted in the massive mobilization of Soviet women as “fighters in overalls.” In the prewar Soviet Union, women had been inured to hardship and hard work. Rationing was a fact of everyday life, housing shortages were severe, and in the back of people's minds lurked the threat of the labor camps, the gulags. By early 1940, women already made up some 40 percent of the Soviet Union's industrial workforce and over 50 percent of its land workers. But the colossal military and territorial losses sustained in Barbarossa were to worsen the stark conditions in which women lived in the Soviet Union.

In another terrible blow, the German army in the East had occupied territory where 45 percent of the population lived and where much of its industry was concentrated. By the beginning of October 1942, when most of the available resources had been mobilized for war, women made up 52 percent of the industrial labor force in armaments production and over 80 percent in light industry. But the eastward evacuation of millions of workers, which placed vital industries out of the range of German bombers, had not been matched by the provision of adequate housing. In one giant tank factory, some 8,500 workers lived in holes in the ground. Other factory workers were lodged in primitive “settlements” whose inhabitants, often numbering some fifteen thousand, had little or no fuel and running water. Discipline was harsh. An edict of December 26, 1941, made absence without leave punishable by imprisonment for up to eight years. The workweek was a minimum of sixty-six hours, with one rest day.

Women were also deployed to keep the trains running, a vital contribution to the war effort in view of the Soviet Union's vast size. In 1942 alone, approximately 165,000 young Soviet women underwent training to operate the railways as engine drivers and mates, station staff, members of track gangs, electricians, and mechanics. The first woman engine driver in the Soviet Union, Maria Aleksandrovna Arestova, who had mounted the foot plate in 1931, was brought out of retirement to drive “flying column” trains to the front, often coming under attack by low-flying Luftwaffe aircraft.

In the agricultural sector, acute labor shortages were felt almost immediately. This problem was exacerbated by a severe shortage of tractors. By 1944 over 80 percent of them were driven by women, who in the intervening years had supplied much of the missing motive power with their own muscle power. In 1940 women had made up some 40 percent of the workforce on the land; by 1945 they contributed over twice that, at just under 92 percent.

Reference: Stephen White, ed.,
World War II and the Soviet People,
1992.

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES

1943–present

US Air Force

The first women to fly military aircraft in the United States were members of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASP, see
Jacqueline Cochran,
Chapter 7). One of the outstanding WASPs was Ann Baumgartner, who, on October 14, 1944, became the first American woman to fly a jet aircraft, the experimental Bell YP59A Airacomet.

The WASP trained the first women to fly US military aircraft, but there would be a long wait before the newfledged trainees gained full access to commercial and military planes. The WASPs were not recognized as military pilots until 1977, when the US Congress declared them veterans of World War II. A year earlier, in 1976, women began pilot training for the United States Air Force (USAF). Captain Connie Engle, who graduated from a class of ten women pilots at Williams Air Force Base, Arizona, in September 1977, became the USAF's first female pilot to fly solo in a T-41 Mescalero, a military version of the Cessna 172, and the T-37 Tweet twin-engine jet.

In 1948 the Women's Armed Services Integration Act (see
US Army,
Chapter 6) had stipulated that women in the USAF “may not be assigned to duty in aircraft while such aircraft are engaged on combat missions.” It was not until 1991 that Congress lifted the ban on women flying in combat aircraft, although Department of Defense policy still prohibited women from flying combat missions.

In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin allowed women to fly combat missions and opened combat aviation to enlisted female aircrew. In 1994 the first female mission-qualified USAF fighter pilot, Lieutenant Jeannie M. Flynn, graduated from F-15E Strike Eagle combat-crew training. Flynn went on to log more than two thousand hours in her F-15 by the end of 2002, including two hundred hours of combat time in Operation Allied Force, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (March–June 1999). By 1994, the USAF had seven female fighter pilots and two female bomber pilots.

The first woman in the USAF to fly her combat aircraft, an A-10 Thunderbolt, into enemy territory—the no-fly zone over Iraq—was Lieutenant Colonel
Martha McSally
(see Chapter 7). McSally, who at five feet three inches was one inch under the regulation height and had to get a waiver to fly, later recalled: “In 1984 I was attending the US Air Force Academy and told my first flight instructor that I was going to be a fighter pilot. He just laughed, but after Congress repealed the prohibition law in 1991, and I was named as one of the first seven women who would be put through fighter training, he looked me up and said he was amazed I had accomplished my goal.”

At first progress was slow. In 1998 there were twenty-five female fighter pilots and eight bomber pilots in the USAF, but now a new generation of women pilots who had never experienced the combat exclusion ban was progressing through undergraduate pilot training with high marks.

Typical of the new generation was Captain Kimberly Dawn Monroe, who graduated from KC-135 refueling aircraft to the B-1 bomber and logged eighteen combat missions over Afghanistan between January and May 2002 in Operation Enduring Freedom. The mission of Monroe and her crew was to provide precision strikes with Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs)—conventional free-fall bombs converted with a guidance tail kit into accurate, adverse-weather “smart” bombs.

By 2004, the USAF had women flying virtually every combat aircraft in its arsenal, including the B-2 stealth bomber, the B-52, the A-10 Thunderbolt close-support attack aircraft, and the service's front-line fighters, the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Falcon. Female aviators on refueling jets found themselves even closer to combat. In the war against Iraq in 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom air commanders ordered the fleet to get as close as possible to strike aircraft, in order to cut down on travel time to and from targets. Captain Tricia Paulsen-Howe, a navigator on a KC-135 Stratotanker, flew for hours over hostile territory, refueling aircraft and searching for the two crew members of a downed F-15 north of Baghdad: “We supported all the search aircraft. On that particular day, we were refueling F-15s and F-16s that were actively searching. We went well out of our refueling airspace to go north of Baghdad to be right there so that the fighters would not have to fly very far to get gas. It was extremely hostile territory.”

In 2005, there were 568 (4.1 percent) female pilots and 210 (4.6 percent) female navigators. Inevitably, the advancement of women in the service has not been achieved without controversy. In 1995 an outstanding graduate pilot, Lieutenant Kelly Flinn, mission-qualified as the deputy commander of a B-52H Strato-fortress and subsequently flew on a Global Power long-range air strike during an international exercise. As something of a poster girl for the success of women pilots, she also participated in air shows at Andrews Air Force Base and featured in USAF recruitment advertisements. Flinn was later grounded after facing military charges of adultery, and was allowed to resign from the USAF rather than face a court-martial, a decision that provoked a media storm.

In 2003, the US Air Force Academy was embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal in which 12 percent of the women who graduated that year reported that they had been victims of rape or attempted rape during their time at the institution. During the course of integrating women into the armed services, equipping them with the necessary technical skills has proved much easier than regulating male and female sexual behavior (see also
US Army,
below).

US Army

The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s prompted the US Congress to reconsider the employment of women in the armed forces. There were congressional hearings in 1948 where the star witness, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe from 1943 to 1945, spoke in favor of women in the military, singling out the work of British
Mixed Antiaircraft Batteries
(see Chapter 7) as an example of what women could achieve. Eisenhower stressed the complexity of modern warfare in which armies could not function without an immense and complex support system to sustain the (male) troops at the cutting edge. World War II had made Eisenhower, originally a skeptic about the role of women in the military, into a believer in their indispensability in a total war.

Shortly afterward, with the passing of the Women's Armed Services Integration Act, Congress authorized the US military to recruit women on a permanent basis. Given the contentiousness of the issue, however, severe limits were placed on the intake of women and the posts they could fill.

The services' subsequent interpretation of the law tightened the screw: women were barred from combat and going to sea, with the exception of transport and hospital ships; they could not serve as aircrew and were prohibited from commanding men; they could achieve no higher rank than colonel or, in the US Navy, captain; their numbers in the services were set at 2 percent of the total strength for enlisted women and 10 percent of that number for officers. In a heavy-handed attempt to regulate sexual behavior, women were to be encouraged to be “ladylike,” and lesbians were, as far as possible, weeded out.