Women's roles and experiences during the Great Depression and World War II

Interview With My Grandmother

Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Gregg Lee Carter authored the book (Working Women in America; Split Dreams), which offers a rich reflective and factual look at working women (whether in the workplace or working at home) from the time of the colonial days through modern times. Many of the issues and historical records found in the book offered me a chance to present questions to my grandmother, who was born in 1922 and today is in fairly good health. And I had a short interview with my aunt Etta, who is 91 years old. Etta does seem to be slipping into dementia from time to time, but on the day I sat down with her to do this interview, she seemed sharp and eager to answer questions. First I interviewed my grandmother. She remembers the Great Depression, and she recalled the long lines of people hungry in West Virginia. They were out of work but what was more important to them was getting a hot meal, at least a cup of soup. She worked in a munitions factory during World War II, in Clarks We boiled some water for tea, Grandma poured into the little China pitcher with two tea bags, and when it had steeped sufficiently, she poured each of us a copy of mint tea. I like honey in mine but her jar of honey was pretty much coagulated, which made it hard to spoon out, so I just drank the tea straight.

Question: You were born right after the end of World War I, so you were nine or ten when the Great Depression hit. What do you remember about the role of women during that ugly period in American history?

Grandmother: I helped my mom fix big pots of soup in our house. It was bean soup one day, potato soup the next day, and when we could get enough vegetables to use, we made vegetable soup. I remember opening a big sack of beans and dumping them into a huge pot to soak for a day. I was too young to carry anything but there were days in Charleston when I remember helping fill bowls of soup for the people in line. Someone might faint in the hot sun from exhaustion or from hunger, and my mother would attend to that person, leaving me and our neighbor Joyce to fill the bowls with hot soup; people brought their own cups and bowls and they were happy to get anything to eat. I remember that distinctly.

Question: Were there any African-Americans in your town in West Virginia, and did you have any black friends?

Grandmother: I did have two friends who were black. They were a bit older than me but my mother and father were not comfortable around black people so I did not come home with my black friends. There was a lot of prejudice in West Virginia. My uncle was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and I remember being at his house (he was a policemen) and seeing a long white robe hanging on the close line in back of my uncle's house, and asking my mom what it was.

Question: Did your mom explain about the white robe?

Grandmother: No, she just said it was not something for kids to know about. It was quite mysterious but I think I learned from my black friends what my uncle was up to. He had lived in South Carolina before moving to West Virginia. I don't know what he did down there but I know he had his patrol car parked in his driveway at his home and we all were thrilled at the various communication gadgets in his patrol car. And one big red light on the top.

Question: (On page 31, Hesse-Biber writes that "Women were seen as too weak and delicate to participate in the rough work world of men"). Grandma, was your mom strong enough to go off to work somewhere in the morning when you were little? Many women worked in as the Industrial Revolution was springing up with jobs around the country.

Grandmother: I know she went somewhere in some mornings. It may have been a volunteer job, or maybe she was getting paid. She was strong. When she spanked me, I could tell how strong her hands and arms were. My dad was working in the mines, when he was healthy. He coughed a lot. I think he died of coal miner's disease. They never said. He just got sicker and we had a funeral for him before I was 17.

Question: So do you know what work your mother did? (On page 32, Hesse-Biber writes that women worked long hours but they also had time to "attend lectures, forums, language classes and sewing groups…") Did she also go to any lectures or meetings with other women?

Grandmother. It's right here in my mom's diary that she kept (flipping through the pages of a little book); she got on a company bus and went to a cotton mill out of town. She worked 10-hour shifts, she ways. She earned eighty cents an hour, carried her lunch in a lunch bucket. I don't think she had much of a social or cultural life. It was rough times honey. Really rough. You had to survive.

Question: You were 19 years old when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, and that got us into World War II. Did you have a career at that time?

Grandmother. I was planning to get into Fairmont State Teachers College eventually, but at that time I was working as a domestic helper in a hotel in Charleston. Then the war came and they needed women to work in some of the men's jobs.

Question. (Hesse-Biber writes that "Women entered the munitions factories and other heavy industries to support the war effort"). So where did you work during the war?

Grandmother. There was a factory making ammunition in Charleston. I got a job grinding the little flaws off of shell casings. They kept adding to a big pile of them next to my chair. Later, maybe 1943, I remember I was twenty-one so it had to be 1943, I worked the graveyard shift as a welder. At first the men totally harassed me and tried every way in the world to show me up. But I never backed down. I was sore for a while but I got strong. We were actually welding steel walls for the hull of a ship.

Question: (On page 43, Hesse-Biber explains that when the men came home from the war, they took their jobs back but some said the "female jobs" were "well below their skill levels"). What was it like when the war ended and the men came back to the factories?

Grandmother: I was not working in the welding job any more by 1945-46. I got a job waiting tables at a little coffee shop, mom and pop restaurant near our house. When a man would come in who had served in the war my boss gave him free coffee and a doughnut.

Question: Were you aware at that time how low the wages were for women compared with what the men got?

Grandmother: Of course we were, but you didn't raise your voice about it. My mother was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and they had power. My mother worked along side black women, Mexicans, and Indians.

My aunt Etta is 92 and gets around using a walker. She is fairly sharp still but I had to speak right into her hearing aid to ask the questions, otherwise she would pretend to hear me but didn't really know what I was asking. The interview was only ten or fifteen minutes. She remembered vividly helping her family pick oranges and apples for this wealthy orchard owner during the Great Depression. And she recalled working in World War II factories. In the Journal of Women's History (Mandel, et al., 2002) the writers quote from a Business Week article in 1942: "Surveys show they [women] not only can do the job but that they often do it better."

Question. Aunt Etta, I know you worked in the factories during World War II -- do you remember that experience?

Aunt Etta. I certainly do. I was working in Springfield Massachusetts, I was among the Women Ordnance Workers, and I think that's the name they gave us. I also was a General Electric employee at their plant in west Lynn, Mass, in 1943. We were making ammunition for our boys overseas. At first the men were not very friendly there, not really rude but they didn't help us much. One man flirted with me and I enjoyed it because it was lighthearted and he didn't mean any harm. Until he started to touch me, gently poke me in certain places, and I resisted that.

Question. Did the women hang out together after work, or become friends once the war was over?

Aunt Etta. Oh now, there was no social life after work. We had work at home to do. I had a husband and two boys to feed. The housecleaning was my job too. My mom was very sick and she moved in with us in Massachusetts. We had a rough go of it, but we made it.

Conclusion

There is a lot of scholarship on women's role during the Great Depression, and there is also good scholarship on women's efforts at home during the war. Mark Aldrich notes that women's pay went up during the war simply because women had made so little in their previous retail and domestic jobs. For example, the U.S. Women's Bureau surveyed employed women in 1944-45 and that survey revealed that for every 100 women employed in eating and drinking places prior to Pearl Harbor "30 of them had moved into war manufacturing" (Aldrich, 421). One woman (initials "B.A.") was making 20 cents an hour as a waitress "where she was not permitted to accept tips." However when she was hired at a bomber plant, she was earning $1.15 an hour, Aldrich writes. The history of women in the workplace needs continuing research, and not just because there are unanswered questions about wages and the dynamics in factories when men returned from war. Women's lives and careers have never been adequately reported and recorded, and for a writer who still remains astonished that women did not get the right to vote until 1920, a hundred and thirty-nine years after the Articles of Confederation went into effect, it seems appropriate to study women's history more thoroughly.