Bachelor Girl

become a habit… she had not saved a penny.” All true. As Julia explains to one of them, “You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have money, you can go one way…. If you have nothing at all… you go another.” And sometimes rather than fight, you take up residence in a fantasy world. “Every day is a new day,” Julia dreamily tells herself. “Every day you are a new person.”

There were millions of single women in 1940—office drones, struggling reporters and nurses, end-of-the-road new women, the homeless, and all those still waving a tattered bohemian flag. But what became of any of them was once again a question put indefinitely on hold.

HOW I WON THE WAR

So much has been written about the experiences of women during World War II that I will not describe in the usual minute detail how they “answered the call to duty,” as invoked by the deep, paternalistic urgings of mid century newsmen—Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Lowell Thomas.

Let’s instead look at it this way: The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiances, boyfriends, lovers would ever return. As one California woman wrote in her diary in 1942, “All plans changed last week or fell away.” Single meant “available,” but not as prospective brides to men. The War Manpower Commission, supported by the Office of War Information, produced voluminous amounts of working-girl propaganda to fill the void.

Millions of suddenly essential female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.

Suddenly it was glorious and patriotic to be single. Newsreels with titles such as “Glamour Girls of 1943” reported that with “industrial advances” a girl might do “practically anything!” There were no limits to “the types of jobs a woman could do…. whether she has a husband or not.” Any single gal who didn’t step up, sign on, cooperate, was considered as much a disappointment and failure as those who had favored a career over marriage in decades past.

One female worker recruitment film, entitled To the Ladies, and shown as part of newsreels throughout 1942 and ’43, opens with an establishing shot of fictional Middletown, USA. The camera pans the sidewalks, town squares, store windows and finds only women. They’re young, hair down, in flowered dresses, or they’re older, more professional-looking, hair piled up, shoulder pads piled up nearly as high. We intercut between life scenes: girls at a drugstore counter giggling over sodas and twirling in their seats… women buying nail polish… women having lunch… women going to the movies in the afternoon. The Voice of Authority asks us to compare this lackadaisical portrait with others from around the world.

Why, look at the women of England! Forced to send their kids off to the country or into tube stations. And the French! Here we cut briefly to fashionable women tearing up their last good clothing to use as tourniquets for bleeding soldiers. We also watch a Russian grandmother building something in her kitchen that looks like a bomb. Meanwhile, back in innocuous Middletown, idle females carried out the “meaningless household chores” that had previously been declared their purpose in life. As the camera moves back and away from the street set, the women look like little kids rushing around as they play.

As if the point hadn’t been made, a companion film, Women of Steel, introduced a shop-girl welder and her Hungarian great-grandmother who, using her blowtorch, lit a male coworker’s cigarette.

There she was, the one singular female icon to arise from this antisingular period: Rosie the Riveter, industrial pinup, her hair back in a snood or kerchief, her body swimming inside overalls, one hand holding the signature blowtorch. What’s rarely mentioned is how few ever made it to welder status and the coveted role of human cigarette lighter. And of the few who did, 99 percent were white. At the time, many didn’t take note or find such discrimination unusual; the society was segregated, and most whites had never before worked with those then referred to as Negroes. (If white women worked in offices, black women were lucky to clean them at ten P.M.)

It’s one of the first things we learn during the average “Rosie” documentary, most made during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Jewish, Italian, and Irish workers recall the exhaustion and exhilaration. They all talk about loneliness. When we come at last to a black worker it’s clear that wartime single life was often lonelier than any white women might have imagined. One former black welder spoke in a 1972 documentary.

I had done all the requirements, the hours, but it was just the case they’d never put anybody in the more interesting welder jobs unless she was white…. three years of me watching—it seemed like hundreds of girls get in there before me… yeah, I finally got in. And they think I don’t know they paid me less than half [the salary] of the whites?… when it was leaving time, they always made me and the others wait until the white ones had left first. So we never talked…. I remember thinking one day, oh God, is this stupidity?… Here we were all alone pretty much. None of us, just from the faces you could see, was going home to very much…. It was a strange time, very tough, and I couldn’t get over that we couldn’t break it down a little, stick it out together.

They had at least this in common: Despite reports indicating that as many as 75 percent of all working women wished to keep their jobs after the war—black women, for example, had increased their presence in the clerical sector by five thousand jobs—Rosie and all her sisters were to become the century’s most exotic, briefly celebrated temps. At the time, they would never have believed it.

In May 1942 Business Week reported that airplane plants considered women 50 to 100 percent more efficient in wiring instrument panels than men, due to general carefulness and a greater attention to detail. The authors of this survey felt confident in stating that women could perform 80 percent of all war- industry jobs and all but 80 out of 937 jobs in civilian industry. Boeing Aircraft in Seattle utilized squads of superwomen for moving and lifting heavy loads. Sperry Gyroscope announced: “Women can and do work in every capacity possible.” Tough individualized women, reflections of this stunning assessment, began to appear in the popular culture. Wonder Woman, after Brenda Starr, was the most popular cartoon strip of the period, and movie serials—the cartoonish and cheaply made “B” movies—tracked exotic creatures such as Ruth Roman in Jungle Queen, Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka,” deeply embattled in the endless Perils of Nyoka, and Marguerite Chapman as Spy Smasher. For the first time since its introduction in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was voted three times to the Senate floor.

Throughout the war years, an unusual number of actresses worked playing single women in films. Olivia De Havilland and Ann Sothern played aircraft workers in Government Girl and Swing Shift Maisie. Lucille Ball played a rich girl turned defense plant worker in Meet the People. Lana Turner played an unlikely war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You and an heiress turned WAC (the Women’s Army Corps) in Keep Your Powder Dry. Movie girls also contended with what had become a housing crisis. In The More the Merrier Jean Arthur shared an apartment with two men. In The Doughgirls Ann Sheridan pretended to be married so that she could keep a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Ginger Rogers starred in Tender Comrade, as one of several women who chip in to share and fix up a large house. And they get along beautifully, with no trace of the competition and bitchiness of Stage Door (1937), in which some of the above-mentioned stars lived in a boardinghouse for actresses, battling one another for auditions, dates with producers, and walk-on parts.

But as early as 1942, a campaign was under way to prepare the workplace for men by planning—and I