THE Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor recently received a letter that ended: “Wishing you success in your work and hoping for the day when woman may relax and stay in her beloved kitchen.” The writer of the letter was a good friend and well-wisher to the female of the species, a union man, and no mossback — he was young enough to wear the nation’s uniform. Blithely taking it for granted that every woman is bursting with eagerness to leave her job and get into an apron, he echoed a sentiment which is rising all too fast among male workers, union and non-union, and among employers in mass-production plants.
In the great factories, the ominous sound of the old saw, “A woman’s place is in the home,” is heard above the music now piped into the workrooms to make conditions more attractive for the still badly needed women workers. The management of Jack and Heintz, an airplane parts concern notorious for inflated wages, has sugar-coated its own version of women’s manifest destiny to cook and breed by holding out the vista of the post-war gadgeted kitchen to which their female workers will graduate by request.
Across the land, this notion jeopardizes the future of women in industry; and in too many cases women themselves provide arguments for employers who are preparing to go from talking about how women want to go back home to firing them. Reporters travel the country and interview women in war centers. They write stories replete with color and human interest, starring quotations from women to the effect that home is the rightful place for any woman — that women don’t want to work, they want to be loved. Large numbers of women thoughtlessly assert that women have only a secondary claim on jobs. Even when women reach minor executive positions — the best open to them — they too often accept the fact that a man carrying equal responsibility will get more money.
Add also another cause of post-war trouble. Women workers have not been the best of union members. They came into the plants after the workers in the unions had already won their big organizational gains. Wages were stabilized and hours fixed. Since the women had no part in winning these gains, they have been all too slow, from the point of view of the male union members, to show any sympathy toward the union. “Worse yet,” says R. J. Thomas, president of the United Automobile Workers, “numbers of women have been actively hostile to the idea of paying their union dues.”
Atlantic readers will recall A. G. MEZEHIK’S “West Coast Versus East . The Tug of Peace,'’ which appeared in our May, 1944, issue. Mr. Mezerik has spent the past year in further studies of employment and economic conditions in the principal industrial areas of the United States.
Even though the number of women in trade-unions increased from 800,000 at the time of Pearl Harbor to 3,000,000 now, many of the recruits remain unenthusiastic, going along because they have to. Since they see no benefits from the union, they feel that they are wasting money when they pay their dollars, although the great improvement in wages and working conditions for women since the last war is directly attributable to the strength of organized labor. But women have shown little recognition of this fact, since, even now, only one out of every five working women belongs to a union.
The ensuing friction has caused real doubt that some union men will easily accept women as coworkers. Mr. Thomas is truly gloomy about the prospects, not alone because of the attitude of male workers, but also because, in his own words, “ women have not yet, in the mass-production industries, shown any real sense of responsibility in fighting for their own needs.”
The overwhelming majority of new women workers failed to realize early enough that they might want to continue to work in the plants or that necessity might force them into competition for jobs. Enterprising magazines and advertising agencies have used public opinion polls to ascertain the attitudes of women. At the start of the war, the polls indicated that as many as 95 per cent of women war workers planned to quit as soon as victory was certain. Perhaps that was the gay and glib thing for the girls to say when the war looked as though it would last forever. With every new victory, however, the end of the war came closer, and the polls began to reveal that the percentage of those planning to quit was dropping sharply.
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