Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Women labored in construction, drove trucks, cut lumber and worked on farms. They worked in factories, building munitions, planes, trains and ships.
Women who had not worked outside of the home applied for defense jobs; others who had only worked in domestic service left for better paying positions in the war industry. Today, we often associate the women workers during World War II with the popular symbol Rosie the Riveter—and with good reason.
In the 1830s, half a century before the better-known mass movements for workers' rights in the United States, the Lowell mill women organized, went on strike and mobilized in politics when women couldn't even vote—and created the first union of working women in American history.
An estimated ninety-thousand workers swarmed into the city to work in the local war factories, especially in one of the two shipyards (Gulf Shipbuilding and Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding) or in the ALCOA factory.
Female operatives were some of the hardest working employees in mills and factories, but also some of the most exploited. Drawn by the prospect of freedom and money, they often logged twelve-hour days and there were few codes and regulations to ensure their safety.
In addition to long hours of factory work, women faced societal expectations to maintain a standard of behavior dictated by popular literature, religion, and the lifestyles of urban middle-class women.
See these women, pride shining from their faces, as well as characteristically marvelous Bourke-White shots of enormous machines and grease-lathered gears that capture the grit and rugged beauty of a factory and its workers in full production mode.