These Colorized Photographs Show WWII’s Working Women In A Powerful New Light

While WWII would eventually open the doors to a greater variety of jobs, a good number of women were already part of the workforce. In fact, around 25 percent of U.S. women were employed outside their homes by 1940, according to the Khan Academy. But the majority of these women hailed from minority and working class backgrounds – driven in part by the loss of income suffered in the Great Depression.

Furthermore, the jobs undertaken by these women were limited in scope. They were also usually related to what were female-dominated professions: such as teaching, typing or sewing. And the majority of those who did work were also expected to leave their posts upon starting a family. Simply put, there weren’t many options for the ambitious working woman at the time.

Many men had an antiquated view of working women at the time; for example, some held the view that women should only be allowed to work jobs that men preferred not to perform. Others believed that middle- or upper-class women should never have to work. And some even thought that employed women should relinquish their jobs to unemployed men – particularly amidst the Great Depression.

But these men would soon have no choice but to reconsider their attitudes towards female workers. You see, when the U.S. joined the conflict after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was forced to call on its entire population to aid the war effort. Women soon found themselves thrust into work, and this put the U.S. squarely at odds with Germany – where leader Adolf Hitler decreed that the role of women was solely as mothers and wives.

For many women, the departure of their husbands meant that their responsibilities increased. Not only were they placed in sole charge of managing their households, they also had to join the effort on the home front – filling the gap left behind by the men fighting overseas. And that meant overcoming not just male attitudes towards women working, but in some cases, female attitudes too.

To ensure that women would take up the mantle, then, the government launched a countrywide publicity campaign. Fronted by one of the era’s most well-known icons – Rosie the Riveter – the posters and films were intended to encourage women to take up factory jobs and join assembly lines. It’s little wonder Rosie is now so renowned, though, given the role that she played in revolutionizing the image of women in society.

In 1942 J. Howard Miller created a now-iconic poster for the campaign – depicting the then-nameless Rosie in a blue work shirt and red bandana. With a confident, determined expression, she flexes her muscles and proclaims, “We can do it!” While the poster itself was simply one cog in a bigger machine at the time, it helped to sell the idea that women could – and indeed should – enter the workforce.

As the war effort ramped up, many women began heading west – chasing a newly revitalized American dream. The U.S. government was busy ploughing money into new shipyards and airplane factories in California. And the result was the most sizeable mass migration in U.S. history, according to Smithsonianmag.com.

In California and elsewhere, women quickly took up the reins in positions that were now newly open to them. Rosie the Riveter encouraged women to find jobs in munitions, and the new factories provided the opportunities to do so. The result was a rapid, widespread increase in the number of women working in the defense industry.

For the four years from 1940, The Metropolitan State University of Denver says that the total number of women employed in the U.S. defense industry ballooned by an incredible 462 percent. Elsewhere, History.com found that in 1943 a whopping 310,000 women worked in the aircraft industry alone – marking 65 percent of the trade’s total workforce. Prior to the war, just one percent of aircraft industry employees had been women.

What’s more, industry experts quickly realized that women were uniquely suited to many facets of aircraft assembly. It’s thought that they were particularly good at riveting, for instance – because it shared many qualities with sewing. But at the same time, the women who joined these factories were learning new skills, too.

Glenn Martin – co-founder of the company that would form part of the defense titan Lockheed Martin – told National Geographic in 1944, “We have women helping design our planes in the engineering departments. [They are] building them on the production line, [and] operating almost every conceivable type of machinery – from rivet guns to giant stamp presses.”

And where the defense and aviation industries saw a considerable increase in the number of female workers, other sectors followed. Indeed, women flocked to non-traditional jobs in the automobile, shipbuilding, steel, and metal industries – all aiming to support the war effort. They also often traveled many miles to do so and brought an economic boom to manufacturing cities.

For example, the National Archives estimated that around 90,000 people converged on the city of Mobile, Alabama, where multiple factories were working to serve the increased demand for war supplies. In fact, one of Mobile’s plants was responsible for just over a third of the U.S.’s aluminum – a key resource for constructing airplanes. And while some men continued to work at these factories, the role of women in their success was unquestionable.

Armed with their new transferable skills and tools, these working women saw a tangible knock-on effect in their domestic lives, too, as they became increasingly self-sufficient. For instance, they would no longer have to rely on their husbands or male friends and acquaintances for home repairs. Now, they could simply fix everything themselves.

And it wasn’t just in factories that women proved a vital part of the war effort. Around 350,000 joined the military – serving in the U.S. and overseas. And in May 1942 – at the behest of a number of women’s groups and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – Congress established the first female service branch: the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WACs)– now known as the Women’s Army Corps.

According to History,com, by the end of World War II, the U.S. Army counted more than 100,000 WACs among its ranks – along with 6,000 female officers. They were deployed in over 200 non-combatant roles across the globe and eventually joined other branches of the military, too.

Women quickly became an integral part of not just the U.S. Army, then, but also the Navy, Coast Guard, Airforce, and Marine Corps. And without them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower claimed that the war may never have been won. He famously said, “The contribution of the women of America – whether on the farm or in the factory or in uniform – to D-Day was a sine qua non of the invasion effort.”

In joining the military, women were apparently aiming to free up men to fight by taking on non-combat roles. Some served as engineers or truck drivers, while others operated radios or translated intercepted enemy transmissions. One all-female battalion was even sent to process undelivered mail across Europe. But it was the nurses working on the front lines who were most often in danger.

One such nurse was Second Lieutenant Elsie S. Ott – the first woman to help evacuate injured troops from Karachi, India. Having never flown before, she had just a day’s notice to prepare for the inaugural “air ambulance” recovery. But while the journey was arduous, it was nevertheless successful, and it led to Ott earning the first Air Medal ever awarded to a woman by the U.S. Army.