Women & Machines

The U.S. manpower problem is rapidly coming round to the inevitable solution: womanpower. Slacks and hairnets dot the nation's warplants now --and thousands on thousands of women stand ready to rear munitions as well as children. The U.S. had no trouble in converting women to war --the problem was to get enough war work for the women to do.

Last week the President announced that registration of women for war work had to be abandoned because 1,500,000 women who want jobs are already registered at U.S. Employment Service offices. And of the 750,000 women who have applied for work in factories, only 79,000 can be absorbed by July 1, according to a survey of 12,500 plants which plan to take on 675,000 new workers by then.

Industry is taking on women workers slowly now. The rate must increase if the U.S. is to have a fighting force of 10,000,000 men. Employers find it impossible to save a man from his draft board, no matter what his industrial skill is. "Train another," has been the answer. Lately the answer often is: "Train a woman."

In Caldwell, N.J., a miss just out of high school carefully, quickly smoothes the edges of brass propeller-fittings. Three minutes are allotted to each fitting. In Detroit an ex-schoolmarm holds valve tappets for Wright engines to the light, and feels each one with her fingers. There must be no tiny scratch or rough spot--to wreck a plane, cost a life. In Ford's great bomber hatchery at Willow Run a woman flyer (Mary Elizabeth Von Mach) inspects motors for the big B-24s. In San Diego a young war widow strings numbered wires of an electrical subassembly, attaching the end of each to its proper terminal. In Dallas a bridge champion's wife assembles hydraulic devices which raise & lower landing gear. All her salary goes to war bonds. In Flint, Mich., a Polish girl carefully fastens the bolt of a .50-caliber machine gun in a grinder, adjusts a machine which smoothes its face. In a noisy Detroit cellar-school a mother of three works with a hand riveter --inserting rivets, inspecting them, and drilling them out if imperfect. And thousands of girls all over the U.S. are making small parts on machines, inspecting, filling shells, putting fabric on non-stress areas of bomber wings, bending tubing to fit into fuselages, making rubber boats, assembling machine guns and small arms. They work as long as ten hours a day on day, "swing," and "graveyard" shifts.

Patriotism is one feminine motive for war work. But the strongest is the pay. Even college-trained girls seldom hope for more than $25 a week on their first jobs. But war-factory jobs start at $25 to $40 a week and applicants need not have graduated from anything. After a training period --from two to six weeks --they are in.

Work in a war plant also has more charm for the female worker than work in an old-fashioned factory. Aircraft plants, for instance, are likely to be brand-new, one-floor, fluorescent-lighted places, with plenty of space. The atmosphere is air-conditioned and stimulating --signs, flags, mottoes, charts exhort speed and more speed. Machinery is compact, beltless, quiet. And management constantly concerns itself with worker morale.

War fever has removed the social stigma from factory work: many women enlisting for industry are nurses, teachers, saleswomen, even Junior Leaguers, who would not have dreamed of factory work a year ago. White-collar girls in plant offices ask transfers to the shop, where life is "more exciting."

Women are no problem in such places as the AC Spark Plug in Flint, which has employed women for years, easily converted men & women alike to machine-gun making. Briggs Mfg. Co. in Detroit simply took women from the upholstering department, taught them to put fabric on bomber wings and rivet framework.

But in most war plants, women are a novelty. The attitude of plant managers ranges all the way from that of Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, which wonders why it did not employ women before, to that of Cadillac in Detroit which keeps its first 25 women workers behind a padlocked door. Says an executive: "You know how men are."

Ford never had a woman in plant production before, was chary of letting them even do clerical work. Vultee, which now employs women in all but the drop-hammer department, figured the distraction caused by a woman walking through the plant in the old days at $250. Once upon a time Consolidated barred women entirely.

The attitude of men fellow workers toward their new competitors is a mixture of nose-out-of-joint and gallantry. They either let Minnie strictly alone or are much too helpful. Said one workman last week as news photographers posed a redhead at her lathe: "I ran that machine two years and nobody ever took my picture."

But the influx of women, all agree, has spruced up male workers. When a pert miss came into Curtiss Wright's St. Louis plant as a tool designer, the men, after one dumbfounded day, began wearing ties and shaving with great frequency. In some still womanless departments of North American Aviation in Kansas City men workers complain in the plant's paper that the promised blondes haven't arrived.*

Recovering from the novelty of women workers in slacks (usually too tight), plant managers are beginning to estimate the contribution women can make: 1) they have greater finger dexterity than men (Westinghouse has known this all along, has used women in electrical assembly since the days of fancy aprons and high lace collars); 2) they are more immune to monotony than men, will keep at a tiresome job long after a man starts hanging around the canteen or water cooler; 3) they excel at inspection work where keen eyes and sensitive fingers often find flaws a man misses (Newton A. Woodworth, maker of engine parts, says it is easier to make a woman "quality conscious" than a man); 4) women workers are more docile than men workers; 5) last but not least, they stick at their jobs, respond readily to speed-up campaigns.

The National Association of Manufacturers has summed up the difficulties in employing women as 1) they generally need assistance in setting up machinery and in lifting heavy objects; 2) they are absent from work more often than men; 3) they are more susceptible to fatigue; 4) it is difficult to make foremen out of them because they are likely to abuse authority ("They're cats," said one plant manager); 5) a woman worker has a shorter industrial life than a man. Plant managers who have been changing women over from peacetime factory work to wartime work would also add that a woman takes longer to adjust to a new job.

Some objections to women workers can be explained by the fact that women usually have had no experience with machines before coming into a factory--only months ago few U.S. women ever even had to change a tire. As for fatigue--the housewives show it worst, at the end of an afternoon shift. (Some plants, notably Bell Aircraft, find women have surprising endurance.) One big difficulty is getting women to work for women. And there is a prejudice, partly fostered by the girls themselves, against letting a woman assume the final responsibility on a motor that means life or death.

As time goes on women will learn how to set up heavy machinery. Women will take on harder jobs as men are drawn off and they gain seniority. Where heavy lifting now prevents their working, new lifting devices or unskilled labor will do the lifting. Women are likely to take over whole departments, like inspection and electrical subassembly, fine acetylene welding--jobs they do better than men.

The first big wave of women into war plants came last November. Each successive clampdown by the Selective Service System has given the trend a great shove. By the end of 1943--if the war is still chewing up U.S. manpower--war industry will have absorbed 4,000,000 women.

* At Douglas in Santa Monica girls curred male coworkers of "whewing" and whistling after lunch by doing the same in reverse. Said one trim girl : " Look at Tarzan." Said another: " What a build that guy's got." The men couldn't take it.

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