“Women and WWII.”  29 July 2003. University of San Diego.  17 April 2006.  <http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~cg3/outline.html>.

• Women were being asked for the first time to work along with the daily household chores.  P-introduction
• Rosie the Riveter P-a call to arms S-top
• “The demands put on American industry by the war machine were immense. With some ten million men at war and the rest of the male population at work, it was clear the only way America would be able to win the war was if it enlisted large numbers of women for employment. America needed it's women to go to work to build the planes, tanks, and ships needed to fight Hitler. World War II, more so than any other war, was a war based on production, and so it was time to bring American women into industry.”  P-a call to arms S-top
• “American women were getting discriminated against at home. Though women were turning out for jobs at alarming rates, many employers refused to hire them (even though they had unmet labor requiements.) Some employers outrightly refused to higher women, while others set ridiculously low highering quotas for women, and still some agreed to employee women, yet they refused to offer them jobs previously "assigned to men." These practices left women feeling very confused as to how America wanted it's women to behave. Most people believed that men should be the sole breadwinner in the family, and as a result women were amoung the last hired in the early stages of the war. S-middle
• “In 1942, the National War Labor Board (NWLB) attempted to erase some of the long standing inequalities in women's pay, when they decided to employ an equal pay principle. According to the NWLB, women would be paid the same as men for the same or comparable work. However, these standards were seldomly enforced. Most emplyers thought that the traditional women's pay scale was acceptable, and some reasoned there was no need to make women's pay comparable to men's because women's work was easier. But this was far from the case.” P-a call to arms S-bottom
• “Other items that women needed to ration were silk, nylon, rayon, cotton, and wool. All of these materials were in high demand because they made parachutes, aircraft and military clothing, tents, and even gunpowder bags. Food items that were rationed were coffee, tea, butter, and meat. As a result, housewifes had to drive around to several different markets to find the supplies that they needed to create a well balanced meal. This too created a problem given the fact that gasoline was rationed as well.” P-women fight the war from home S-middle

“For 9-year-old, war started when brothers called.”  2001.  Gazette Communications.  17 April 2006.   <http://www.gazetteonline.com/special/homefront/story76.htm>.

• Posted outside homes to show the family had a relative overseas. S-top
• “Editor's Note: Robert Knoll of Robins was 9 when the United States entered the war. He writes about how the war affected his family. Following are excerpts” S-top.
• “Then in the summer of 1942 Lee got his draft notice, and as far as I was concerned the war had officially started. ... Shortly after Lee left, George's draft number came up. He was inducted into the Army on Nov. 20,   1942, just two days short of his 23rd birthday and four days short of his second wedding anniversary. About the same time George was drafted, Dick enlisted in the Navy Air Corp to train to become a pilot. When his orders came in January of 1943, they sent him to preflight training at Ames, Iowa.” S-1/2
• “Mom was very busy during the war. ... She was in charge of gathering up items to send to the servicemen in hospitals. People would sometimes donate games and a lot of jigsaw puzzles. The first batch she got, Margaret and I talked her into sending our old puzzles and we kept the donated ones. Then when she got another batch, we sent on the first ones; that way we had new ones all the time and still helped the war effort.” S-2/3

Hartman, Sharon H. and Linda P. Wood.  “Women and WWII.”  1995.  Brown University.  19 April 2006. <http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/WomenInWWII.html>.

• “Nancy Potter described the effect of the war in dramatic terms, ‘I think for girls and women, and perhaps boys and men, of my generation the war forced them to grow up prematurely. It made them far more serious about the bare realities of life: life, death, values. It robbed them, in a sense, of some childhood.’" S-top
• “Government intervention during the Depression had mainly given jobs to men. There was a lot of overt discrimination against women, especially in the "better" jobs like teaching, civil service, and secretarial work. Men and women had different types of jobs. Men worked in manufacturing and dominated the professions. Women did clerical work, or worked on the lower scale in a factory, or worked as domestics in other people's homes.” S-1/2
• “The war brought a tremendous shortage of labor. Not only was there great demand for labor to build up the war machines necessary to fight, but the men were leaving civilian employment for military service in huge numbers. To fill the shortage, society could have gone back to child labor as in the preceding century. Instead, society asked women to fill the jobs (See Rosie the Riveter), and they rushed to take them. Was it patriotism and propaganda that made women find war jobs? Or was it money, independence, companionship, and pride in learning new skills that motivated them? "Women did change. They had gotten the feeling of their own money. Making it themselves. Not asking anybody how to spend it," said Naomi Craig, who was finally able to get a decent job because of the war when industry needed workers, regardless of their sex or color.”  S-top
• “Marriages were common during the war. Men married quickly before being shipped out. And when they returned, they expected to get their jobs back, buy homes, and raise their families. Barbara Gwynne explained her situation, ‘Now that the war was over, my plans for the future were just to survive. I got married, and my husband and I had a baby. We just did what was in front of us.’” S-3/4 

“Chapter 28 :  War and Peace .”  The American Nation:  A History of the United States.  Ed.  Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty.  New York:  Longman, 2003.  735-757. 

• “By 1944, 6.5 million additional women had entered the workforce.” P-743
• In 1945 at the peak of war production  19 million women were employed. P-743
• “ A Seattle official of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Iron Ship Builders said of women job applicants:  ‘They don’t understand...If one of these girls pressed the trigger on the yard rivet guns, she’d be going one way the rivet the other.’” P- 743.
• Many women were soon doubling the “men’s work” in the ship yard.  P-743
• Men were forced to accept women workers due the demand of labor. P-743
• Women were convenient labor because one did not have to pay them as much as men and they were not subject to the draft. P-743
• Women entered to work force for economic reasons, patriotism, a desire to work, and loneliness.  P-743
• The government attempted to set up day care facilities to accommodate the working women, but it was a failure. P-743
• Juvenile crime and prostitution increased when women with absent husbands had to move their families for economic reasons to poorer areas. P-744.
• Many “war bride” marriages ended in divorce because the couples hastily married and then were separated for long periods of time. P-744

“Chapter 15 Close to Home.”  WWII The People’s Story.  Ed.  Nigel Fountain.  Pleasantville, NY:  The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 2003.  213-227

• 1940 unemployment was about 15%; in 1944 it was about 1% P-213
• “For women it was terrific to be able to work-the enormous liberation from being home, for not just young women, but middle-aged women who found this an extraordinarily exciting time, a time when they were really sort of important and independent, and loving it.”  -Burton Stein, a working schoolboy P-216
• Some elderly ladies offered day time child care at their homes so the younger women could work.  P-218
• Women were also helping swing music evolve, included the Charleston, the jitterbug P-220
• When applying for jobs in terms of race one would mark white or black and Native Americans were considered white.  P-225    

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