Women Join the Work Force
It was soon decided that Dayton’s ability to meet labor demands during the war hinged largely upon the number of women not employed who could be working. Efforts were made to convince these women to participate in the war effort outside of their homes.
A recruitment campaign directed especially toward women was soon begun. One of the first mediums used was billboard advertising. The Dayton War Manpower Committee put billboards throughout the city, with a new poster appearing each month.
A novel and effective means of informing prospective workers of job openings was a pamphlet called “The War Worker”. It listed and briefly described jobs listed at the U.S. Employment Service. The six-page folder, 4 x 9, was printed each week .
Display pedestals containing bins for the folder were placed in theater lobbies, banks and other public buildings. Smaller, counter-type containers were used in places where there was less traffic such as busses and streetcars.
Each folder was kept up to date according to jobs on file at the time and the color of paper was changed with each issue so that the different issues were easily distinguishable. From 18 to 20 thousand were distributed a week.
Motion pictures were made of women as they actually worked to show the different jobs they held. Part of the program would consist of statements by the women and another would have a narrator tell of Dayton’s need for more women to work in the factories.
Dayton newspapers advertised the need for women war workers in an unusual way. More than three hundred working women were interviewed in different jobs across the city. Former housewives were usually chosen for the interviews, since it was largely from that group that future workers were expected to come/ These interviews were then run as stories, all of them telling how happy the women were that they were helping in the war effort.
The recruitment was successful. Rosie the Riveters and Winnie the Welders (nicknames of the women who began to work in the defense plants) began filling the Dayton factories. Wearing pants and a kerchief on their heads to keep long hair from being caught in machinery, these women became “Soldiers without Guns”.
A survey was sent out in 1943 to businesses in the Dayton area that had eight or more employees. It showed that 150% more women were working full time in 1943 than in 1940 and eighty percent more than in 1942. Thirty percent of Dayton’s industrial employment was women.
Before war’s end, five million women would work in factories across the U. S.
Sidebar text:
On November 16, 1942 a registration card was mailed to every home in the Dayton and Montgomery County area from the Dayton office of the War Manpower Commission. It was hoped that women eighteen years or older would fill out the card and return it to the U.S. Employment bureau. To help make sure that as many cards as possible would be returned, women volunteers from various civil defense organizations were asked to go from house to house to collect the cards from anyone who hadn’t returned them voluntarily. The purpose of the card was to obtain detailed information concerning the working abilities and capacities of women in the city and county. The week following the mailing of the cards, over 6000 had already been filled out and returned to the Dayton office. Over 93,000 cards were eventually mailed.
As women continued to join the work force, some companies began realizing how valuable the women were. By July 1943, women held three-quarters of the Trans-World Airlines jobs in the Dayton area. Of the one hundred or so employees at the time, seventy-five were women, with jobs ranging from baggage and ground crew workers to radio operators and passenger agents. “Necessity brought women into the advanced position they now hold in the airline business,” said Vernon Gunn, district traffic manager of TWA in Dayton at the time, “and it has proven that they can handle some jobs even better than men.”
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