"And We Want Steel Toes Like the Men": Gender and Occupational Health during World War II

Alma worked the night shift in 1943 in order to have her days free for the house and kids. She slept about five to six hours a day, and never all at one time. Irregular heat and ventilation in the plant where she worked and the cold she caught there left her with a cough, but she did not go home sick. When her husband and children caught cold, however, she stayed out of work for a week to nurse them. Still, Alma found the work preferable to full-time housewifery and wanted to continue it after the war, somehow balancing it with her family and household responsibilities. ¹

New York Times writer Elizabeth Hawes used Alma’s story to illustrate why absenteeism was high among working mothers during World War II. Alma’s experience also suggests two important and contradictory aspects of the war with respect to occupational health. First, she asked no special favors at work, suffering the same discomfort as other workers, both male and female, and she expected to be accorded both the freedom and the responsibility to make employment decisions for herself. Second, the reality of her household responsibilities, even with a caring husband who pitched in with preparing meals and washing dishes, meant that her family’s health was directly tied to hers—a link that, in turn, affected how she interacted with the workplace. ²

Many wage-earning women expected equal treatment and equal protection but also knew that domestic responsibilities influenced women’s workplace performance. This was the dual nature of the wartime workplace, and it revealed the tensions built into feminist notions of equality and special treatment that had been part of the public debate on women’s rights since the early twentieth century. It is significant that such debate centered around the health of wage-earning women. Some women’s rights activists had made concerted efforts to eliminate state labor laws that typically placed restrictions on women’s daily and weekly hours spent at the factory; others were equally determined to maintain laws that acknowledged women’s physical and social differences from men, and further believed that protecting women was the first step toward protecting all workers. These positions have been well covered in the literature on the history of feminism in the twentieth century. ³ However, by examining the trade-offs and contradictions inherent in the two approaches, this article details the extent to which employers used them to limit occupational health and safety changes, as well as how women workers incorporated them into their lives.

For instance, feminist activism for gender equality coincided with employer priorities of achieving full wartime production with minimal changes in the workplace to accommodate women. Equal treatment was also championed by many women workers who sought expanded economic opportunities. This was in conflict with another perspective, that of gender difference—most notably the “double duty” of working women that had long been recognized by reformers, state health and labor officials, and women workers themselves as something that distinguished female workers from their male counterparts.

Medical professionals and federal and state bureaucrats also responded to the pull and push of equality and difference. The federal Women’s Bureau and the well-known toxicologist Alice Hamilton debated the extent to which women should be protected during wartime. ⁴ Industrial physicians, many of them new to the specific health concerns of women workers, questioned the legitimacy of certain sex-based employment restrictions even as they tried to handle an “epidemic” of menstrual cramps. ⁵ Examining the tensions produced by these differing perspectives provides a method for observing the impact of the war on workplace health.

Exploring the well-covered terrain of women in World War II ⁶ from the comparatively underexamined perspective of occupational health also allows a consideration of the significance of gender in defining worker health. As David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz (and others) have argued, the economics of doing business often drives decisions about workplace health. ⁷ Dealing with new female workers did not change that strategy...