The Fair Employment Commission also failed in tackling companies’ discrimination. For instance , in Detroit , Sears Roebuck lowered barriers enough to hire black women in the stock departments, but would not hire blacks in sales, where they would be seen in public. Therefore, owing to the reality of job discrimination, black women often took the lowest-paid and most hazardous jobs during the war , or were re-employed in the domestic service jobs that they had lost during the Depression. However, the hostility that black women encountered at work led to the politicisation of many black women during the war. in 1943 Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Youth Administration won a promise from defence plants to hire black women united in other campaigns such as the NWTUL’s campaign to end lynching and racial harassment in the workplace , and in 1942 nationwide protests amongst black women’s groups forced many employers to reconsider their employment practices. It is relevant to add that for many black women, the conversion from domestic service to factory work marked a welcome shift in job prospects, for black women were entering a white dominated employment field.
Ultimately however, such challenges to racial injustice did little to alter racial attitudes during the war. Cities across the US continued to devalue black women’s work in a way as to suggest that black women’s concerns were of little importance to policy makers. For example , a black woman at the Edgewood Arsenal earned $18 per week whereas her white counterparts earned on average twice this amount despite working fewer hours. It was only after the war that black women’s prospects improved because the momentum for social change was gaining strength. In the late forties, black women had finally begun to gain access to better jobs, since in the late forties the number of black women in low-paying jobs had fell by 15 percent by 1950.
The end of the war further refutes the view that women made substantive gains from the Second World War. When war production ended , many women quit their jobs. Women’s net gains during the war were negligible for although the shift to clerical jobs continued after the war, very few women occupied skilled craft jobs. The Women’s Bureau concluded that: ” Only a few women have been allowed to continue in the newer fields of employment, and thus continue to use skills learned during the war.” It is true that women’s employment underwent visible change during the war and the absence of men allowed women to expand their influence in a variety of educational and civic ways.
However, underscoring this potential long-term change were government backed media campaigns which sought to restrict women’s public activities and possible long-term goals. Mobilisation propaganda as well as the attractions of jobs induced young women to give priority to immediate employment, so that despite the greater educational opportunities created by the absence of men, women’s college enrollments actually declined during the war. Social welfare and child-care experts called upon women to pay closer attention to their maternal responsibility, and this demonstrated the government’s eventual desire to see women return to the domestic sphere once the war was over. Post-war purges of women from “men’s jobs” was strengthened by male workers and unionists, who colluded in the expulsion of women from the auto and electrical industries. Therefore, similar to American politicians, unionists’ loyalties ultimately resided with men. By April 1947 the prewar employment pattern had been re-established and most employed women were clerical workers, operatives, domestics, and service workers . A sad truth powerfully emerged after the war: there had been no revolution in attitudes, women faced the reality that the series of measures introduced during the war were done so grudgingly in the face of national emergency.
90d
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