A Mouthful of Rivets

They riveted, of course. They “bucketed” for riveters, they were usherettes in movie theaters—wearing the oversize clothes of the men they replaced. They collated fingerprints for the FBI and startled their co-workers by querying, “What’s sodomy?” They played pro baseball and worked in air traffic control. Mostly, they built ships and planes, working every shift, doing grimy work, living in strange cities, renting rooms, wearing their hair in snoods so that heavy machinery wouldn’t snatch their scalps off. They used their ration stamps for steel-toed shoes. Generally, you get the feeling that these women, working in World War II so that “our boys” might serve their country, had the absolute greatest time in their collective lives.

This book is put together in the form of an oral history, and the only bad thing you can say about it is that the sections are too short. These women are so tremendously likable that you want them to go on reminiscing for whole chapters, but most of them get only a few pages. The authors have divided their subject matter into sections like “Coping With the Basics” or “From Shy to Sure.” But these sections necessarily limit what the women get to talk about. You want to shout at the authors: Wait a minute! I want to know how this woman got her job and what her favorite moments were, and not just when she got laid off, but how she really felt about it. But the whole book goes by too fast, which, again, is just another way of saying that it’s terrific. The reader feels bereft and gloomy when it’s over.

So many questions come up here! Obviously, the difference between man’s work and woman’s work sails into the reader’s mind riding on a big metaphysical question mark and lodges there. Despite all of Gloria Steinem’s rousing talks over the years about how if women are suited to make silicon chips, they’re also suited to do brain surgery, I admit to some kind of revisionist, retro thought pattern: For instance, women don’t usually weld, and it might be because it’s too hard. But here are these sweet women, one after another, saying they trained for a week, or a day, or a morning, and then there they were, driving a crane, or climbing a six-story ladder, welding their hearts out, saying things like “They didn’t tell me anything. You’d have to wash the slag off to make the perfect bead and I had the perfect bead. I did perfect work. It’s kind of like embroidery.”

Embroidery? No wonder it’s taken so long for this book to get written. If the hardest of men’s factory work is really kind of a snap and everybody gets to know it, this whole country might tremble and crumble. Again and again, these ladies say things like, oh, it was easy, there was really nothing to it, I had a great time, I just loved it.

These women don’t subscribe to myths. They don’t go for it. Remembering the men who worked beside them, they recalled being gently kidded, or helped, or protected. Only one woman recalls being systematically harassed, and she went on to found a bookstore. Was she smarter than the others so that she recognized her harassment? Or was she just in a bad circumstance? Or were most people in the grip of such overriding patriotism that they forgot to be terrible to each other and really did concentrate on winning the war? In some ways that frame of mind is so far away from us today that it really is incomprehensible. In any event, these women—the great major of them—remember the men they worked with very fondly.

It’s amazing that such an unpretentious book can do so much to the reader’s mind. World War II still exists in living memory for many Americans, myself included. But when a woman recalls how icemen and milkmen came right into the kitchen, left their wares and picked up money from the top of the icebox, you have to say, wow! That was a different America. 0ne lady recalls working on the railroad still using kerosene lamps, and that memory swings back into your mind. Another remembers doing her laundry on a washboard, and the words themselves resonate with a lost reality: icebox, washboard, boardinghouse, snood.

Clean language zings off these pages. Margaret Fraser Beezly worked in Whitehaven inspecting planes. She found a friend and lost her: “I wish I could find the other girl. Gertrude Rubinski.” (Gertrude if you’re out there write to Margaret, please.) Another girl worked as a lifeguard, and remarks: “People drown very quietly.” Another remembers: “I cried, and the tears froze on my face.” Some writers would kill for these honest sentences.

After the war, these women got laid off. Some of them felt cheated, but many were ready to marry, have kids, do something new. Now they travel, and work, and join the Peace Corps, and make homemade quilts, and help the poor. They are so wonderful, so incredibly swell. This is how unusual “A Mouthful of Rivets” is. It makes you actively proud to be an American woman.

By 1943, two million American women had replaced WW II’s fighting men in blue- and white-collar jobs. Freelance writer Nancy Wise, who held a variety of office positions during that era, and her daughter, a freelance journalist, record the contributions of these women to the war effort, the “brief point in history when women rose to unexpected and surprising heights of achievement, then returned to more traditional roles, usually without protest.” First-person narratives recount the home front’s social upheaval and vividly portray the often difficult job condition—including sexual harassment—women faced. ‘Their occupations ranged from welder to personnel administrator. Although men displaced them at war’s end, the authors posit that these women paved the way for their offspring in the workplace.

A MOUTHFUL OF RIVETS:

Women at Work in World War II

Nancy Baker Wise and Christy Wise.

Josscy-Bass, $24 (276p) ISBN 1­-55542-703-0

Vol. 91 No. 5,

11/1/94

Rosie the Riveter—that World War II icon that called women into the workplace for the sake of the war effort—is familiar enough, but what about the real women who followed her lead? Nancy Baker Wise was one of them, and in this book she has compiled, with her daughter's help, an oral history of the women who eagerly took on men's jobs while the men were away at war, then quietly turned them back over when the men came home. With wit and wisdom, more than 125 women tell their stories of being truck drivers, factory workers, machinists, oil drillers, fighter plane repairers, and, of course, riveters. They tell of being thrown into situations with no training and learning complicated jobs overnight; of balancing job and family; of fighting harassment and tears; of the thrill of earning money and handling new challenges; of the heartbreak of being shut out of the workplace at war's end. Their warm and engaging stories bring to life an odd, often neglected chapter of American history. —Mary Ellen Sullivan

These upbeat books focus on the many ways women served during World War II, which gave them opportunities to make real contributions and to show themselves and others that they were capable of doing anything that was necessary to keep the homefront running. Without their participation in nontraditional jobs, this country could not have won the war. Mother Was a Gunner’s Mate is a detailed and personal account of Wingo’s years as a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). In a straightforward and entertaining manner, Wingo includes all the details that make this account a highly personal one, beginning with her family’s farewell party, her training at Hunter College, and her departure for California, where she served as a gunnery instructor until the end of the war and the beginning of a new life for her.

The mother-daughter Wise team has collaborated to bring together the stories of dozens of women who filled in for the men who left their jobs to serve in the Armed Forces. A Mouthful of Rivets carries the strong message that these women were happy to be working, proud of their accomplishments and independence, and aware that they were equal to the men they replaced. They delivered milk and worked in factories and gas stations to keep the country moving. The book concludes with a list of the women interviewed and an update on their status today. Readers will learn a great deal about history by reading these books. For public libraries.—Dorothy Lilly, Grosse Parole North H.S., Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.

Wingo, Josette Dermody.

Mother Was a Gunner’s Mate: World War II in the Waves.

Naval Inst Pr. Nov. 1994. c.241 p. permanent paper. photogs. LC 94-10440.

ISBN 1-55750-924-7. $24.95.

Wise, Nancy Baker & Christy Wise.

A Mouthful of Rivets: Women at Work in World War II.

Jossey-Bass. (Social & Behavioral Science). Nov. 1994. c.276p. photogs. bibliog. index. LC 94-11929. ISBN 1-55542-703-0. $24. HIST