My Mother is Not Donna Reed!

MY MOTHER IS NOT DONNA REED!
A Surprising Look at Some American Women
Who Came of Age During World War II1

Margaret C. Hlinka, ©20032

[James Gagiikwe, editor, 2009]3

[Please read Notes before reading the Essay]4

5

She is wearing a shirtwaist dress, a tasteful string of faux pearls and pumps. Her hair is perfect. She’s vacuuming the livingroom carpet. She’s the ideal 1950’s homemaker: contented, comfortable, blissfully free of opinions or ambitions. She is Donna Reed (or Harriet Nelson or June Cleaver). She’s the image of my mother’s generation. She is what Baby Boomer daughters rebelled against. Or is she? Were the women who came of age during World War II the real pioneers in the quest for equality?6

June 6, 1944: D-Day. War correspondent Martha Gellhorn stowed away in the ‘head’ of a British hospital ship bound for the bloodsoaked beaches of Normandy. She described the scene for Collier’s Weekly:7

“Then we saw the coast of France and suddenly we were in the midst of the Armada of the invasion … There were destroyers and battleships and transports, a floating city of huge vessels anchored before the green cliffs of Normandy. Occassionally you wounld see a gun flash or perhaps only hear a distant roar, as naval guns fired far over those hills. Small craft beetled around in a curiously jolly way. It looked like a lot of fun to race from shore to ships in snub-nosed boats beating up the spray. It was no fun at all, considering the mines and obstacles that remained in the water, the sunken tanks with only their radio antennae showing above the water, the drowned bodies that still floated past. On an LCT near us washing was hung up on a line, and between the loud explosions of mines being detonated on the beach dance music could be heard coming from its radio. Barrage balloons, always looking like comic toy elephants, bounced in the high wind above the massed ships, and invisible planes droned behind the gray ceiling of cloud. Troops were unloading from big ships to heavy cement barges or to light craft, and on the shore, moving up four brown roads that scarred the hillside, our tanks clanked slowly and steadily forward.”8

June 7, 1944: D-Day + 1. Gellhorn scrambled into a motor launch speeding to Easy Red Beach. She waded ashore with stretcher bearers to rescure one hundred stranded, wounded men before the nightly air raid and “before the dangerous, dark cold could eat up their hurt bodies.”9

Gellhorn’s husband, also a war correspondent, observed the D-Day invasion from the frustrating distance of a ship offshore. Apparently, Ernest Hemingway never forgave his wife for beating him to the war story of the century.10

Throughout the course of World War II, Germany and America were engaged in a deadly duel to perfect a combat jet fighter. In october, 1944, a prototype Bell YP-69A jet fighter, disguised with a fake propeller, arrived at Wright Field Army Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, for testing. The test pilot was Ann Baumgartner, who wrote of October 14th, 1944 –11

“I was alone with the jet. Weighed down with responsibility, I advanced the power and the engines whined, black smoke trailing. Visibility with the tricycle gear was good, and taxiing could be controlled with just the rudder. Cleared for takeoff, I pushed the engines to a high scream and started down the runway. As advertised, it took a while to get airborne. Settled into a climb, suddenly the engine noise stopped. Had the engines quit already?12

No, we (the plane and I) were still climbing. Then I realised the jet noise was now behind me. I looked out at the elliptical wings and the narrow nose ahead of me. As we slid along silently, it was strange to realize I was the only jet up there, perhaps the only jet over the United States that day.” A WASP Among Eagles13


On that warm October afternoon somewhere in the skies over Wright Field, Ann Baumgartner became the first woman to fly a jet. Baumgartner was one of 1,000 WASP’s (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) who served as military flyers on the American home front during World War II. They ferried new aircraft from factories to U.S. air bases, towed targets for anti-aircraft trainees, taught men to fly, and served as test pilots for new aircraft.14

The final Air Force evaluation on the YP-59A tested by Baumgartner found that it was not suitable as a combat aircraft, but that it “proved that the principle of jet propulsion for aircraft was sound and practical.” Germany won the race to produce a jet fighter. In 1945, on the eve of Germany’s surrender, Allied pilots confronted a fighter without propellers – the ME-262 jet – piercing the skies of Europe.15


Conventional history records that the American women’s movement went silent during the decades between winning the right to vote in 1920 and the revival of feminism in the 1960’s. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 created high expectations for progress toward economic equality for American women. Those expectations, like so many other hopes, were crushed by the Great Depression. Throughout a decade of economic devastation, Americans believed that husbands and fathers should be given priority for scarce jobs.16

Congresswoman Florence Kahn declared that “woman’s place is not in the business world competing with men who have families to support, but in the home.” The American Federation of Labor resolved that “married women whose husbands have permanent positions … should be discriminated against in the hiring of employees.” When pollster George Gallup asked in 1936 whether wives should work if their husbands were employed, a resounding 82% of the Americans polled said ‘no’.17

In his landmark book, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century, historian William H. Chafe writes that in the 1930’s employers increasingly denied married women the right to work. Nearly every U.S. state passed laws prohibiting employment of married women. A National Education Association study in 1930-31 showed that of 1,500 school systems surveyed, 77% refused to hire wives and 63% dismissed women teachers if they married. From 1932 to 1937, federal legislation prohibited more than one member of the same family from working in the civil service.18

In 1940, the percentage of women at work was almost exactly what it had been in 1910. The prospects for improvement in women’s economic status appreared bleak.19

Then, in a few deadly hours over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese advanced economic opportunity for American women far more effectively than decades of action by Congress, religious leaders or the women’s movement. In the months following America’s declaration of war, millions of men left their jobs to take up arms. 20


“But what kind of girl would want to fly an experimental Jet? A pioneer like me, maybe?” The speaker was Orville Wright. The question was directed at Ann Baumgartner as they were standing in front of the Fighter Flight Test hanger at the edge of the north-south runnway of Wright Field. It was early 1944, and all experimental military aircraft were evaluated at Wright Field by an elite cadre of the Air Force’s most accomplished pilots.21

Wright Field incorporated “Huffman Prairie”, a farmer’s field, where the Wright brothers [Orville and Wilber] did much of their early aviation testing. Orville often visted the air base, clad in his trademark hat and overcoat, to talk aviation. He was particularly interested in jet propulsion. On that day in 1944, Orville encouraged Ann Baumgertner’s ambition to fly the secret experimental jet due to arrive soon at Wright Field. “You must fly that jet,” Wright said. “I’ll be rooting for you and how I’d love to fly it too. But I’m close to 80 years old, you know.”22

American women served in combat during the Revolutionary War, and on both sides of the Civil War. Their service was not officially sabctioned or recognised, nor their number tallied, because they disguised themselves as men, including the use of fake facial hair. During World War I, more than 34,000 women served in the American Army and Navy nursing corps, and in clerical jobs for the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard.23

But World War II was the first dramatic breakthrough for women in the U.S. military, according to retired Air Force Major General Jeanne Hilm in her book, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution. More than 350,000 American women served in the various branches of the military. All were volunteers and all, except nurses, served in programs started from scratch – including the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots scheme. These new units created opportunities for women to prove themselves in a wide spectrum of jobs previosuly restricted to men.24

Ann Baumgartner ws born in 1918 in an Army hospital while her father was away fighting in the Amiens region of France. Her mother was an artist and graduate of the Parsons School of Art and Design. Her father, a patent attorney and aviation enthusiast, took his family to New York City in 1927 to watch the ticker-tape parade welcoming Charles Lindberg home from his historic trans-Atlantic flight.25

After graduating from Smith College, class of 1939, Baumgertner moved into an appartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, joined a modern dance company, and went to work writing for Eastern Airline’s monthly in-flight magazine. But Baumgertner had secretly nurtured the dream of flight since hearing Amelia Earhart speak at her school after Earhart’s transatlantic flight in 1932. On weekends, Baumgartner drove to a small airport in New Jersey to take flying lessons.26

After a stint as a reader for a literary agent, Baumgartner wrote features for The New York Times and contributed the first page of The Times Magazine, calling it “About New York”. By 1942, she was working as a writer for Rockerfeller Center, Inc., while completing the 200 flight hours required for a commercial pilt’s license. It was then that she saw a news story about opportunities for women with the Air Force.27

One of these women looking for opportunity was Ann Baumgartner. Ann saw a news story about the Army Air Force recruiting experienced women pilots for home front flying to free men for overseas active duty. She applied, survived the interview with WASP leader, aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, and was ordered to report for training at Avenger Field in Texas. From a pool of 25,000 applicants, Ann would become one of only 1,070 women who made the grade to become WASP’s. As WASP pilots they were classified as Civil Service employees, and not military personnel.28

At Avenger Field, Baumgertner and her sister recruits undertook the same training program required of male aviation cadets: 180 hours of flight training and ground school classes, in the fundamentals of navigation, meteorology, aircraft mechanics, and radio telegraphy. Baumgartner graduated on September 11, 1943 and was assigned to the Artillery Base at Camp Davis, North Carolina. She, and fellow WASP, Betty Greene, were assigned there to replace two women pilots who had been killed in crashes. According to Baumgartner’s memoir, A WASP Among Eagles, the first accident was due to sabotage.29

“The plane’s engine quit and it crashed on its back on the runway. On examination, it was found that the fuel had been laced with sugar, which stopped the engine. Unbelievably, this was hushed up. Whether or not anyone was blamed or punished we never knew, even though others had also had engines quit. I the second, even more terrible accident, the pilot could not get out of a crashed buring aircraft because the canopy latch would not open. The plane’s log – or “Form 1” – showed that this complaint had been written up but was never repaired. It seemed that a habit had been formed to “red line” the Form 1 if some rather small problem was at stake; that is, simply record what was wrong, but let it fly.”30

It was left to the WASP pilots to pay for the funerals out of their own pockets. Because of the cover-up; ordered by Cochran herself; two members of the base WASP unit resigned. The remaining women pilots chose to stay and serve their country, exhibiting a cool courage. They had learned that to stay alive they would have to look out for themselves. They routinely double-checked the planes they flew themselves and befriended base mechanics for support.31

In February, 1944, Baumgartner was transferred to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio for ‘temporary duty’. Her assignment was to test high-altitude and low temperature equipment being developed for WASP pilots. Nothing was said about flying duties. She therefore lobbied for permanent assignment to Wright Field and was assigned to the Fighter Flight Test Branch[FFT] in March, 1944. Initially she served as an assistant operations officer on the ground until she could prove that she had the ‘right-stuff’ to become the first female experiemental test pilot. Her dream assignment was to fly the huge Republic P-47 fighter.32

During one flight, while trying to improve her skills with that powerful plane, the aircraft controls ‘froze’ and the plane snap-rolled into an uncontrolled dive. Heavy, frozen control surfaces at altitude were a common problem with the P-47. She found herself hurtling towards a farmer’s field, unable to slow or control the dive.33

“After that, I simply relaxed. “Okay, God,” I said, “It’s up to you.” Then everything seemed to quiet down…. Suddenly the controls responded. I pulled slowly, slowly back on the stick. The G-forces pulled my face down…. With a great ‘whoosh’ the plane recovered from the dive, not more than a few undred feet from the ground.34

Carefully we returned to the flightline. I walked around the plane. Nothing seemed amiss. I left the plane a teller of no tales.”35

A month later, after an FFT pilot was killed in similar circumstances, the P-47’s control surfaces were re-designed.36

Baumgartener was then transferred to Bomber Test Flight and participated in testing a heavily-laden Boeing B-29 Superfortress for long-range flights. These tests were designed to test the capacity of the B-29 to carry atomic weapons. Then, on Octeber 14, 1944, she became the first woman to fly a jet, the prototype YP-59A. 37


During World War II, American Women fought for work in another profession considered off-limits: that of war correspondent. While a mere handful of female journalistic pioneers had covered some combat action in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War I; at least 27 American women secured official military accreditation as war correspondents during WWII. Martha Gellhorn wrote:38

“War is a malignant disease, an idiocy, a prison, and the pain it causes is beyond telling or imagining; but war was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in. I was a special type of war profiteer; I was physically lucky, and was paid to spend my time with magnificent people….39

I wrote very fast, as I had to; and I was always afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place.” Faces of War40

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis to a prominent physician father and a mother, Edna, active in the Suffragette movement. A Bryn Mawr graduate, Edna Gellhorn helped organise 7,000 women to demand the vote at the 1916 Democratic National Convention, held in St Louis. Eight-year-old Martha was in the front row.41

Martha Gellhorn enrolled in Bryn Mawr, but fled the college cloister in her junior year. She was ambitious to become a writer and determined to escape the confines of a conventional, respectable life. Gellhorn worked briefly as a cub reporter for the Albany Time Union, covering social events and the morgue. In 1929, The New Republic published her first byline article – an impression of a sold-out Rudy Vallee [US singer, ed.] performance.42

In February 1930, 21-year-old Gelllhorn bartered passage to Europe; by writing a complimentary article for the Holland America Lines’ trade magazine in exchange for a thrird-class ticket. She arrived in Paris with US$75, a single suitcase, and the driving ambition to becoem a foreign correspondent. While in Paris, Gellhorn scrambled to win assignments from the United Press wire service and Vogue magazine. She covered League of Nations meetings in Geneva for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and completed her first novel.43

Believing that the Great Depression posed a terrible threat to America, Gellhorn returned home in 1934. A St. Louis friend took her to meet Harry L. Hopkins, Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration [FERA]. Hopkins hired Hellhorn as a field investigator to report on how Americans on relief were faring. Hopkins had doubts about whether Gellhorn had the right stuff to do the job: “She had the polish of a young society matron and distracting long legs.”44

Gellhorn toured the country for a year, reporting on the appalling, degrading and corruption-riddled living conditions imposed upon so many Americans. In 1935, Gellhorn urged a group of unemployed men in a small Idaho town to rebel against a corrupt contractor. The FBI caught up with her in Seattle. The Idaho men she had incited to action had broken the windows of the FERA office; and Gelhorn was fired as a result. Her FERA work became the subject of her second novel, The Trouble I’ve Seen. Published in 1935, the novel was a critical success. Gellhorn’s glamourous photo – in an ironic contrast to her novel’s grim and explicit content – decorated the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature. 45

In 1936, Gellhorn, her mother and brother decided to spend their Christmas holiday together in Florida. On a day trip to Key West she met a local fisherman at a bar called Sloppy Joe’s. His name was Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn and Hemingway must have created a stuning picture for bar patrons. He lounged in a “grubby T-shirt” and “odoriferous Basque shorts” held up by a bit of rope – a barefooted, bulky figure, darkly tanned by the sun. Gellhorn was a long, cool, sleek blonde dressed in her signature black dress and high heels. Over drinks they talked about his work – Hemingway had been Gellhorn’s literary hero since college – and the novel she was trying to finish. The debate continues as to whether meeting Hemingway in Key West was serendipity or a calculated Gellhorn strategy.46

After several idylic weeks in Key West, Gellhorn returned to St. Louis. But she was restless. An ardent anti-fascist, she thought that Spain was the place of the moment – the place to stop Fascism. She believed a world war would start there, just as it had been triggered in the Balkans in 1912. Hemingway had signed a contract with the North American Newspaper Alliance [NANA] to cover the Spanish Civil War. He invited Gellhorn to join him in Spain. They both believed passionately in the democratically-elected Spanish Republic’s right to defend inself against Franco’s Fascist rebellion. Gellhorn arrived in New York City to find that Hemingway had sailed for France, leaving no instructions about how she was to enter Spain.47

In March, 1937, carying only a knapsack and US$50, Gellhorn got off a train at the Andorran-Spanish border and crossed into Spain. Reaching Madrid she went to the Hotel Florida, where a colony of correspondents were camped on the war’s doorstep. At the time of her arrival, Madrid had been under siege for five months. The hotel was in the direct line of fire from Franco’s artillery. Most of the rooms facing the plaza were too badly damaged to be used. Hot water and food were precious. The ‘front’ was only 1200 yards away. Gellhorn found Hemingway in his room, entertaining soldiers on leave from the International Brigade.48

“What was new and prophetic about the war in Spain,” wrote Gellhorn, “was the life of civilians, who stayed at home and had the war brought to them.” She tried to capture the impact of total war on daily life in Madrid, submitting her first article to Collier’s Weekly:49

“Women are standing in line, as they do all over Madrid, quiet women, dressed usually in black, with market baskets on their arms, waiting to buy food. A shell falls across the square. They turn their heads to look, and move a little closer to the house, but no one leaves her place in the line. After all, they have been waiting there for three hours and the children expect food at home.50

In the Plaza Major, the shoeblacks stand around the edges of the square, with their little boxes of creams and brushes, and passers-by stop and have their shoes polished as they read a paper or gossip together. When the shells fall too heavily, the shoeblacks pick up their boxes and retreat a little way into a side street.51

So now the square is empty, though people are leaning closer against the houses around it, and the shells are falling so fast that there is almost no time between them to hear them coming, only the steady roaring as they land on the granite cobblestones.52

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.53

A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: GET OUT OF MADRID.”54

Her article, High Explosive for Everyone, was published on July 17, 1937, beginning Gellhorns’ eight-year relationship with Collier’s as a war correspondent. In the next two years she covereed Czechoslovakia’s humiliating capitulation to Hitler, the Russian invasion of Finland, and the Sino-Japanese War, pausing only briefly to marry Ernest Hemingway.55

“From November 1943, with one unavoidable break in the spring of 1944, I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” wrote Gellhorm. “The U.S. Army public relations officers, the bosses of the American press, were a doctrinaire bunch who objected to a woman being a correspondent with combat troops. I felt like a veteran of the Crimean War by then, and I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman’s angle.”56

Gellhorn’s daring and inventive scheme to land with Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy – without proper crednetials – was not well received by the U.S. Army. She was arrested by the Army’s PR office and sentenced to confinement at an American nurses’ training camp outside London. After 24 hours, Gellhorn escaped over a barbed wire fence, and hitched a ride to a military airfield. She hopped an unauthorised flight to Naples by Charming the pilot with a sad story about missing her fiance in Italy. 57

She covered the 8th Army’s slow advance across Italy, and the Allied invasion of Holland. On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a surprise attack in the Belgian Ardennes and broke through the American front lines. Gellhorn described the landscape created by the Battle of the Bulge for Collier’s:58

“A colleague and I drove up to Bastogne on a secondary road through breathtaking scenery. The Thunderbolts [P-47s, ed.] had created this scenery. You can say the words ‘death and destruction’ and they don’t mean anything. But they are aweful words when you are looking at what they mean. There were some German staff cars along the side of the road. They had not merely been hit by the machine-gun bullets, they had been mashed into the ground. There were half-tracks and tanks literally wrenched apart, and a gun position directly hit by bombs. All around these lacerated or flattened objects was the usual riffraff: papers, tin cans, cartridge belts, an odd shoe, clothing. There were also, ignored and completely inhuman, the hard-frozen corpses of Germans. Then there was a clump of houses, burned and gutted, with only a few walls standing, and around them the enormous bloated bodies of cattle.59

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.”60

In 1945, Gellhorn divorced Ernest Hemingway [she was his 3d wife, ed.] and severed her relationship with Collier’s. For the next 50 years, Gellhorn would cover every major conflict. Her critical reporting of the Vietnam War so angered the American military that her visa was revoked. In her seventies, she wrote critically about the Reagan Administration’s policies in Nicaragua and El Salvidor. At age 81, she reported on the American invasion of Panama.61


More than 350,000 American women volunteered for military service during World War II. But on the quiet, invisible battleground at home, millions of American women had to take charge of their lives without uniforms, basic training, battle plans or Comanding Officers. They found the courage and the will to explore unkown territory for women and played a crucial role in winning the war.62

In Arms and the Girl, Gulielma Fell Alsop, a physician at Barnard College, and Mary F. McBride, director of adult education at the the New York City YWCA, described young American women in 1943:63

“In their blue overalls, in their sneakers, with their hair hidden in caps and kershiefs, the girls of the war step lightly about the great scaffolds, drilling, forging, welding, sewing, stitching, filling, packing, making explosives, pilling cartridges, arranging bombs, taking part, with their nimble fingers and quick, sure eyes, in every kind of preparation for fighting. These blue-overalled girls are everywhere. Lift up one of the masks in the welding department, and an intent but smiling face looks up from the work with a startled humanity …..64

She is well paid for this work. She is probably better paid than she has ever been. She also works overtime and is paid for that. She has more money to spend than she has had in all her life that has covered the Great Depression period, the period of deflation. She buys War Bonds and War Stamps. Not only does she make the materiel of war, but she spends her money to enable the government to buy other materiel that other girls make. She is right at the heart of the war effort.65

The manpower of war cannot prevail without the womanpower of the war behind it. The men may be the shock troops, but the women are the base line.”66

Government and the mass media launched a crusade to persuade American women that it was their patriotic duty to fill the jobs abandoned by men sighing up for combat duty. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote in her 1942 pamphlet, Women in the War:67

“A lively interest in the mobilisation of women is sweeping the country. It is not only a recognition of their importance but a campaign to stimulate larger numbers to enter plants. The ‘soldierettes’ of the home front are interviewed, featured on the fashion pages of newspapers and magazines in their snappy uniforms, are the heroines of movies. The glamour girl of today, the woman in the news, is the working woman. Every day brings a thrilling account of a new, difficult, or delicate job mastered by a woman; every such accomplishment lays low some ancient superstition about women. They are not afraid of heat, electricity, noise, lights, gas, smells, high, dark or dangerous places. They do not worry about their appearance. ‘Feminine vanity’ does not balk at dirty faces, greasy hands, hair plastered down under a protective cap, severly tailored uniforms, shoes conditioned for safety, and a lunch box instead of a fancy purse. Our women measure up to the stern requirements of modern industry.”68

Women who did not work in war industries found other ways to help meet the manpower shortage. Writes William Chafe:69

“When a scarcity of taxi drivers developed in New York, women hackies took the wheel. A group of grandmothers operated the police radio in Montgomery County, Maryland, and women drove the public buses of Washington, Detroit, and New Orleans. Two thousand female volunteers saved a million-gallon stawrberry crop in Tennessee, while 29,000 others answered the government’s plea to “Take a Fruit Furlough” by joining the Women’s Land Army.”70

According to Chafe, the war:71

“also made a dent in some of the barriers blocking women’s employment in business and the professions. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute enrolled its first woman student; the Curtis-Wright Company sent 800 women engineering trainees to college; and giant corporations like Monsanto, Du Pont and Standard Oil began to hire women chemists. In Washington, the government sought to fill its depleated legal staff with women lawyers, and on Wall Street, brokerage houses embarked on a concerted campaign to recruit female analysts and statisticians. Even the close-knit Washington press corps opened its ranks. Male reporters still excluded 37 women from the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, but on Capital Hill, the number of women journalists tripled from 30 to 98.”72

World War II’s impact on the American woman’s economic staus was stunning. Between 1940 and 1945, the proportion of women working jumped from 25 percent to 36 percent – a rise greater than that of the preceeding four decades. By V-E Day, the female labor force had increased by more than six million, or about 50 percent. For the first time, more wives were employed than single women; more women over 35 than under 35.73


The rapid reversal in the American public’s attitude towards working women was also dramatic. At the height of the Great Depression, more than 80 percent of the public strongly oposed work by maried women. By 1942, in contrast, 60 percent believed that wives should be employed in war industries (only 13 percent were opposed), and 71 percent thought more married women should work.74

During World War II, American women were exhorted to do their patriotic duty by taking the jobs men left to serve in combat. But what was patriotic in 1942 was nearly treason in 1945. Returning veterans were to have their jobs back. Women were told by government, business and the media to go back to the kitchen.75

Fredeick Crawford, head of the National Association of Manufacturers, praised women for their wartime contribution, but declared that “from a humanitarian point of view, too many women should not stay in the labor force. The home is the basic American institution.” Barnard College sociologist Willard Waller charged that women had gotten “out of hand” during the war, causing children to be neglected and endangering the “very survival of the home.”76

In a 1945 public opinion survey commissioned by Fortune magazine, most American men and women believed that a sharp division of labor between the sexes should be maintained. Most Americans surveyed were now opposed to a wife working if her husband could support her.77

By the close of 1944, the WASPs were disbanded. But General Patton had not yet crushed the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge, and Allied troops were taking very heavy losses in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. According to WASP test pilot Ann Baumgartner, the male instructors in the government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program now suddenly decided that they wanted to take over WASP flying jobs on the home front. In this they had the support and sympathy of Congress.78

Jackie Cochran worked hard for militarization inro the Air Force for the WASPs. General “Hap” Arnold, Army Air Forces Chief of Staff, tried but failed to persuade Congress of the benefits of militarization. Because the WASPs remained Civil Service employees, they were discharged with no veterans benefits. They did not qualify for the G.I. Bill or for military burial. Ann Baumgertner recalled, “To have our wartime service terminated before the war’s end made us feel incomplete, that we had not been ‘in at the finish’. After honing our skills and dedicating ourselves to the war effort, we were now surplus.”79

Four days after VE-Day, May 12, 1945, Ann Baumgertner married Major Bill Carl, whom she had met at Wright Field. They moved to Long Island and raised two children. She became a columnist on science and the environment for publications ranging from Newsday to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, and testified before Congress on environmental issues. An XP-59A jet fighter, similar to the prototype she flew, is permanently on display in the Milestones of Flight Gallery at the National Air and Space Museum. A panel with Baungertner’s photo commemorates her 1944 flight.80

After the disbandment of the WASPs in 1944, 150 of the women pilots signed on for non-flying duty in the Air Force. Additionally, two others went to the Army, two to the Navy and one to the RAF. Many of these women remained in the services through to the Vietnam War era, with most serving as captains, majors or lieutenant colonels. Many others took civilian jobs, when they could find them, ferrying civilian planes, running flying schools, or serving on government flying safety boards. Their contribution to America’s victory was not acknowledged until 1977, when Senator Barry Goldwater [Republican, Arizona. Ed.] sponsored a bill retroactively militarizing the WASPs.81

Congress, in 1948, passed the Women’s Armed Services Act, establishing a permanent place for women in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. But the bill specifically prohibited women from duty in “combat aircraft engaged in combat missions.” This clause was interpreted by all the services to mean that all pilot categories would be closed to women; on the theory that a pilot should be available to fly any plane on any mission at any time. It would take 49 years from Ann Baumgartner’s historic jet flight to the time when American women could officially pilot jets in combat.82


Despite Martha Gellhorn’s long and successful career as a war correspondent and fiction writer [5 novels, 14 novellas, and 2 collections of short stories], she is usually remembered merely as one among Ernest Hemingway’s many women. Gellhorn resented the Hemingway label: “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”83

World War II opened up unprecedented opportunities for female journalists. Political reporter turned war correspondent May Craig told the Women’s National Press Club in 1944: “The war has given women a chance to show what they can do in the news world and they have done well.” After the war, the ranks of female journalists thinned out and seasoned newswomen who had proved their competence faced demotion. By 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, there were actually fewer female foreign correspondents than on the eve of World War II.84

Socially, a curtain of silence fell over the American woman’s contribution to the war effort, errasing her accomplishments for 50 years. But the generation of women who had tasted financial independence, personal freedom, and the challenge and satisfaction of work would never be the same.85

With a degree in social administration, Edith Sokol was appointed director of the True Sisters Day Care Center in Cleveland, Ohio during World War II. In 1945 she wrote her hsuband, Victor, an artillery officer with the 84th Infantry in Europe”86

“Sweetie, I want to make sure I make myself clear about how I’ve changed. I want you to know now that you are not married to a girl that’s interested soley in a home – I shall definitely have to work all my life – I get emotional satisfaction out of working; and I don’t doubt that many a night you will cook the supper while I’m at a meeting. Also, dearest – I shall never wash and iron – there are laundries for that! Do you think you’ll be able to bear living with me? …
I love you, Edith”87

A 1944 Women’s Bureau survey found athat three out of four women who had taken jobs during the war wanted to continue working. But under the Selective Service Act, returning veterans jumped to the head of the employment line. Between September 1945 and November 1946, a million women were laid off. The number of women working in heavy industry dropped most dramatically. [It needs to be remembered that most war production contracts were cancelled after VJ-Day. Ed.] But according to William Chafe, the most striking feature of women’s employment after the war was the number of women who rejoined the work force in clerical, sales and service positions – lower paying, sex-segreated, ‘pink-ghetto’ jobs.88

Real gains for women in the workplace continued throughout the 1950’s. By 1960, twice as many women were at work as in 1940, and 40 percent of all women over 16 held a job. The proportion of wives at work had doubled from 15 percent in 1940 to 30 percent in 1960. The number of mothers at work lept 400 percent. By 1960, both the husband and the wife worked in more that ten million homes, and mothers of children under 18 accounted for almost a third of all women workers.89

The paradox of the 1950’s was that while American society wanted women to continue as fulltime housemakers, in the image of TV’s Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver, the wife and mother who worked had become a permanent feature of American life. 90

Economic equality for women – equal pay, desegregation of job classifications, community support services while at work, and real progress in the professions – was still a distant goal. But, in the real world, Donna and Harriet and June – those 1950’s television icons of the ideal American woman – were working wives and mothers.91

In 1950’s suburbia, a college-educated writer and mother of three was grappling with the conflict between image and reality for the American woman:92

“Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today. I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half guiltily, and therefiore half-heartedly, almost inspite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from the home. It was this personal question mark that led me, in 1957, to spend a great deal of time doing an intensive questionaire of my college classmates, fifteen years after our graduation from Smith. . . . The problems and satisfactions of their lives, and mine, and the way our education had contributed to them, simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women’s magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.”93

Betty Friedan came of age on the campus of Smith College during World War II. She would emerge from 1950’s suburbia to publish The Feminine Mystique in 1963, lighting the fuse for the feminist explosion of the 1960’s. The audience was ready and waiting. A generation of women had tasted opportunity and independence during World War II. And they were raising their daughters to challenge the way women toil, marry and mother in America.94


“The challenge of my generation was to give our children the choices we didn’t have;” says my mother. “Especially for our daughters, we wanted everything we didn’t have – books, clothes, college, careers. And most of all, control of our own destinies.”95