was based on the recognition of men as the primary workers, and although women might work as society required—certainly in the home, and sometimes out of it—neither their status nor their wages were the same as those of men. The anti-Fascist crusade of World War II paid little attention to the similar status of American women.
In 1940 an attempt to get labor leader Sidney Hillman, a member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, to appoint a woman to his staff was rejected. “It was apparent,” says a government report published in 1952 by the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, that the commission “did not favor the participation of women in the development of policy with respect to women’s expanding integration into the labor market.”
When the War Manpower Commission was set up in 1942 to coordinate the use of the home-front labor market, the effort of women to join the policy-making group was rebuffed—even though women were needed for the work force and were entering it in large numbers. Mary Anderson, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, asked the manpower commission’s Management-Labor Policy Committee to appoint one or two women as members; the proposal was turned down. Rather—on the request of the Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs—a women’s advisory committee was appointed to the War Manpower Commission. Despite a promise from the commission’s executive director that the chairman of this advisory committee would have voting membership on the Management-Labor Policy Committee, this voting right was not granted. Moreover, the chairman initially sat on the sidelines at policy meetings, and only after several sessions was she invited to join the others at the conference table.
The 1952 Women’s Bureau report, commenting on the subsequent work of the advisory committee, raises the question as to why the committee “did not concern itself to a greater extent with problems pertaining to wages and hours for women workers. …” The report conjectures that the “Committee may have felt that it was necessary to subjugate the interests of special groups to the needs arising from the national emergency.” Nevertheless, the bureau report expresses cautious criticism of this neglect of the equal-pay problem:
… it is believed by some reviewers in retrospect that a good opportunity was overlooked by the Committee to gather more data and develop important information on the subject of equal pay, since this was a period in which women were entering the labor market to an unprecedented degree and performing many jobs held before almost exclusively by men. There is evidence that discriminatory pay and work opportunity practices did exist; the issue of equal pay and its corollary, equal opportunity, may have helped to create obstacles to the fullest possible integration of womanpower at a time when the labor supply was most critical. Although the Committee embodied the equality principle in all of its basic policy and program releases, there was comparatively little emphasis on equal pay.
Here was shown the traditional view that women should be reticent and avoid vigorous protest. The bureau report says “women were wary of attracting unpopular attention to issues in their own behalf,” adding that “in the climate of war crisis,” it was easy for men of the national administration to dismiss the requests for action as unnecessarily feminist—thereby reacting in accordance with tradition. The report also notes the existence of “doubts and uneasiness” on the War Manpower Commission “concerning what was then regarded as a developing attitude of militancy or a crusading spirit on the part of women leaders. …”
The conservatism of the women’s advisory committee—in the face of the intransigence of the males on the War Manpower Commission—is indicated in the bureau report, which says the committee’s work “should set at rest the alarm of those who wince at the memory of objectives ascribed to the early feminists as seeking to usurp the traditional masculine role or seeking special privileges which have no justification.” The committee, rather, “demonstrated that it could hold to its purpose, that, in addition, it could quietly go about its business, without offending propriety or tradition, and, finally, that its purpose embraced larger objectives than special privilege.”
Once again, therefore, needed changes in America’s social structure—action toward achieving equal rights for women—were subordinated to the need to vanquish fascism. Once again, the forestalling of change meant that the evils Americans were presumably fighting to overcome would continue at home after the military campaign abroad was over.
The war brought full employment and decisively ended the Depression of the thirties, as Roosevelt’s New Deal measures had failed to do. Still, it left intact the same basic features of the American economic system, which had produced, throughout American history, poverty amidst abundance, profiteering by big business, and alliances between giant corporations and the government at the expense of the American public. In The Crucial Decade, Eric Goldman writes:
The America of V-J was prosperous, more prosperous than the country had been in all its three centuries of zest for good living. The boom rolled out in great fat waves, into every corner of the nation and up and down the social ladder. Factory hands, brushing the V-J confetti out of their hair, laid plans for a suburban cottage. Farmers’ children were driving to college classes in glossy convertibles. California border police, checking the baggage of Okies returning east, came across wads of hundred-dollar bills.
Goldman exaggerates the reality; there were also the decaying slums, the shortage of housing, the ghettos, the unsatisfying jobs held by most people. He is closer to the truth when he talks of the “tonic sense of new possibilities” that many people felt. Yet the trouble was that even though trade unions, representing only a fifth of the working population, had become stronger during the war, the power of large corporations had increased in much greater proportion. The war accentuated the traditional American economic scheme in which business profit and power were the first considerations.
The alliance between big business and government has been a keystone in the American system ever since Alexander Hamilton’s economic program was presented to Congress during the nation’s first, peacetime administration. In wartime, the alliance has always become tighter, and World War II was no exception. The mobilization of production was essential to waging and winning the war, and this required the cooperation of those who controlled production—the executives of industry. Roosevelt, in one of his boldest speeches, had denounced the “economic royalists” of America, although his administrations did little to dislodge them from power. As historian Bruce Catton saw it from his post in the War Production Board: “The economic royalists, denounced and derided through two terms of the administration, had a part to play now. …”
In his book The War Lords of Washington, Catton described the process by which industrial mobilization during the war was carried on in such a way as to leave the economic status quo untouched. The United States began a drastic increase in war production after France’s defeat, and according to an official report of the Office of Production Management, as early as 1941 three-fourths of the total dollar value of military supply contracts was concentrated in the hands of fifty-six corporations. A year after the fall of France, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the auto industry had received $4 billion in war contracts; it was, however, delaying the fulfillment of those contracts while it brought out the 1942 model cars, decorated with more chromium than had ever been used before—and chromium was one of the scarcest and most critically needed materials.
Hitler might be on the rampage, but American businessmen were concerned mostly with business. Moreover, they went to Washington in large numbers as dollar-a-year men to direct industrial mobilization; they drew no salary but they maintained profitable corporate connections. The alliance between America’s governmental and business leaders, in effect, was not going to permit the war to cause any basic changes in the American capitalistic system. The government’s decision to employ dollar-a-year men, as Catton says,
grew logically out of the fundamental decision that while we were fighting an all-out war we were going to fight it for limited objectives—which is to say, for purely military objectives—and it was a decision of the
