Women Ironworkers Comercial Iron Works October 25, 1944 OrHi 64477

World War II transformed the nation’s work force as thousands of women took wage-earning jobs for the first time, a national increase of 57 percent between 1941 and 1945. At the peak of the Boeing Company’s wartime production effort south of Seattle, 46 percent of its 50,000 employees were women. Comparable figures for Portland’s big Kaiser shipyards in 1944 indicate that the 28,000 women laborers comprised 30 percent of the work force, with countless others working in smaller yards along the Columbia and Willamette rivers. To accommodate families with children, day-care centers became an important feature of urban life for the first time.

The Kaiser shipyards made an early commitment to hire women to fill construction positions at its Portland and Vancouver facilities. When the Oregon Shipbuilding Company hired two women welders in April 1942, it was the first time a U.S. Maritime Commission yard employed female workers to carry out production functions. As news circulated about the shipyard’s willingness to hire women, welding schools took on the task of training more women for the work. By early 1943, all the major shipyards operated paid trainee-welding programs in an effort to meet the critical labor shortage. Sociologist Karen Skold, who has studied the role of women workers in the Portland shipyards, points out that the yards hired women at an earlier time and in greater numbers than elsewhere in the nation, a reflection of the region’s dire labor shortage. Ultimately, women shipyard employees earned good wages, gained equal pay with men for the same kind of work, and labored at jobs that had formerly been denied to them.

Both Kaiser shipyard and federal officials recognized the importance of government-funded child-care accommodations for women shipyard workers, with community-based facilities located in Portland, Vanport, and Vancouver. Two Kaiser child-care centers, strategically located at shipyard entrances and operating for all three work shifts, provided excellent care for the children of working mothers. Staffed by professionally trained child-development experts and providing nutritionally balanced diets, the innovative centers became national showcases. At their peak, the two Portland shipyards—Oregon Shipbuilding and Swan Island—employed 16,000 women, and the two child-care centers cared for approximately 700 children. These figures also indicate that thousands of women sought care for their children elsewhere.

Hiring women for shipyard work was an uneven process. Females were over-represented as welders, but they made little headway at other skills where there was a sufficient supply of male workers. Women dominated the labor force for unskilled “help” tasks. Still, while hiring women to work in the shipyards challenged conventional notions about appropriate work and ideals about feminine identity, it is also significant that female employees were the first to be handed “quit-slips” when the war began to wind down and shipyard construction began to collapse. As Karen Skold observes, “women were temporary substitutes for men in a labor shortage.” Although a few unskilled females held onto their jobs after the war, the Oregon Shipyard Corporation laid off its last three women welders in October 1945. Real gains and full equality between men and women in the workplace lay in the future.

© William G. Robbins, 2002

Themes: Social Relations,Politics and Government,Industrialization

Regions: Willamette Valley,Columbia River,Portland Metropolitan Area

Date: 1925-1945

Author: William G. Robbins

Summary:
The Kaiser shipyards committed early to the hiring of women as war production workers. In addition to housing, Kaiser recognized the need for health and child care facilities in order to keep production at full steam.