View of Girls Processing a Hydraulic Bridge Erecting Crane, Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation, U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph, 1944

World War II fundamentally altered the workforce of the United States as the nation shifted from a peacetime consumer-focused economy to one centered on war production. While industries shifted their production lines to munitions and supplies for the armed forces, millions lined up to serve in the armed forces. By 1945, more than twelve million served in the military, the majority of whom were men. The sheer number of enlisted men necessitated that factories turn to an often-ignored segment of laborers: women. Many of the women who worked at wartime industries had been employed in lower-paying light industrial jobs prior to being hired in the 1940s. Others had worked in clerical or sales positions, and some were new to the workforce. Overall, women’s employment in the workforce jumped from 14 million to 19 million, representing about 36 percent of the overall workforce total. Of these, about six million worked in heavy war industries, which paid higher wages than the positions women held before.

While this number was large, it represented mainly white women workers. Black women had greater difficulty in finding well-paid wartime positions. In southern states, employers often blamed Jim Crow laws for refusing to hire Black women; they claimed that there was no space or money to build segregated facilities. In other places, employers either simply refused to hire Black women, or white women threatened to strike if Black women entered their ranks. Those Black women who succeeded in gaining employment in these lucrative industries had to fight to secure them, using the Fair Employment Practices Committee investigators or sympathetic union leaders to advance their cases. What Black women could and did do, however, was to take the jobs white women vacated for the wartime factory positions; this enabled many to leave low-paying domestic service jobs.

Women generally expected to keep their jobs after World War II. A Women’s Bureau study found that 75 percent of women planned to keep working, and of those, 90 percent intended to remain in the jobs they had. This did not happen. Wartime industries shifted way from war-production mode, laying off thousands of women in favor of returning men. In Virginia, almost 19,000 women left production jobs in 1945 and 1946. This did not mean that women stopped working; instead, many reluctantly returned to the lower-paying jobs they had held before the war.

The photograph shows women working in a vehicle processing plant on January 8, 1944, in Newport News. The women worked as part of a team manufacturing hydraulic bridge parts that were to be shipped overseas during World War II. It was not uncommon for women were to be referred to as “girls” in the time period and this is reflected in the title of the photograph.

Citation: U.S. Army Signal Corps. View of Girls Processing a Hydraulic Bridge Erecting Crane, Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation, 1944, U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph Collection, Library of Virginia.

This photograph and others from the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation are available in the Library of Virginia's Digital Collections Discovery.

For more information:
American Social History Project/Center, City University of New York, “Statistics on Women in the World War II Workforce.”  

Social Security Administration, “Employment of Women in War Production,” (1942). 

Megan Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans": African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-1945,” Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Preview Activity

Look at It: Look at the photograph. What are the women doing? How are they dressed? Why might they have been photographed in this way? Often, the government staged pictures of women working in factories for publicity photographs. Do you think this picture was staged? Why or why not?

Post Activities

Up for Debate: Do you think the term "girls" was appropriate for this photographer to use? Why or why not? What might the public reaction be today to such a title?

Form an Opinion: Write a journal entry as if you were one of the women who found herself out of a job when men returned home from the battlefield.

STEM Stat: The women shown in the photograph were processing a hydraulic bridge erecting crane. The purpose of this type of crane is to allow for a bridge to be pre-assembled and them moved into place using the hydraulic erecting crane. How might this technology been helpful to US and allied troops in Europe during World War II? Think of the geographic locations of many of the battles, the presence of bodies of water, and the importance of bridges during the war.