Jean Heisler of Lyndhurst remembers the day the world changed for her, and for women across the country.
"I was home... it was pouring rain... we had the radio on and it was interrupted, announcing that Pearl Harbor had been attacked."
The shock and anger prompted by the Japanese attack on a U.S. base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sent young men across America into military recruiting offices, leaving many employers in the lurch. A new pool of workers was needed, from factory floors... to professional offices. Armed with a graduate degree in psychology, Jean Heisler saw an opportunity to crack the previously all-male bastion of the military.
"And I wrote to the Navy Dept. asking them, 'When are we going to have Navy women officers?'
Six months later, Heisler was appointed to what the Navy described as "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service," or WAVES for short. She was able to put her college studies to work at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, probing the mental state of men returning from the war. Of course, at that time, women with post-secondary degrees weren't all that common.
Anna Bielert says she didn't even graduate from high school. But, that didn't stop her from landing a good job at the new Fisher Body Aircraft Plant in Brook Park. She became a Rosie the Riveter, working on the B-29 Bomber.
"I worked on the outboard wing," she says. "It's almost like in the middle of the plane. See, the outboard wing was in this section here. After we worked on it, they sent it to Boeing to put it together."
In the fall of 1942, nine times as many women were employed in aircraft assembly as had been a year earlier. Others were building tanks or jeeps. Case Western Reserve History Professor Renee Sentilles sees this as a watershed moment.
"Women were taking on 'male jobs'. They're actually leaving their homes and going into defense plants and taking on male jobs. And they receive, for the first time, the same pay that men got in those positions."
Anna Bielert says: "We really made money. We really did. When you work overtime, you get time-and-a-half. We worked a lot of Sundays, and you got double time."
"And, it's not done because the country is thankful to women," says Renee Sentilles. "It's because the unions didn't want the pay for those jobs to go down. It was already well established by WWII that when women went into a profession, it drove wages down. And so, there's a real promise made to American men who are going into the war effort, we will keep your jobs safe, we will keep the job pay safe."
A government propaganda film shot at Cleveland's Republic Steel sent that message home in no uncertain terms:
FILM CLIP INTERVIEWER: How do you like your job Mrs. Stoner?
Stoner: I love it.
FILM CLIP INTERVIEWER: How about after the war? Are you going to keep on working?
Stoner: I should say not. When my husband comes back, I'm going to be busy at home.
FILM CLIP INTERVIEWER: Good for you.
But, historian Renee Sentilles says it was too late. The country would never return to the pre-war status quo for American women.
"Their horizons have broadened; the way they think about their place in the world has broadened. And even if they don't end up leaving the home, again. They raise their daughters differently... they raise their sons differently. It creates a different understanding of their place in society and the world."
Anna Bielert recalls: "A lot of women said, 'If a man could do it, we can do it.'
Anna Bielert relished the way her life changed because of the Second World War, until she died in 2010. 90Something Jean Heisler takes pride in the change she's seen in the workplace, but she still betrays a sense of impatience over the pace of that change.
"You're hearing more and more about women taking the helm. It's very gradual... it's not well received always... but I think it is happening a lot more than it was. And 70 years later, it's about time."
