The first layoffs came swiftly. As soon as the Armistice was signed, women on the night shift at the Frankford Arsenal were let go. By November 14, Curtiss Aeroplane had discharged 3,000 people. In Bridgeport, the Remington-Union Metallic Cartridge company announced plans to release up to half of its workforce. Fifteen machine shops in Worcester, Massachusetts had, by late December, laid off more than twelve hundred women, and expected to release the rest of them as soon as the war contracts were finished.(1)
In other industries, change came less quickly. Two million American men were still in Europe and would take many months to come home. In the stateside training camps and in the factories, a great influenza epidemic was killing thousands of Americans a week. And so in the secondary war industries, women would hold on to their jobs a bit longer. Meat packers still had to send food to the troops in Europe. Machine tools, once again needed for making consumer goods, were still in short supply. At Jones & Lamson, James Hartness called a meeting to assure the women that the company still needed them, and so Caraola Cramm continued "side-by-side" with the shop boys for a time.(2) On the railroads, too, women's departure would be slow, and sometimes painful.(3) Florence Clark, a field agent for the U.S. Railroad Administration, had been hired to protect them; she would instead be watching them go.
| Engine wipers in Great Falls, Montana. War Department photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (165 WW-595D [14]). |  |
In the early twentieth century, railroads formed the primary transport network throughout the country. During the war, trains not only moved troops, weapons, and ammunition; they also carried raw materials for the foundries and factories, coal for the power plants, and food for the army and the nation's hungry allies in Europe. By late 1917, the railroads had been nearly paralyzed by insufficient coordination, corporate short-sightedness, and labor strife. The confusion left cargo stranded at supply points. Freight cars full of supplies bound for Europe stood unloaded at the east coast docks.(4) Then in December of 1917, in order to keep war materials moving, the government had taken control. Under a single administration, freight began to move more rationally. Likewise, labor conflicts were more readily resolved. The Railroad Administration established wage increases, employment standards, and a basic eight hour day.
From the beginning of the war, the number of women on the railroads had grown steadily until, by November of 1918, there were 70,000 more women railroad workers than there had been in 1917.(5) From Maine to Florida to Kansas to Oregon, they were working in the offices, on the track repair crews, in the machine shops, and in the rail yards. To provide some protection for these new workers, the administration formed the Women's Service Section in August and brought in Pauline Goldmark, of the New York Consumers' League, as manager.(6) In early October she hired four field agents. Although the war then ended within a few weeks, the Railroad Administration continued its work. The nation's railroads still needed women's labor, and the women certainly still needed their jobs.
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By early winter, the railroads were ready to reduce their workforce. Although the Railroad Administration had actively worked to remove women from truck pulling and track repair work, the officials had no intention of allowing women in lighter jobs to be targeted in the coming layoffs. Orders went out that the force reduction should be done strictly by seniority and that current workers should be transferred to available jobs before anyone new could be hired.. Men who had left railroad jobs to find better-paying work in munitions plants would have no right to return and displace the women. Only returning soldiers would take precedence. Florence Clark and Helen Ross would spend most of the coming year monitoring compliance with this order, and witnessing, in spite of their efforts, the gradual dismissal of women from the railroads.
In the Harrisburg yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad,(7) trouble was first stirred up by a group of male employees who wrote an anonymous letter to William Elmer, Acting Superintendent of the yards. "Now that the war is over and the men are trying to find work," they wrote, "give the men the jobs...Our men came first before the war, why not now? Women help ought to be entirely taken off the railroad." Apparently the management in Harrisburg agreed, because women began to be discharged quickly-- not just outdoor laborers, but store room attendants and clerks. Florence Clark was on the spot immediately, and she met with strong resistance: seniority lists were withheld, and women were discouraged from talking to her.
She managed, however, to demonstrate that the women had been let go wholesale, without regard for seniority, and that records had been altered to make it look as though the women had been fired for incompetence. When Clark brought the whole matter before Pauline Goldmark and, through her, before the Director General of the Railroads, the women were reinstated.
| An oxyacetylene welder working on a water jacket for an aircraft engine. Women also became welders for the railroads. Photograph courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (Signal Corps photo 35757). |  |
In mid-April, the women storeroom attendants were given 30 days to prove that they could perform their duties. They would find it surprisingly difficult. Florence Bowen quickly learned that the work at her desk had tripled and that she also had new duties out in the yard. Within days, she and two other women had quit. Mrs. Snyder stayed longer, putting up with harder physical labor and with being snubbed by the men in the storehouse, who would not answer her simple questions.(8) Cora Knisely, who supported herself and her blind mother, was required to climb ladders all day, bringing heavy items down from high shelves. During the war, the heavier part of the storeroom duties had been performed by men. Now, the women were expected to lift brake shoes and valves that weighed up to seventy pounds.(9) When Cora lost her nerve and refused to bring material down from a top shelf, she received a formal reprimand. In mid May, she wrote to Florence Clark saying that she had been treated "like a beast" but would not give up. Annie Lingle found herself re-assigned to a dark cellar, but she, too, needed the work and wanted to hang on.(10) Within another week, Anna Crosson, a clerk in the freight office, reported to Clark that both Knisely and Lingle--the last two women store room attendants--were gone.(11) Crosson, too, suffered insult and harassment, but still had her job in the office.
The same thing happened in the Mount Vernon Shop of the Pennsylvania Railroad, where women who had worked as outdoor laborers were first laid off, then recalled. Suddenly they found themselves loading large pieces of scrap iron, lifting barrels, and shoveling coal all day, while men more recently hired were doing the lighter work that the women had done before. When the women filed a complaint, the local Master Mechanic defended the changed methods in the yard. With the reduction in workforce, he claimed, it was no longer possible to separate the lighter work from the heavy work. When the Railroad Administration reviewed the complaint, the women were overruled. Unable to meet the new demands of their jobs, they drifted away from rail yard work.(12)
Women were not, however, being driven disproportionately from all railroad jobs. They became firmly established as telephone and telegraph operators. Many women clerks kept their jobs, too, in spite of the efforts of male clerks to drive them out. Clerical work held little interest for returning soldiers or for men who had passed the last two years earning fabulous wages in the munitions plants, and so the need for female clerks remained. Work traditionally done by women, too, remained their own- -cleaning the inside of Pullman cars and sorting and counting the linens.
There was a relentless falling off, though, of women in non-traditional jobs on the railroads. Driven out of the heaviest work by good-intentioned reformers and out of the most desirable work by hostile union men and indifferent supervisors, twenty thousand women left the railroads in the year following end of the war. Though some must have left happily, many others shared the feelings expressed in a letter written by Carrie B. Fearing, a laborer who lost her job to a man in January of 1919:
...if our work was satisfactory why not let us stay[?] what matters who does it so it is done and done right?...We are women that needed the work very much. [O]ne woman gave her only support to the army[,] one has her aged Father[,] another has a small son and I supported my disabled Sister...while her son was in the service of U.S.A. and if we are good enough to do the work in the last year we are good enough to do it yet. We never took a soldiers place, a soldier would not do the work we did...sweeping, picking up waste & paper and hauling steel shavings ...We are of which I speak respectable but poor women and were liked and respected by all who knew us...Women's work is so very hard to find this time of year and expences are so high with Liberty bonds and insurence to pay and home expences it is hard to get by. ... it matters little who does the work so long as it is done right[.] [W]e would not do it if we did not need it.(13)