[Mary Van Kleeck, a Smith College-educated sociologist, and Mary Anderson, a former boot maker and a labor leader, were recruited to help run the new women's section at the Department of Labor.]

Congress authorized a budget of forty thousand dollars for the Woman in Industry Service, and the two Marys, along with two secretaries, set up shop in a one-room office in the Labor Department. A couple of wooden desks, a typewriter, a telephone--from here they were to oversee the working conditions of ten million working women.

          *               *               *               *               *

At best, Washington in summer is hot; at worst, it is a steamy subtropical swamp. In their office at the Department of Labor, electric fans blew papers around as Mary Anderson and Mary Van Kleeck worked through the day and late into the evening almost every day, perfecting the language of their labor standards for women and collecting data to support their most important positions. If they were not in the office, it was because they were on the road. Crisscrossing the country, they slept in Pullman cars at night and spent their days visiting factories, talking to local officials, and making recommendations to employers.(1)

          *               *               *               *               *

Making fuses at Gray and Davis in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86G Box 8, Signal Corps photo 31635).

Working in collaboration with Clara Tead at the Department of Ordnance, Van Kleeck and Anderson were able to get their new work standards inserted into military contracts: an 8 hour day and a 48 hour week, established lunch and rest periods, no night work except with special permission, equal pay for women doing the same work as men, a safe and sanitary working environment, protection from hazardous chemicals, no industrial home work, a wage high enough to support dependents, worker involvement in creating good working conditions, and the establishment of personnel departments.(2)

Before the war, the government had not dared to intrude so directly into employment conditions, and most Americans had not thought such intrusion necessary. Protective laws had been passed only with great difficulty, and they remained highly controversial. As long as most working women could wear ankle length skirts on the job, as long as they were occupied in the traditional feminine tasks of spinning, sewing, cleaning, and food preparation--however industrialized those tasks had become--many Americans could continue to imagine that traditional concepts of feminine delicacy were not being violated. When war work required women to wear bloomers and to get machine oil--rather than food products--under their fingernails, when they were packing explosives rather than candies and inspecting bullets for eight hours a day rather than inspecting corsets for twelve, when the quality of their work could directly influence the outcome of the war, then suddenly their hours and wages and working conditions became the business of the public and the government.

The standards would apply first to women in industry, because most women, according to the Woman in Industry Service, went home after a day of factory work to do several hours of heavy housework.(3) Then gradually, subversively, Mary Anderson and Mary Van Kleeck began to articulate a new philosophy: it was not the person who should be regulated, but the job.

          *               *               *               *               *

At the United Gas Improvement plant in Philadelphia, coal was transformed into manufactured gas, used primarily for lighting. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86G-6S-4).

In late July, the Manufacturers' Association of Niagara Falls wrote to the Department of Labor asking permission to put women on night work. They understood the special hazards--social isolation, exhaustion brought on by caring for the home and children all day and then working all night. Still, they believed that the war emergency justified an exemption from the New York State law forbidding night work for women, and they suggested that hiring sturdy Polish and Italian peasants somehow made the request tolerable: "The only remedy is to surplant this man shortage with women of those European States accustomed to laboring work, and repulsive as this may appear to Americans, it is a war necessity and as easily stopped upon war ending as it is to introduce it."(4)

To Van Kleeck, the issue of night work was secondary. She knew that in 1912, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the New York State Factory Investigating Commission had found dangerous and unhealthy working conditions in the chemical industries of Niagara Falls,(5) which produced picric acid for explosives, abrasive products for heavy machinery, storage batteries, electrodes, and a great variety of caustic and poisonous chemicals.(6) In wartime, all of these products were in ever greater demand.

Van Kleeck immediately formed a committee of experts to study the employment of women in hazardous industries, and announced that their first investigation would be at Niagara Falls. Even more quickly, she sent Mary Anderson, on a midnight train, to Niagara Falls to have a look around. There Anderson found workers' houses sitting in the shadow of trees that had been stripped bare of their leaves by the chemicals floating out from the nearby factories. Inside the plants, women were not directly handling lead, which was known to cause miscarriages and birth defects, but were working near dangerous processes. In other shops, women were making Carborundum grinding wheels, working in rooms where the metallic dust was "so thick you could hardly see the worker at the next machine."(7) Anderson's brief visit reinforced the need for urgent action. In August, Mary Van Kleeck went to Niagara Falls herself, along with four physicians, an officer from the Ordnance department, and Nelle Swartz of the New York department of labor.(8) They visited the plants, interviewed welfare workers, spoke with pastors of the Polish and Italian communities, and questioned the employers about their plans and needs. They quickly concluded that the labor shortage in Niagara Falls had been a problem long before the war began taking young men away. Unhealthy working conditions, miserable housing, and frequent illness had long made it impossible for the local industries to keep workers on the job. In one of the most spectacular resorts in America, it was said that the workforce changed as quickly as the tourist population.(9)

Van Kleeck knew from the outset that she would use the Niagara Falls investigation not just to make--or reinforce--policies on night work. "The whole purpose of the investigation," she would later write, "was to secure prompt action to improve conditions in the plants."(10) Chemical industries must install blowers and filters to clean the air. They must put down impermeable flooring to replace wooden surfaces that held the poisons. They should supply bubbling drinking fountains rather than pails of water, provide plentiful soap and water for washing, and set up eating areas away from work areas. They must hire physicians to test for industrial disease, and they must rotate workers through the most hazardous tasks.

From their position at the Woman in Industry Service, Anderson and Van Kleeck could not regulate conditions for men, but they could insist that conditions be improved before women were hired. They could refuse to let women work at night if a factory might, by improving conditions, make everyone more efficient and so make night work unnecessary. And they could urge, repeatedly, that "risks should be eliminated for men" as well.(11) "The great task now is not to set apart women from industry, but to apply the medical and engineering knowledge of the country to making all work safe and healthful for the men and women who are producing for the Nation's needs."(12)

In late September, while Van Kleeck and Anderson were studying the issue of night work and women's exposure to hazardous chemicals, the national woman suffrage amendment again came before the Congress. President Wilson had first supported it back in January, when it passed in the House but was defeated in the Senate. This time, Wilson appeared before the Senate to make a strong appeal: "We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?" He cited women's efforts in industry "wherever men have worked," as well as in Europe "upon the very skirts and edges of the battle itself," where women were serving as nurses in the Red Cross, hostesses in canteens, drivers and telephone operators. Approval of woman suffrage, Wilson urged, was "vital to the winning of the war and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle."(13)

The Senate defeated woman suffrage again; but women toiled on, in the factories and the shipyards and the machine shops, on the railroads and in the government offices. With each passing week, women were moving into jobs where they had never been before.