Hutchinson--"Hutch" they called her-- liked to roll up her sleeves and flex her biceps, in the pose of prize fighters on the sports pages. She was a shell turner on the night shift in one of the great munitions factories near Chicago, and she delighted in her newly discovered competence in a man's job. As she worked through the night, her overalls and forearms became splattered with oil. She wore a workman's cap with a long black visor, to cut down the glare from the electric lights. As each huge shell came under her hand, delivered by a man, she grasped it in the jaws of a crane that hoisted it up into position on her lathe. Wrestling the shell into place, she fixed it in the grip of the machine, then shifted a gear to make the lathe spin. Next she set in motion the cutting tool that slowly moved along the spinning shell, cleaning and shaping it. As the cutting tool trimmed off long spirals of thin steel, she measured the shell with large calipers, until shape and size were perfect.

Hutch had been raised by her older sister. The sister's husband had died and her son had gone off to fight the war; so it was up to Hutch to support the family. She gave up an office job to become a shell turner, and began earning more than fifty dollars a week. Low-skilled workers in the same plant--women who merely sharpened tools or trucked them from one department to another--earned no more than twenty dollars a week. But Hutch had acquired a valuable skill. As the inspector slipped his gauge over her finished shells, she smiled with pride. "Oh, I guess I can manage till the boy gets back."(1)

The passage into machine shops and arsenals was not always easy for Hutch and women like her. During the early part of the war, women had moved en masse from the needle trades, sales, and food preparation into female ghettoes within the munitions factories. Gradually, as more and more men were drafted into the army, women such as Hutch had to be trained for skilled machine work, and they had to be put to work alongside men. Often their former jobs and their formal education had done little to prepare them. And while the women were not in all ways ready for the shops, neither were the shops quite ready for the women.

Pressing out channel iron at the Detroit Steel Products Company. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86G-7A-32).

          *               *               *               *               *

With America fully at war, the atmosphere in the arsenals was intense, and the pressures of war now included the unaccustomed mingling of men and women on the job. Men disliked having their domain invaded by women; they didn't know how to treat women in the workplace, and they didn't want to learn. More important, they feared for their jobs and their wages. The work of skilled craftsmen was being broken down into simpler parts that could be repeated over and over by the low-skilled newcomers. And the women were turning out to be speed demons. Paper box makers, glove workers, button makers, women who had spent years sewing the same seam in thousands of corsets a week they all worked as if there might be no tomorrow, for in the seasonal women's trades there often was no work tomorrow. Skilled craftsmen, on the other hand, frequently worked in well-organized union shops where the men deliberately set a moderate pace, maintaining a sense of dignity and a measure of resistance to the managers' attempts at control. The conflict between these two work ethics, and the belief that "men's work" might become "women's work," created a kind of gender war in some shops.(2)

At the Philadelphia Navy Yard, men shouted insults and obscenities at women entering the yard for the night shift and again leaving in the early morning hours, until the police and Navy Yard orderlies began to escort the women home.(3) At the Schuylkill Arsenal in South Philadelphia, men went into the toilet rooms and deliberately left the doors open, in order to embarrass the women, until Mary Anderson recommended installing swinging doors.(4) In other factories, men stripped off their own clothes right at their machines and they tried to watch the women change into their overalls.(5) In many places, men simply refused to work alongside women.

          *               *               *               *               *

Assembling airplane wings. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86G-1N-1).

The Aircraft Industry: Buffalo, New York

Out at the end of the streetcar line, past the park-like suburbs of the city of Buffalo, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation had put up the largest of its factories. Within the 27 acre complex, behind the low buildings that faced the street, stood a huge glass structure that looked like an enormous greenhouse. Inside, the company built big flying boats for the Navy, and light and agile training planes for the Signal Corps.

The aircraft industry was young and new--younger than any of the people who worked in it. When the war began, only eleven years after the Wright brothers' first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, the airplane was still experimental. It had not yet been put to work moving people or mail; it had no instruments to permit flying in bad weather; it was certainly unproven as a weapon of war. In 1914, America had only 16 plants that made airplanes, and only 211 workers. By 1918, there were more than forty plants employing nearly 27,000 people. Of those 27,000, more than 6,000 were women; and of those 6,000, nearly 2,000 worked for Curtiss in two Buffalo plants.(6)

Inside the glass-walled factory, acres of high-ceilinged work space were divided into departments for machining, woodworking, assembling, and finishing. In an airy balcony, up above the machine tools that didn't require high ceilings, a training school, staffed mostly by female teachers, trained two hundred women at a time. Other balconies housed rest rooms with couches and chairs; cloak rooms for hanging up coats, hats, and street clothes; or lavatories with rows of modern toilets and sinks. The other Curtiss factory in Buffalo, housed in an old building downtown, provided fewer comforts; but in both plants the work was light and fairly clean.

The airplane of 1918 was still largely made of wood--a spruce frame covered with heavy linen and veneer made of lightweight spruce or cedar. At the Curtiss plant, women in the woodworking shop helped shape the wooden parts, bored holes where one wing part needed to pass through another, and operated a machine that nailed wooden parts together. With bare hands and arms, women dipped the light wooden parts into varnish and hung them on a rack to dry. Another group shaped and smoothed the propellers, then finished them with oil and varnish.

Working alongside men, women helped assemble the wing panels, the ailerons, the rudder, and the tail unit, setting the lightweight wooden pieces in place, and gluing and screwing them together. They also helped assemble the fuselage. Four long, curved beams--two upper and two lower--made up the main body of the airplane. Women assembled small wooden struts which men then used to join the beams together. When the frame of the body had been built, women laid the flooring and installed the electric lights.

All of the small metal parts used to hold the wooden pieces together were also machined in the plant, mostly by women who had been trained in the company's school. After these parts came from the cutting machines, another group of workers filed or polished them to create the exact size and surface required.

Once the airplane's frame had been assembled and the wooden veneer added to the lower parts, the wings had to be covered. First, wide strips of linen were sewn together into the rough shape of the wing. Men and women stretched the linen tightly over the wing and tacked it down. Then a crew of experienced seamstresses--many of them grey-haired alumnae of the garment industries-- sewed up the loose ends of the wing covering, using heavy linen thread and large, curved darning needles. Next the wing panel was stood up on its edge, and teams of young women passed a long, three-inch darning needle back and forth, fastening the linen to the ribs, stitching it tight to keep the fabric from flapping in the wind.

In the doping room, agile young women worked alongside the men, brushing a thick varnish onto the wings, turning the porous linen into an airtight sheath that would provide lift for the airplane. The British had already found that dope made with tetrachlorethane was poisonous,(7) and so Americans used other solvents. Still, the doping room filled up with fumes that were strong, unpleasant, and possibly hazardous. At the Curtiss plant, the doping room was shut off from the rest of the factory and--in summer at least--doors and windows to the outside were kept open.

After doping, the aircraft was ready for its final coat of paint: khaki for the Army training planes, blue-gray for the Navy's flying boats. Then women would apply the insignia from transfer paper, identifying the plane by the three concentric circles of red, white, and blue.

Throughout the plant, at each stage of the process, female inspectors checked over every part. With micrometers and calipers in hand, they made sure that each bolt and screw matched the blueprint specifications for length and width, and for the number and spacing of the threads. Where the ends of cables had been wound into place, the exact number of wraps had to be counted by inspectors. All joints and metal fittings had to be checked. The wings, ailerons, elevators, and tail pieces were inspected both before and after they were attached to the fuselage. Once the engine and gas tank had been installed, the propeller and pilot's seat put in place, and all of the cables and steering mechanisms attached, the plane was ready for packing. While a wooden crate was being built around the plane, women busily prepared the metal fittings for exposure to salt air. Each metal part had to be smeared with petroleum jelly and then wrapped with tissue paper. The smaller girls climbed up inside the plane to get to the interior metal fittings. When all was done, the lid was nailed onto the box. A sturdy derrick lifted the crate onto a waiting freight car, and the aircraft was on its way for training at the stateside army bases or for patrol duty along the coasts of Europe.