Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War

Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War by Carrie Brown 254 pages 

I really enjoyed this book! It starts with pointing out how many of us know "Rosie the Riveter," but all of the women who preceded her, who worked in industry during World War I, remained unknown. For example, who made the gas masks for American soldiers facing chemical warfare for the first time? Who filled and shaped millions of cartridges?  Who assembled planes, sewed uniforms and worked in meatpacking factories to keep soldiers fed? More than a million women!!

The author goes back to pre-World War I to explore women working in all kinds of industries and how these women left those jobs to work in munition plants and other jobs to help the war effort. She also is quite clear that the jobs they left (working in garment factories, etc.) were just as dangerous as their new jobs where they were exposed to explosives, toxic chemicals and hostile male co-workers. I appreciated that the author wrote about women who helped the labor movement and how their work continued on, even as World War I came to an end. The author also spends time documenting how Black women faced even more challenges, taking jobs that were too dirty and dangerous for White women (and even White men).  The author's discussion of how the Chicago Defender newspaper drove people from the South to go North to find work is unsparing in describing the hardships that people faced. She points out that except in the peanut and tobacco industries, most factories were closed to Black women and men alike and that when Blacks did get into factories, they inevitably earned less than their White counterparts.

While there were a lot of obstacles in the way, women kept at it, determined to continue working and also continue working towards a living wage. The author does discuss unions and how women entering the job force in the war actually led to improved working conditions for many workers (men included).  Brown includes quotes from people who advocated on behalf of working women, including this one which struck me as something which could come from someone in today's society (but was from 1919):

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, one of the most respected leaders of the woman suffrage movement, addressed the National War Labor Board and said, "Is it  not astonishing, gentlemen, that women are not quite as interested in their own moral conditions as men can be for them, and is it not quite remarkable that women may not know what kind of employments they are adapted to as well as men can tell them? . . . Let me say that the time has come when it is neither the right of men nor the duty of men not justice for men to decide these problems for women . . . "