In September 1945, less than a month after Japan's surrender, the United Auto Workers' International Executive Board met in sessions running from the 10th to the 18th. The union's Women's Committee, led by Grace Blackett, made a presentation to the board. Its charge was that women were being discriminated against in the plants, that local union officials were collaborating in it, and that seniority was being applied inconsistently to push women out. The minutes, as quoted by the historian Timothy Minchin, listed the subject as "certain problems in the Union affecting women."
Lottie Crank gave an example. Some 460 women had worked in her factory during the war, she said, and 55 to 60 remained. She called for an investigation of the local officers involved. The board said it would consider the presentation and, as Minchin reports, gave no concrete response.
Who went first
More than 2.5 million workers were separated from their jobs in the month after Japan surrendered. A federal analysis by Olga Halsey of the Bureau of Employment Security, published in June 1946, found that between July 15 and September 1 the number of men employed in the major war industries fell 21 percent, and the number of women fell 40 percent. In the auto industry, women were 24 percent of the workforce in 1944 and 7.5 percent by mid-1946, according to Minchin.
Halsey judged it probable that many women had less seniority than men and so were laid off first and rehired last. Returning veterans carried statutory seniority rights. And according to what she called "fragmentary studies," women in about one-fifth of the plants or agreements under review kept separate seniority lists that protected them only in jobs counted as women's work before the war.
The orders
On October 6, 1945, the UAW's Fair Practices committee wrote through its chairman, George F. Addes, to Edward L. Cushman, director of the U.S. Employment Service for Michigan. The Detroit Tribune, a Black weekly, printed the letter on its front page a week later. Addes charged that the service was accepting and filling orders from Chevrolet Gear and Axle and from Budd Wheel that specified white male workers only, and that this helped the companies violate the seniority rights of women and Black workers, who were entitled to prior consideration. The union had been told earlier that the service's written rules required refusing such orders. Those written rules, the letter said, had been "countermanded by later oral ones."
On November 12, the St. Joseph, Michigan, Herald-Press ran a wire photograph of women laid off from Ford's Highland Park plant after V-J Day, carrying signs on a picket line. The caption said they were protesting the hiring of 2,200 new men who, they charged, had no seniority rights. It gives no date for the picket, and no follow-up has turned up, so how it ended is unknown.
What was said, and what was wanted
On September 5, the Kannapolis, North Carolina, Daily Independent ran an item suggesting that many released war workers were women who could "go back to their old jobs of just being women," and that Rosie the Riveter might marry a man who couldn't match her wages but would keep the larder full. Four days later the Salt Lake Tribune surveyed local jobs. Its sources included federal managers, labor officials, a taxi company president, and the mayor. One manager said his problem was women quitting, not women being fired. The cab president said his company was indebted to its women drivers, though most planned to leave when husbands and fiancés were discharged. It quoted none of the women it described. A state official put his own worry this way:
"If my wife can earn as much as I she might leave me"
The mindset carried into 1946. In Waterbury, Connecticut, the Democrat reported on May 6 that a school psychologist told a church group that postwar children needed a mother's care more than ever, and that a career and homemaking could not be mixed with success. On July 18, a column of short quips in the Hutchinson, Kansas, News-Herald listed it as "Good News" that men were preferred at the approaching reopening of the Cessna plant, and that the slack-clad Rosie the Riveter brigade would not return.
A 1946 Women's Bureau report measured what was on offer. In a U.S. Employment Service sample from three cities, 40 to 61 percent of the openings for women were clerical, sales, or service jobs, while only 15 to 18 percent of the women claimants had last worked in those fields. Many of them, the report said, no longer wanted that work. Later research added two findings. The economist Evan Rose concluded that the 1945–46 exit was the result of layoffs, displacement by veterans, and poor job offers compared with wartime work. Claudia Goldin found that women at work in 1950 were more likely to have joined the labor force after the war than during it.
The rule that wasn't written down
In the first essay of this exhibit, the law said marriage wasn't grounds for firing a teacher, and county boards kept firing teachers anyway. The 1945 version is harder to pin to a single decision. There were seniority lists, preferences for veterans, job orders that named the workers wanted, and a federal office whose written rules, according to the union, had been overtaken by spoken ones. Each could be explained on its own terms. In these papers, the exit was described as something women were about to do — or ought to.
Lottie Crank asked for an investigation, and the board promised to consider the presentation. In 1946, Minchin reports, the UAW made the committee a permanent part of its Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department, renamed the Women's Bureau. His account doesn't say what became of the 55 to 60 women who stayed in her factory.
The next essay follows what came after the layoffs, when the question stopped being who went first and became who was allowed to apply.