Rosie the Riveter's Job Market: Advertising for women workers in World War II Los Angeles

Introduction

The image of Rosie the Riveter is well known in American popular culture, showing a woman proudly engaged in industrial work for the war effort (Figure 1). Less well known are the advertisements for specific jobs that women responded to when seeking employment (Figures 2 and 3). Rosie the Riveter has come to symbolize the role that six million American women played in expanding the United States’ industrial production capacity after 1941. Because the Rosie the Riveter campaign explicitly aimed to change public attitudes to women’s work, a focus on Rosie iconography necessarily invokes a narrative of change. Yet recent scholarship about women’s work during and after World War II also tells a story of important continuities. Occupational segregation by sex remained strong, and many women workers were laid off after the war. How do we reconcile a history of significant industrial work by women during the war, yet limited change immediately after the war?

Figure 1. We Can Do It.

U.S. National Archives’ Local Identifier: NWDNS-179-WP-1563. Series: War Production Board, compiled 1942–1943 (Record Group 179). Office for Emergency Management. War Production Board. Available: http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=535413

Figure 2. Sample of women’s job ads showing pre-Pearl Harbor size.

Source: ‘Classified Ad 10’, Los Angeles Times, 2 August 1941 edition, p. A11.

Figure 3. Example of women’s job ads, June 1942 to October 1943.

Source: ‘Classified Ad 5’, Los Angeles Times, 6 March 1943, p. 8.

Note: The Goodyear ad shown above is approximately a quarter the size of some of the other examples of larger job ads. It was not uncommon to find ads by companies such as Alcoa and Douglas Aircraft Corporation that occupied almost an entire column on a page. The job ad at the bottom of the left hand column shows an example of an ad for a non-war related position.

This paper looks at wartime classified advertisements for women workers as a way of charting continuities and changes in women’s employment during World War II. The majority of advertisements for women’s job were for non-war related jobs, and points to the need for scholars to examine women’s work in domestic, service and clerical jobs during the war.¹ Unlike the bold visual style of the Rosie the Riveter campaign, newspaper classified advertisements were functional. They rarely invoked patriotism even at the height of the war. Before and after the war, classified advertisements provided job seekers with economic rationales—wages, benefits, and training—for applying to particular jobs. Newspaper classified advertisements show the emergence of new opportunities for women in wartime manufacturing. Yet the majority of advertisements during the war continued to be for stereotypically female occupations, indicating important continuities in the wartime labor market.

The demands of a wartime labor market made it more acceptable for women to take on jobs in manufacturing, utilities and transport that in peacetime had mostly been done by men. Government and industry largely viewed women’s involvement as a stopgap measure until war’s end. Despite many women’s desire to keep working, the immediate impact of World War II on women’s employment levels was relatively small.² But the long-term consequences were significant. In recent scholarship, historians and social scientists have agreed that women’s wartime work shifted the boundaries of acceptable work for women in the post-war years.³

The iconic images of Rosie the Riveter explicitly aimed to change public opinion about women’s work. Rosie encouraged women to apply for industrial jobs they may not have previously considered, and aimed to make women’s industrial employment more acceptable to the public. During the Great Depression women’s employment had been unacceptable to many, with women accused of taking jobs from men.⁴ A focus on Rosie the Riveter necessarily tells a story of change in the work lives of American women during the war. The historical evidence for change is significant. At the peak of wartime industrial production 2 million women were working in war-related industries. Many were engaged in occupations that before World War II were proscribed to women by public opinion or employers’ hiring practices. The work experience accumulated by these women during the war was significant. Despite their desire to continue working in relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs after the war, many women were laid off from their industrial jobs.⁵ Despite layoffs at war’s end, by the late 1940s a sustained and significant increase in women’s labor force participation was underway that would continue until the 1980s.⁶ The chronology of women’s wartime work followed closely by unprecedented increases in women’s—and particularly married women’s— labor force participation has stimulated several decades of scholarly debate about the role of World War II in changing the work lives of American women. Popular historical accounts of the consequences of women’s wartime work draw a line from the “taste of making their own money,” that women got in World War II to the “revolution … in working life and home life in America” that followed.⁷ Other popular accounts describe how the “old pattern, in which women worked until they married and then never again, was broken.”⁸

Popular accounts of a direct line between wartime work and post-war change echo early scholarship that emphasized a direct causal role for World War II in post-war change. Most prominently, William Chafe’s influential 1972 history of American women in the twentieth century argued that World War II was a “turning point in the history of American women.” Similarly Chester Gregory argued in 1974 that as a result of the war “new ideas and seeds of social change [came] to life” and “created a new woman.”⁹ Thus, the early scholarly consensus was that wartime employment changed attitudes of women workers and employers, and led directly to post-war increases in women’s labor force participation.

Strong claims that post World War II developments catalyzed social change were challenged by scholarship published in the 1980s and early 1990s. Alice Kessler Harris’ influential history of women’s, Out to Work, acknowledged the sudden emergence of “unprecedented opportunity” for women to work. The chapter on women’s work in World War II begins by asking if war was “to be a breakthrough?—a turning point,” and acknowledged that “it certainly looked like it.”¹⁰ Yet the chapter concludes that war was “less a milestone than a natural response to the call for patriotism,” and “the milestone came after.” What changed women’s work behavior in the post-war decades, according to Kessler-Harris were changes in ideas and attitudes in the post-war decades themselves.¹¹

Studies of women and wartime work in the 1980s continued the historiographical direction suggested by Kessler-Harris, which qualified the impact of World War II on post-war changes in women’s work. Ruth Milkman’s influential 1987 book, Gender at Work, showed that workplaces maintained sexual divisions of labor during the war. As women took on jobs formerly done by men, the boundary between men’s and women’s work shifted.¹² At war’s end it shifted back. Even women working in manufacturing jobs that could have continued in peacetime were dismissed. Women working in defense production industries were even more vulnerable to dismissal.¹³

The record of mass dismissals of women at war’s end makes a narrative of continuity between wartime work and post-war change much harder to sustain. A narrative of wartime work catalyzing post-war change would require that women who entered the labor market during the war stayed on in large numbers after. Using a retrospective survey of workers Claudia Goldin found that more than half the women working in 1950 had been working in 1940. War did not draw them into the labor force. Moreover, most women who started work during the war exited before 1950. Most of the post-1940 entrants to the labor market who were at work in 1950, had entered work after the war’s end.¹⁴

In just a decade the scholarly consensus of the 1970s, that World War II was a breakthrough in American women’s work opportunities, had been overturned. A sign of the revised perspective is that while Chafe’s 1972 interpretation is included in popular histories, Chafe’s later work has incorporated the more nuanced views of other historians. In The Unfinished Journey Chafe argues that “at best … working women’s experience…. [a]fter World War II proved ambivalent.” While “statistical advances” were maintained the jobs women held were less desirable, and “traditional attitudes” meant that women who wanted to work had to accept occupational inequalities.¹⁵ Both historians and social scientists have extended the emphasis on attitudinal change after the war. For example, Susan Hartmann characterizes attitudes to women’s work between 1945 and 1960 as being in transition, rather than presenting a paradox.¹⁶ In recent research, the economist Raquel Fernandez and colleagues show how World War II might have led to changing attitudes to women’s work among people who were children during the war. Women growing up in states with higher levels of women’s labor force participation during World War II, were more likely to be in work themselves as adults. Similarly men, who as children saw more women work during World War II, were more likely to have a spouse who worked.¹⁷ A new scholarly consensus about the effect of World War II on American’s women’s employment is emerging that recognizes both wartime work and post-war layoffs, and how experiences at one point in time can change attitudes and behavior later in life.

Images of Rosie were important in turning public opinion, and shaping the cultural acceptability of women’s wartime employment. Yet Rosie did not direct women to specific jobs. Sometimes advertisements provided follow-up information about recruiting offices, but the majority did not. Moreover, the manufacturing workers that Rosie symbolized often had previous experience. When Rosie went to the factory, someone had to take her place. Thus, there was considerable movement between jobs during World War II. Turnover rates in manufacturing doubled during the war.¹⁸ In a tight labor market attracting the right workers to the right jobs was even more of a challenge for employers.

Yet there has been little historical examination of how wartime employers sought specific women for specific jobs. Since 1980 there has been significant research on the general advertising encouraging women’s employment and studies of women workers in specific industries and locations.¹⁹ This research note complements existing contributions about women’s wartime employment by showing how firms advertised for workers in newspapers. The methodology employed could be replicated elsewhere to provide more evidence about how wartime labor markets worked.

We examine the Los Angeles employment market, and sample job advertisements in the Los Angeles Times from 1939 to 1945.²⁰ Los Angeles was chosen not for its typicality, but its importance. The Los Angeles area was a center of wartime production, and the population and labor force grew tremendously. Civilian employment grew by nearly 50% in four years, from one to one-and-a-half million. Los Angeles was the largest city with a wartime population and employment boom.²¹ Similarly, the female labor force in the Los Angeles area was the largest among cities with booming war production.²²

Background

There is no previous historical research on newspaper-classified advertising for women’s wartime work. Scholarly attention has focused on the visually attractive and ideological content of Rosie the Riveter advertisements.²³ Leila Rupp and Maureen Honey show three phases in the government’s War Manpower Commission (WMC) mobilization campaign. The first phase began in 1942, and focused on general mobilization of women into war work, and was primarily directed at women without dependent children.²⁴ The second phase occurred in 1943, and came as women moved from low-status jobs into desirable defense industry jobs. The turnover caused acute shortages for essential service jobs that were “…unglamorous, underpaid, [and] low-status…”²⁵ During the first two phases women moved between jobs within urban areas, and to cities such as Los Angeles, that struggled to cope with the influx.²⁶ The problems of migration motivated the campaign to promote the housewife-turned-factory-worker to encourage women to work in occupations vital to civilian life.²⁷ The third phase from 1944 onwards promoted women’s return to pre-war domestic roles as demobilized servicemen re-entered the workforce.²⁸ Throughout the war, women’s mobilization was portrayed as temporary.²⁹

The WMC’s advocacy of women’s employment was complemented by private advertisements. While the federal government played a very large role in the wartime economy—spending 43% of GDP on defense in 1944—private business and advertising continued.³⁰ In a patriotic and corporatist atmosphere many corporate advertisements promoted both a company’s products and government wartime objectives, including women’s mobilization.³¹ Companies that employed large numbers of women in war production often advertised their employees’ contribution to the war effort, and sometimes called for more employees. Like the Rosie ads they did not advertise specific jobs. The most specific information they gave was directing women to the local United States Employment Service office, or instructing women to “Look at the Classified Advertising section of your newspaper to see the kinds of jobs open in your locality.”³² Classified advertisements were a significant pathway between the encouragements to employment made in Rosie the Riveter advertisements, and women obtaining an actual job.

Sources and method

Despite the importance of newspaper classified advertising during wartime, there has been no historical research on the topic. Classified advertising was an important, but not the most important, recruitment method in the early twentieth century.³³ Recruitment methods varied across industries and occupations. In unionized jobs, the union was often employers’ first choice for recruiting workers. Hiring at the “factory gate”, and through employment agencies was also significant. Classified advertising became more important for recruitment when there was high turnover, or when employers needed inexperienced workers not closely connected to the labor market.³⁴ These conditions applied in World War II Los Angeles.

With millions of jobs advertised across the United States during the war it is unfeasible to examine all of them. We selected the Los Angeles Times for our sample of classified advertising, because it was a newspaper with a large distribution and readership within the Los Angeles region—a region that had the largest growth in wartime employment of any American city during the war.³⁵ The sample is composed of classified advertisements appearing in the “Help Wanted” job advertisement segment of the Classified section. The unit of analysis is not a “job” being advertised, but an advertisement that might refer to multiple openings. There was no consistent indication in advertisements of whether they referred to multiple or single vacancies. We sampled 12 issues of the Los Angeles Times each year from January 1939 to December 1945. Advertisements on the first Saturday of each month were used until January 1944, and on the first Friday of each month thereafter. Initially the Saturday edition had the largest section of classified employment advertising, but after January 1944 the main ‘Help Wanted’ section moved from Saturday to Friday.³⁶

Classified employment advertisements in the Los Angeles Times were divided into several sections, segmenting the labor market by gender. The sample included ads in the following sections:

• Help Wanted Women (section 110)

• Help Wanted Women – Household and Domestic (section 111)

• Help Wanted Men (section 116)

• Help Wanted Men and Women (section 119)

• Help Wanted Couples (section 112/120).³⁷

We summarized characteristics of the advertisements such as inducements to apply for a job (e.g. training, higher wages) and the presence of propaganda rhetoric. We also summarized the style and design of advertisements, including size, layout, and font used, where these elements were being used to attract readers’ attention. There are some limitations of the advertisements for studying further segmentation of the labor market. Most notably in a sample of 35,000 advertisements there was only one mention of race. A solitary advertisement noted that “colored” women could apply, hinting at the presence in other jobs of barriers to black women’s employment.³⁸

Although individual advertisements are sparse, in totality they give a picture of the labor market over seven years. The sample of 35,000 job advertisements is a significant fraction of the Los Angeles labor market during the war. Employment in the Los Angeles region rose by 460,000 from 1940 to 1944.³⁹ Our sample is equivalent to at least one twelfth of the net new jobs created in Los Angeles during the war, as some advertisements are for multiple vacancies. Assuming the sample is representative of other editions in the month, approximately 150,000 job advertisements appeared in the Friday or Saturday Los Angeles Times during the seven years of our sample, or approximately one-third of the net new jobs created in wartime. Newspaper classifieds were clearly a major channel for advertising jobs in World War II Los Angeles.

Timing of classified job advertisements during the war

The temporal pattern of classified advertising was similar to that identified by Rupp and Honey for WMC advertisements. Job advertisements rose quickly after December 1941, and peaked in 1943. From 1943 to 1945 the number of jobs advertised declined sporadically, spiking upwards several times, including at the end of the war, but never reaching 1943 highs. The pattern for male and female advertisements was similar. The total number of advertisements was less than the combined number of men’s and women’s jobs. Jobs advertised for either men or women were counted towards both totals, as were jobs for couples (which were largely domestic service occupations).

Extrapolating from the sample to a 52-week year gives an estimate of the volume of advertisements every month, and show the limits of wartime change. Although many men were away, and there was a concerted attempt to encourage women into employment, the number of advertisements for men was nearly always larger than for women, and this was consistent through the period of rapid expansion in 1942 and 1943. In January and May 1942 more advertisements for women than men appeared, but that did not occur again early 1945.

Unemployment was already declining before the United States entered the war. But in California unemployment rose slightly in the first quarter of 1942 as people entered the labor market faster than employment opportunities opened.⁴⁰ The reversal was temporary. Between March and October 1942 unemployment in California dropped dramatically, from 9.4% to just over 1% of the civilian labor force. Until the end of the war unemployment in California remained low. In late 1943, just 0.3% of the labor force were unemployed, or 12,000 people. Despite fluctuating employment over the next 18 months unemployment remained under 1% until early 1945, when it rose steeply to over 11% of the labor force in early 1946. Across the country less than 4% of the labor force were unemployed. Thus, the employment situation in Los Angeles during the war was abnormally good during the war. The trends in advertisements in Los Angeles may not be replicated in labor markets with lower unemployment levels.

War altered the volume of advertisements significantly. By comparison with the 760 advertisements every month in 1941, the average number of advertisements each month in 1943 was 4368. There was little growth in advertisements until June 1942. After the peak in 1943, advertisements eased throughout 1944 and 1945. By war’s end and after, job ad volumes were below the 1943 peak, but still two to five times greater than pre-war. The boom in advertisements was partly a function of a very tight labor market. The volume of advertisements was greatest when unemployment was lowest. As unemployment rose after the war the number of advertisements fell to levels seen early in the war. National series of advertisement data show that as unemployment rose after the war there were high volumes of job advertisements. The adjustment from war to peacetime labor markets meant employers had vacancies even as unemployment rose.⁴¹

Occupational differences in job advertisements during the war

While Rosie the Riveter is an important icon, the iconography suggests women’s wartime employment was in defense related jobs. Yet a focus on armaments production and advertisements highlighting that role obscures job shifts in the wartime labor market, and continued demand for women in domestic and service jobs. Examining what kind of jobs were advertised for women during the war shows distinct patterns of demand for different occupations at different points in the war. To examine these shifts we analyze advertisements for women’s jobs in March and September each year (Table 1). The most commonly advertised jobs for women continued to be “Household and Domestic” jobs. Only in September 1943 and March 1945 did advertisements for clerical employment exceed those for household and domestic workers. Moreover, there was a volume of advertisements for domestic workers throughout the war, suggesting high turnover. The most striking pattern observed was for war jobs. Demand peaked in late 1943, diminished over the next six months, and nearly vanished by September 1944. The number of war job advertisements for women was a small fraction of all jobs advertised. Even at the peak, just one in eight jobs advertised for women were for war jobs. The majority of job advertisements for women continued to be in traditionally female roles.

Table 1.

Sample of job types advertised in March and September, 1939–1945

Year	Month	Household/Domestic	Sales	Clerical	Food	Medical	Beauty	War Job	Total Women’s Jobs
1939	March	11	5	4					36
	September	27	11	2	1		1		56
1940	March	14	6	9		2			45
	September	31	13	9			1		70
1941	March	26	6	8			1		61
	September	63	16	10	7	2	1		132
1942	March	45	7	17	9	3	1	3	110
	September	124	15	21	22	4	4	4	265
1943	March	83	15	64	27	11	6	19	359
	September	126	29	142	57	24	8	60	477
1944	March	78	12	72	16	14	3	6	361
	September	70	18	67	22	10	3	1	283
1945	March	46	5	53	5	1	3	1	160
	September	65	17	50	14	9	19		263

Source: Los Angeles Times, survey period of 1939 –1945.

Note: Household/Domestic volumes included job ads for hotel maids listed in Section 110, or jobs for couples where the female was required to do housework listed in Section 112/120, in addition to the listings in Section 111 for Household and Domestic help. Food included job ads for waitresses, cooks at restaurants or cafes (but not domestic cooks from Section 111), and food counter staff. Medical included positions for doctors, nurses, dental nurses, and osteopaths. Beauty included positions for beauticians, hairdressers, and cosmeticians, but excluded job ads for selling Avon products, which were considered part of Sales.

Recruiting women into work in wartime

In a tight labor market some employers used inducements to attract women to jobs. We defined “inducements” as extra information about the job beyond the occupation, employer and wage. Only 241 of 15,586 sampled job advertisements for women had inducements. For most advertisements the wage, employer and occupation were sufficient. The majority of the ads featuring inducements were for war work. After 1942 some ads for non-war work included inducements, such as a guaranteed job after the war. The inducements most commonly mentioned were training (108/241) and wage incentives (123/241). Both were most likely to be mentioned in 1943, and were not seen after mid-1944.

Training inducements mentioned that on-the-job training was provided, and indicated that applicants should not worry about experience. Training had different implications in early 1942 than at the peak in 1943. In 1942 training often involved tuition by an outside agency, which women sometimes paid for, but usually subsidized by the employer. Alternatively, training could be funded by the employer initially and repaid by the woman from her wages. In September 1942 the first advertisements appeared where successful applicants would be paid regular wages during training provided by the employer.

Wage inducements compared the wages in the advertised job to alternatives, or mentioned guaranteed overtime at time-and-a-half. Other inducements included free or subsidized transport, or carpooling organized by the employer; assistance with accommodation; childcare at the workplace or nearby; and a willingness to consider women older than 45. In one instance a defense job advertisement explicitly stated that colored women could apply.⁴² Yet these advertisements were a small minority. Most classified advertising was functional, reporting just occupation, wage and employer. Significantly for our understanding of the wartime labor market, appeals to citizenship and the importance of war production were limited. Classified job advertisements performed a complementary role to the WMC advertising in getting women into work.

Patriotic rhetoric within the wording of job ads was not common even at the peak of the WMC campaign. In 1942 and 1943 just 37 out of more than 7000 advertisements appealed to the importance of the war effort. Training and comparatively high wages were mentioned more often than patriotism in classified advertisements. In the big picture neither was important. The information provided in classified advertisements changed very little during the war. The significance of this negative finding is that it shows the WMC Rosie advertisements and newspaper classifieds were complements in recruiting workers. The government’s campaign to change attitudes about women’s work was necessary to get women to think about shifting jobs or entering the labor market. But it was not sufficient to get women into particular jobs. Newspaper classified advertisements informed women about actual available jobs, and the lack of ideological content shows the effectiveness of the publicity campaign symbolized by Rosie the Riveter.

A revealing indicator of competition for workers was a wartime increase in size and change in layout of classified advertisements. The standard advertisement from 1939 to 1941 was two to five lines in even-sized small font. After Pearl Harbor, as demand for war jobs slowly increased, so did the size of classified advertisements. Early in the war, from approximately January to May 1942, advertisements for defense related positions began to appear, with a gradual increase in size. Advertisements increased to between seven and twenty lines, with the inclusion of a larger banner heading in a bigger font that often stated the nature of the defense industry involved. After June 1942 defense related job advertisement sizes grew even more, taking up half or more of an entire newspaper column. However, non-war related advertisements quickly followed suit. By the end of 1942, although the number of large advertisements for war jobs outnumbered those for non-war jobs, they were generally indistinguishable in size and layout. The new, larger size remained standard until November 1943, when all women’s job ads suddenly returned to the 1939–1941 standards of three to five lines. The growth in size was an eye-catching tool to attract potential employees and coincided with the peak of the wartime labor demand and government-sponsored Rosie campaign.⁴³

Conclusions

A sample of Los Angeles classified job advertisements complements existing studies of the motivational Rosie the Riveter campaign, and gives a fuller picture of how wartime labor markets worked. In a sample of just over 35,000 job advertisements in the Los Angeles Times, just over 15,000 jobs were open to women. The number of job advertisements only increased dramatically in 1942, as unemployment in the Los Angeles region dropped dramatically and wartime production expanded rapidly. From the beginning of the war in 1939 to 1944, more job advertisements for men than women were published. The gender gap in job advertisements only closed in 1945. While advertisements are not the same as jobs, the greater number of men’s job advertisements in classified advertising is a useful corrective to the impression given by a singular focus on Rosie the Riveter. When a prospective Rosie looked in the paper she still saw many advertisements aimed at men only. Rosie’s job opportunities expanded, but were still constrained. Furthermore, even at the height of advertising for women in war-related jobs in 1943, more advertisements appeared for women in household and domestic service, and clerical work. This difference was apparent in all seven years of advertisements. While World War II expanded women’s opportunities, many aspects of the labor market were continuous with pre-war trends. The continuing wartime significance of replacing workers leaving civilian jobs, rather than recruitment of new employees to defense production, is clearer in our study of job advertisements than in previous studies of wartime advertising.

The most significant change in the wartime labor market was the increase in women employed. Women searching for a job between 1942 and 1945 had a greater chance of success than at the tail end of the Great Depression, with the best opportunities occurring in 1943 and 1944. The large advertisements for war jobs in 1942 and 1943 indicate employers eager to attract employees. Other scholars have shown that American women in World War II would have seen considerable amounts of advertising that created a climate of greater acceptance of women’s work. But in the newspaper, wartime women would have seen considerably less about the patriotic importance of their work. Advertisements were functional, mentioning the work to be done, the employer’s details, potential wages, and how to apply. Very few advertisements had comparative information on wages and training, and fewer still mentioned the patriotic importance of the war effort. Newspaper classified advertising for specific jobs complemented the motivational campaigns to encourage women into war work, and recognition of their sparse content and gender segregation paints a more detailed picture of the World War II labor market that American women experienced.