Question

discuss in detail African American women serving in World War II

Answer 1

• World War II provided unprecedented opportunities for American women to enter into jobs that had never before been open to women, particularly in the defense industry.
• Women faced challenges in overcoming cultural stereotypes against working women, as well as finding adequate childcare during working hours. Minority women also endured discrimination and dislocation during the war years.
• 350,000 women served in the armed forces during World War II.After the war, women were fired from many factory jobs. Nevertheless, within a few years, about a third of women older than 14 worked outside the home.
• African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was legal in all parts of the country, and virulent racism in the dominant culture.
• Even then, war industries often filled their most menial and dangerous positions with black employees, frequently on night shifts and in janitorial slots. African American women suffered both racial and gender discrimination, so they had to fight very hard even to enter skilled spots on the production line in aircraft, shipyard work, and other well-paying war industries.
• Entrenched racist attitudes on the part of white employers and coworkers in the nation’s war-production centers hindered black women’s ability to gain employment in these unionized blue-collar jobs. When black people did get hired, they often were forced to use separate restrooms and to perform the lowest paid, most difficult work.
• Sometimes their employment triggered hate strikes, which erupted periodically over the war, when white workers walked off the job over promotion or hiring of African Americans into previously restricted departments and occupation categories.
• Minority women faced particular difficulties during the World War II era. African American women struggled to find jobs in the defense industry, and found that white women were often unwilling to work beside them when they did. Although factory work allowed black women to escape labor as domestic servants for a time and earn better wages, most were fired after the war and forced to resume work as maids and cooks.
• Minority women, like minority men, served in the war effort as well, though the Navy did not allow black women into its ranks until 1944. As the American military was still segregated for the majority of World War II, African American women served in black-only units. Black nurses were only permitted to attend to black soldiers.
• The difficulty for black women entering skilled production areas, retail and other service work, or transportation jobs during the 1940s is mirrored in their continuing dominance of the private market for maids.
• Although during the war, the proportion of African American women who were working in domestic service fell dramatically, from 60 to 44 percent, domestic employment remained their primary occupation category throughout the war. Even in the military, which they did enter as a support for black male soldiers in the segregated armed forces, black women had trouble escaping low-skilled assignments, and they were not allowed to take combat roles
• . Six African American WACs, for example, were court-martialed at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, when they refused to take custodial assignments.
• Despite these obstacles in the labor force, there were some significant breakthroughs in the economy for African American women in World War II. The federal government, to cite the best example, made sure to hire black women as clerical workers in Washington DC, a huge step forward, and new, improved images of them appeared on Hollywood screens.
• Most of all, World War II provided an empowering political base for African American women that heralded the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.
• Despite the disappointing lack of progress for African American women in the wartime labor force, the war was a political watershed for them, and women played leading roles in articulating the community’s opposition to segregation and Jim Crow.
• If they were often defeated as individuals during World War II, as a collective force, African American women found an empowered voice in those years, one that anticipates the fruit of their embittering but powerful wartime efforts to break silence, challenge limits, and change forever the terms of their own lives.