"Nearly 100,000 women, from messengers aged 16 to seasoned railroaders of 55 to 65, are keeping America's wartime trains rolling. So well do they handle their jobs that the railroad companies, once opposed to hiring any women, are adding others as fast as they can get them..."
For those who survived it, the Second World War changed many lives - some for better, some for worse. Gale Volchok was rescued from a dreary job in New York retail and delivered to the proving grounds of two different infantry training camps in New Jersey. It was under her watchful eye that thousands of American soldiers learned to throw their enemies into the dirt and generally defend them selves. To read the U.S. magazines and newspapers printed in 1941 is to gain an understanding as to the sixth sense many Americans had in predicting that W.W. II would soon be upon them - and this article is a fine example. One month before Pearl Harbor the editors of AMERICAN MAGAZINE ran this column about Lauretta Schimmoller (1902 - 1981) who established the Aerial Nurse Corps of America, which, at that time, was composed of over 400 volunteers:
"All air-minded registered nurses, they stand ready to fly with medical aid to scenes of disaster...Now established on a nation-wide scale, ANCOA, with its 19 national chapters, has already handled more than 3,000 emergency cases."
Eight months into America's entry into the war came this article from PM reporting the War Manpower Commission and their data as to how many American women up to that point had stepped up to contribute their labor to the war effort (over 1,500,000):
"Women have been found to excel men in jobs requiring repetitive skill, finger dexterity and accuracy. They're the equals of men in a number of other jobs. A U.S. Employment Service has indicated women can do 80 percent of the jobs now done by men."
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