Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980. 308 pp. - Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981. 198 pp.

Abstract

These two well-researched and closely-reasoned books advance our knowledge substantially beyond the generalizations usually made about the experience and the effects of women's employment during the two world wars. Maurine Greenwald's Women, War and Work concentrates on women workers in three occupations: on the railroads, as streetcar conductors, and as telephone operators, between 1917 and 1920. World War I provides her setting, and her subjects' employment is essentially conditioned by the war, but it is not war industry per se. Greenwald uses the war experience as a lens through which to examine in detail changes in women's work from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, and the relation of women's employment to changes in technology and industrial organization, to government intervention, employers' managerial techniques, trade-union activities, and working-class solidarity. As her different subtitle suggests, Karen Anderson in Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women during World War II is less concerned with the major contours of labour history. Her book focuses on three boom sites of military production, the Seattle area, Detroit, and Baltimore; the women workers she examines are employed in war industry and she traces, besides on-the-job experience, attitudes toward and problems of sexuality, marriage, family life and child care.