Women, Women Everywhere

The most striking evidence of the still incomplete social revolution wrought by World War II can be found in the new occupations of American women:

>Northwest lumber yards now have 4,000 women whistle punks, tallymen, flunkies, bull cooks.

>Six women went to work last week as drivers and casket carriers in Los Angeles' fabulous Forest Lawn Memorial Park. (Said one: "I'd even dig graves if I had to, and it may come to that.")

>In Marshfield, Ore., gaffers watched incredulously as a woman maneuvered a State Highway Commission steam roller down the main street.

>In Seattle, four women drive garbage trucks, and a whole female railroad-track gang was working in the Bremerton Navy Yard across Puget Sound.

>Southern Pacific employed two women as blacksmiths' helpers. Union Pacific got its first woman engine cleaner, brakeman, tie cutter and turntable operator.

>Mrs. Dorothy Betram of Huntington, L.I. is a traffic cop. (Her only objection: "My children don't call me Mom any more. They call me officer.")

>A Tennessee squirrel hunter found a woman operating a bootleg still.

Some old peacetime jobs for women--telephone operators, elevator operators--provided more openings than ever before. Others--stenographers, schoolteachers, movie starlets--are hard put to compete with the high pay and patriotic glamor of war jobs. The first conductorettes on Los Angeles streetcars looked as though they had come right out of a nightclub chorus line. There is hardly any job--truck driver, mechanic, cobbler, oyster shucker, engineer, bartender, butcher, baker or candlestick maker--that women cannot get if they want them and more & more women are getting them.

But for every woman who puts on unaccustomed overalls and goes to the factory for the swing shift, another puts on unaccustomed finery (sales of black lace underwear are booming) and travels to places she has never been before to be with her man in uniform. And for every woman who takes up a new occupation another takes up the oldest occupation--older than the oldest profession--motherhood.

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