Still, their experiences of wartime employment were not forgotten. Rosie lost her riveting job, but her
sense of what she deserved and what was possible was forever changed. The experience of doing a
“man’s job” and at times receiving respect and a “man’s pay” raised women’s self-esteem and their
expectations of what they wanted on the job. More women now knew that they too could do a “man’s job”
and that they too deserved the wages, respect, and union protections all too often reserved for men.
Carmen Chavez of Albuquerque, for example, thought the women war workers in her neighborhood
“changed as much as the men who went to war. We had a taste of independence we hadn’t known before
the war. We developed a feeling of self-confidence and a sense of worth.”^13
At the war’s close, most women workers wanted to keep their higher-paying jobs, and many
organized to fight for the right to do so. Although they generally thought it was fair for veterans to be able
to get their old jobs back, they were infuriated by the presumption that any man, with or without seniority,
whether in uniform or not, had a claim to their jobs. Equally grating for women war workers was the loss
of pay and prestige when demoted to “women’s work.” Their unionized jobs gone, they were back in a
work world of close supervision, speed-up, and low wages, without benefits or job protections.
Wartime gains and losses proved particularly bittersweet for minority women. In 1941, under
pressure from civil rights organizations and a threatened March on Washington, President Roosevelt had
signed Executive Order 8802, which set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and barred
job discrimination in the defense industry and among employers with government contracts. As a result,
industrial jobs long closed to minority women opened up, bringing for some their first taste of economic
independence. Yet the thrill of wartime employment opportunity turned to deep disappointment and anger
in the war’s aftermath. Women of color were the first laid off or demoted, and their brothers, husbands,
and lovers returned from overseas to a second-class citizenship made more intolerable after their wartime
sacrifices for their country. Jobs were scarce and discriminatory workplace practices commonplace,
especially after the wartime FEPC turned out to be temporary. With government oversight gone, minority
men and women had little recourse when faced with job loss or hiring discrimination.
No wonder Addie Wyatt doubted the union at her workplace would help her when she lost her job at
Armour’s meatpacking plant. Like many other minority women, Wyatt was just as likely to be replaced by
a white woman as by a man. But when it happened to her, the union backed up her claims to the job. To
her amazement, she regained her position. “This was moving to me, a black woman who had for a long
time been discriminated against and unable to find a job. I finally had a job—and a better paying job than
I ever dreamed I’d have. That the union could take my side and get results so that I was placed back in the
job I enjoyed, this was moving to me.” Just as surprising to her was the union’s maternity policy,
negotiated during the war. When the union steward promised Wyatt, pregnant with her first child, that she
could take up to a one-year leave of absence and her job would be held for her, she didn’t really believe
him. But, Wyatt remembers, “I thought I’d try it.” When she returned to the plant after three months, much
to her surprise, the job was hers again. Once back on the line, Wyatt vowed to extend the union benefits
she enjoyed to others.^14
Wyatt was one of millions of women having babies in the war’s aftermath. “After the war, my God! It
was like a deluge of babies,” former wartime riveter Lola Weixel told one interviewer. “When I went to
have my first baby, there wasn’t even room. People were doing labor in the halls. It was unbelievable. Oh
yes, everybody, everybody and their sister was having a baby.”^15 The famed baby boom continued for
almost a decade, reversing the delayed marriage and small-family patterns of the Depression and early
wartime years. An expanding economy made it financially feasible to have children again, and as Tillie
Olsen saw it, having children helped restore faith in humanity and heal the wounds of war. But as many of