TIME CAPSULE: Doris Weatherford, skillfully describes in her book American Women and World War Two the plight of the woman expecting a child. A pregnant woman simply had no right to work. Only six states had any regulations even addressing the subject of maternity leave and “comparatively few union contracts take cognizance of the pregnancy problems, even in industries where there is a high percentage of women workers.”
Despite the fact that Labor Department investigation could not turn up a single case of a woman having sued an employer for a pregnancy-related injury, business continued to ignore governmental suggestions for dealing with the problem more rationally and humanely. Although they complained of high turnover rates and the cost of training new employees, they were not willing to insure that investment by guaranteeing a woman the right to return to her job. Only one of 73 factories surveyed had any maternity leave policy.
While Business Week was willing to state parenthetically that “one of the most common causes of abortion is a woman”™s fear of losing her job,” Harper”™s took the issue even further, in a display of candor rarely seen in WWII media:
“Perhaps the problem would be solved more easily if every pregnant woman wanted her baby, but more don”™t than do. Unmarried women obviously don”™t and many a married woman wants to continue at work without the burden of another child. They know the way out of their predicament is dangerous. Some deliberately strain themselves by lifting heavy objects while on the job. More go to abortionists. The result is that abortion rings are now more dangerous than of old now that the sulfa drugs have lowered the death rate ”¦ In Rochester, New York, a group of doctors set up a private hospital and performed abortions illegally, therapeutically ”¦ Counselors cannot and do not want to exclude unmarried women from the benefits of child spacing, which is the accepted term for birth control ”¦ The need for this information has finally brought the former Birth Control League into a position of prominence. Now called Planned Parenthood, it serves an increasingly important role in industry.”
Women”™s magazines, meanwhile, had not a word to say on the subject. The idea that women perhaps should have a right to knowledge about their bodies, including information on how to prevent pregnancy, was instead tentatively proposed to a largely male audience, whose interest was primarily defined by their business and war production needs. Birth control “served an important role in industry” not for women who wanted to live free from pregnancy.
Pregnancy was a far more real possibility for the millions of women in defense industries, since they were much more likely to have male relationships and yet the question of their pregnancies received virtually no attention.
Finally, in the fall of 1944, when victory was in sight, the War Department settled on a policy for its civilian employees. It “put into effect an official pregnancy policy governing the employment of women in its more than 1,000 plants ”¦ where about 500,000 of the workers are women, more than 60 percent of them married.” While still cognizant of employers”™ interests, the new policy was generally aimed at protecting pregnant women from arbitrary bosses. It set post and prenatal leave limits; banned night work, overtime and heavy assignments and protected seniority. (American Women and World War Two)