As Nancy F. Cott notes, though winning the right to vote helped the women’s cause, it wasn’t enough.

By the 1910s the nineteenth century woman’s movement had gained entry to, although no transformation of, many avenues of social, economic and political power from which women had felt excluded.

However, the access was only for some women, who were tokens but not representative of the whole population. Their concept of feminism included equal citizenship but also economic independence and rights in sexuality.

Gradually, women began moving into new and different types of work, aided by two factors: industrialization and World War I. By 1910, thirty-six percent of the workers in electrical manufacturing plants were women, a percentage which remained relatively steady through the Depression.

During World War I, Navy leaders found a loophole which enabled women to serve alongside men in jobs other than nursing.  The women became known as “Yeomanettes.” Lorette Prevectus Walsh was the first to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve on March 21, 1917.  Nearly 12,000 women served in all during World War I, due to a creative interpretaion of the Naval Act of 1916 by Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels.  The Navy was already using women as civil service clerks. Daniels, a long supporter of suffragists, noted the Naval Act was vague, saying only that “all persons who may be capable of performing specific useful service for coastal defense” could serve in the Naval Reserve.

The women’s nickname (yeomanette) derived from how their classification of “Yeoman (F),” as in Yeoman (Female) sounded when spoken aloud. By the war’s end, the women were placed on inactive duty, and by 1925, the Senate closed the Yeoman (F) loophole, limiting reserve service to “male citizens of the United States.”

As the 1920s began to roar, a new symbol of the independent woman emerged: the flapper, with bobbed hair and short skirts who, as Sheila Rowbotham notes, found:

New kinds of employment were opening up in banking, real estate, retail sales, administrative and clerical work…The number of ‘white collar’ women were growing. There was also an expansion in glamorous but unorganized jobs which were part of the growing leisure industry – everything from bowling alleys to the ultimate dream of the cinema.

Scholars are at odds as to just who these newly working women were. Alice Kessler-Harris contends work during wartime opened women to the possibility that marriage and work weren’t mutually exclusive. By contrast, Lois Scharf argues that women were only accepted as workers with the assumption that they would move back into the home after marriage.

In the early part of the twentieth century, America experienced phenomenal growth due to an influx of immigrants. The country’s population doubled from the 1890s to the 1920s, with the bulk of the immigrants coming from “non-traditional” areas, such as Eastern or Southern Europe, who often settled in Northern cities. Meanwhile, a severe urban and rural technological divide emerged. Not only did Rural Americans lack modern conveniences, they also lacked the financial wherewithal of urban dwellers. Farmers’ economic troubles began far before October of 1929, actually starting with post-World War I surpluses, which sent food and grain prices plummeting. While industrial workers’ wages increased in the 1920s by twenty-five percent, farmer’s real wages had eroded during the same time period.

The stock market crash of October 1929 may not have “caused” the Depression, but nonetheless it was a visible signal of the economic problems in American society. For at least half of the population, the Depression brought no great deprivation, though they were certainly aware of the hardships others faced. By 1932, unemployment had reached twenty percent, with a third of those who were working only working part-time. Families moved in together to save money and brought food to less fortunate relatives, strengthening “kinship ties.”

Lois Scharf says the government advocated the notion that women actually felt less strain due to the Depression than men, because no housewives lost their jobs in the crisis. This ignored exactly how unpaid work inside the home offered women any economic security. The government’s awkward bureaucratese is an example of the difficult negotiations during the era to determine exactly what service provides a “contribution” to society and should be protected by governmental assistance.

It wasn’t just the federal government who had difficulty determining if, or how, women were impacted by the Depression. Scholars disagree as to its exact impact on women; it either solidified their positions as workers, forced them out of the professional workforce and into less professional jobs, or re-awoke “antagonism to married women working.” As Lois Scharf notes:

The professional progress of women during the previous decades, even within this feminized field (teaching) came to a halt–a Depression decade legacy for women that continued beyond the 1930s. Married women especially faced scorn for working in these sorts of jobs and were viewed as ‘bad’ role models for children.

Women made up 24.3 percent of workers in 1930; the number rose to 25.1 percent of workers by 1940. In a period of economic uncertainty, Americans retreated from the social revolution of the 1920s. The encouraging trend that women could, and should, work in varied jobs, came to a halt.

Initially, the government took little direct action to assist those who lost their jobs, male or female. President Herbert Hoover’s plans included aid to farmers and encouraging businesses not to lower wages for workers. This was to little avail; by late 1932, thirty-eight states had no or virtually no banks open, with tightly limited withdrawals in those open in other states. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, he took drastic steps to move the country back to work and into economic recovery. His inaugural address (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and fireside chats demonstrated the new president was perhaps more adept at improving morale than actual living conditions for the average American.

Many of the programs that shaped the New Deals’ reputation were put into action during Roosevelt’s first one hundred days in office. A handful of women did find employment in the New Deal projects, like photographers Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott in the Farm Security Administration. The director of the project, Roy Stryker, says

We introduced Americans to America…The full effect of this team’s work was that it helped connect one generation’s image of itself with the reality of its own time in history.

New Deal projects like this laid the groundwork for the mobilization of World War II in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Americans learned of the developments in Europe and Asia through reporting in America’s media: newspapers, newsreels and radio. In Europe, Germany was seeking domination through a series of successful invasions (Poland, Belgium, France, etc.) as well as extermination of “undesirable” populations (Jews, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and others) in what would become known as the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Japan was seeking domination in Asia and the Pacific, through a series of battles in China and Southeast Asia. Italy was the only European country to side with Germany and was itself seeking to expand its dominance, invading Ethiopia. These countries would be known as the Axis; their opponent the Allies.

The U.S. officially remained neutral in the early years of the war, while taking legislative steps to help the Allies, such as allowing nations to purchase goods on a “cash and carry” policy or increasing the size of the Navy.

The surprise military strike by the Japanese at the U.S. Naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1942 moved the United States from an official policy of neutrality to a state of war. The U.S. declared war on Japan the following day; on December 11th, the remaining Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S.

It’s estimated 60 million people died in World War II.

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor the war helped stimulate the economy. By mid-1941, the United States shook off the last vestiges of the Depression as the war in Europe spread. As U.S. military needs grew, however, it quickly became evident that a male-dominant workforce would not be sufficient. Initially, women who were already in the workforce took over these jobs, but gradually married women also began working. The war allowed women to enter into the job market without apology. Working as “Rosie the Riveter” was framed by the government in posters and other propaganda as a patriotic duty. Maureen Honey observes

War work became a vehicle for women to shoulder their civic and moral responsibilities as good citizens, rather than a way to become more dependent and powerful.

But she also cautions it would be simplistic to think that women only entered the workforce to somehow do right by their country. Women also saw wartime employment as giving them a chance to reenter a job force they may have been forced out of due to the Depression, or to enter the labor market for the first time

The labor shortage lessened businesses’ Depression-era resistance to hiring married women. Women, however, didn’t necessarily flock to traditionally-male jobs. Sherna Berger Gluck argues left to their own devices, most women would have avoided war-related businesses like shipyards or production plants in favor of clerical work, which was seen as both cleaner and more respectable. Nonetheless they did apply for and begin working in, factory jobs. Factories, meanwhile, didn’t rush to make things easier for their female workers. The plants were often staffed twenty-four hours a day, but offered little to assist working mothers, such as child care. The government attempted to make working non-traditional shifts easier by expanding federal child care programs. 

In 1944 surveys, seventy-five to eighty percent of women working in wartime areas said they planned to remain in the labor force after the war ended. The government had a different idea. Women were to move back into the home at war’s end. Because the work was conceived of as only a temporary disruption of “traditional” female roles, Lois Scharf and others argue that World War II offered little in the way or real of substantial change for female workers. Others, like Gluck, believe the women’s wartime experiences may have helped set the stage for social change in subsequent generations.