How Women Factory Workers Adapted After WWII
Narrator: With a strong military presence no longer needed, the valley’s airbases would begin to gradually phase out many of the wartime programs, including the women workers.
Bette June Hocking: When the war started to end, when they knew the war was going to start ending and the men would be coming home, they came around and told us, it’s time for you to start thinking and looking for another job and we as women, we all knew this and so sometime in 1945 I started looking and got out before the guys started coming home.
Narrator: Many of the women were ready to return to the role of homemaker.
Jane Morse: It was such a relief to get it over with and get back home again that we just made the best of it, that’s all.
Narrator: But for others, World War II gave them new opportunities.
The economic impact of World War Two not only expanded the population of the valley, but also brought about a great deal of social change.
David Morse: I think that was the biggest change that was made, the population just jumped after the war and they’ll say that they decided to come back because of that experience. The weather situation is so nice here compared to a lot of places in the U.S. they just came back and stayed many of them I would say, people that are here now their parents came into the area and liked it and stayed, it’s a pleasant area to be in.
Bette June Hocking: Certainly helping in the war effort women giving up their feminine frivialities and going into that, so that they can help accomplish what is important and it’s important that the young people now a days know this that it wasn’t something that they did lightly. I think it all boils down to, you’re helping your country, you’re helping people, your helping everybody.
Bill Dooner: All the things that it forced us to do. It forced us to meet other people from outside our little localities. It forced us to see the good decisions made and it forced us to see the bad ones. It just forced us to think about a lot of things and brought about some changes that were a long time in coming. Even afterwards, I think the pace would have been slower. People are prone to keep bad habits as long as possible. But wartime does make us, force us to look at them and maybe throw some of them aside.
David Morse: I think that everybody has the duty when they’re born into the country, they have to maintain it, help it be what it has the capability it has to be and unless we work together collectively like in a democracy and when we say “of the people for the people by the people” that means all of us have to get in. And to do that I think the young people they go back and look at the monuments and they see what has happened to preserve the country for them and they can’t help but have some feeling come over them.
Bill Dooner: Wars do tend to bring people together and I just wish we could find a better way to accomplish the same result, without war.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services