This is a photograph of women steelworkers during WWII. I found this photograph to be fascinating as it is quite difficult to tell that these are women due to the extreme coverage of their gas masks. It is also hard to discern any sort of facial expression under the masks, so it would be a stretch to say what emotions they may have been feeling at the time this was taken.
One of the reasons that I was drawn to this picture was because of a video I watched in my CRD 161 class. This class discussed the historical progressions of people, work, and technology between the industrial revolution and the current day. During our discussion of WWII and its effect on work opportunities, we watched an old advertisement promoting women working in mines, shipyards, steel works, and other factory conditions. The way in which they encouraged women to move out of the household and into the workforce was by playing a clip of a woman performing a domestic chore followed by a clip of a women performing an act with similar movement in the factory. The idea was "if you can do this at home, you can do this for us!" For example, the video might show a clip of a woman using an apple peeler before showing her working on a lathe.
The gas masks were preceeded by women giving themselves facial masks and then placing a cloth over their face. They were smiling throughout the clip until the cloth covered their mouths. Likewise, the women in the next segment, were also smiling upon the removal of their gas masks. Yet the women in this picture were wearing these masks because they were cleaning around the tops of the blast furnaces, a hot and dangerous job. These masks are also oxygen masks rather than gas masks, since there often was a lack of breathable oxygen towards the tops of the furnaces. Did women sincerely believe the ads promoting such occupations? Did they believe it would be like having a facial in a factory?
I find it hard to accept that women would so blindly listen to such advertisements. Yet, I have to wonder what these women were feeling about their position; perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was frustration at balancing the household while working in such a labor-intensive job, perhaps it was happiness at being able to work in a job previously reserved for men. I'd like to think that, no matter how these women were feeling on this particular day, they had a constant sense of pride for doing what they believed was right and necessary to help their husbands, brothers, sons, and their country.
1 comment:
Can people feel "a constant sense of pride" when they are simultaneously feeling suffocated, claustrophobic, overworked, and/or estranged from their husbands/lovers/brothers/sons? Your post seems to involve a certain ambivalence about the 'pride' that such laborers (women or not) should 'feel' in their jobs: on the one hand, you hope that people feel fulfilled in what they are doing, yet on the other hand you hope that people are critical enough not to be duped into working dangerous, exploitive, and potentially unethical jobs.
I really like your open-ended questions in your third paragraph; these are very effective at getting your reader to actively contemplate the subject at hand. You have done a very nice job examining the ambiguities of this historical photograph.
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