Henry County Women Join The World At War
When J. Howard Miller depicted Rosie the Riveter on a poster in 1942 he was chiefly creating a portrait of the women working in aircraft manufacturing, ship yards and other war plants across the United States.
Women worked at all the jobs that had been vacated by the men being called to the front lines. They even worked on the railroads and one Henry County woman worked for the railroad as a “Section Jenny” for $6.00 a day for 10 hours daily. It was hard, back breaking labor but her son was a prisoner-of-war in the Philippines and she said that keeping busy was the best way to forget her worries.
Clinton had two young men at Pearl Harbor on that terrible day of December7, 1941. One was killed and one survived the attack and that alone was enough to strengthen the local citizen’s grim resolve. Everyone was on high alert and the State Highway Patrol contacted all Navy servicemen home on leave to return to their base immediately and the Patrol also took action to guard power plants and other industries in the area.
Because dynamite had been discovered under several bridges on both coasts, the Missouri State Highway Department ordered all 238 important bridges in the State to be guarded day and night, including 7 bridges in Henry County. By February 9, 1942, the nation went on daylight savings time to conserve electricity for the defense industries.
It seemed as if everything was in short supply, and by the end of the war some items were very difficult to obtain and sometimes impossible: shoes, sugar, tires, coffee, dog food, hosiery, gasoline, canned fish, meat, rubber, silk, shellac, newsprint and paper and all metal products including zippers. Bananas were completely unavailable and the speed limit was reduced to 35 mph to conserve gas and also for safety’s sake, as most people were driving on retreads. The most severe shortage was “man power.” When it came time to plant and harvest on the farms the women picked up the slack.
The American Legion in Clinton collected old records to be made into new ones. Residents could leave old records with any local merchant to be picked up. If it could be repurposed, it was.
Nylon stockings could be recycled into parachutes and rope. Old cars were salvaged for the steel mills. By 1945 women were being asked to save their old cooking fat for the war effort. The famous singer, Kate Smith, stated in a newspaper ad, “Only one tablespoon of used cooking fats will help make 5 machine-gun bullets.” She advised it didn’t make a bit of difference how dark or blackened it is or what smelly things like onion or fish you’ve cooked in the fat, it was usable.
When you were just a baby during this time, like I was, it made it difficult in later years to understand why when I viewed my maternal grandmother save white cotton string in large balls, put a patch on top of a patch on my grandfather’s work pants, darn socks again and again, save buttons and zippers from clothes that was beyond repair and salvage every drop of cooking fat. If it was good bacon grease it was saved for cooking, if it was old and rancid it was used to make homemade lye soap.
She, like all the other women on the home front had waged their own war against the enemy by “using it up, wearing it out, making it do or doing without!” Even when the war ended and the servicemen came home, the generation that had survived those difficult times was not easily swayed by the new “golden age of Capitalism.” Those women had learned valuable lessons about the fragility of the U.S. Economic system and for most, would hold on to those lessons for the rest of their lives.
