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Summary Of Slacks And Calluses By Constance Reid

811 Words4 Pages

Slacks and Calluses by Constance Bowman Reid, is a true story about two high school teachers who spend their summer in 1943 helping the war effort by working in an aircraft factory. Constance Bowman Reid tells her own story about her and her friend C.M.’s day to day lives working the swing shift at Consolidated Voltee Aircraft where they “Sleep. Eat. Work. Wash. Sleep. Eat. Work. Wash.” (Bowman Reid, 66) They were unskilled but it did not matter because 85 percent of the work on an airplane could be done by unskilled labor (Bowman Reid, 83.) Bowman Reid’s Slacks and Calluses exemplifies some of the difficulties women faced while working the swing shift at a bomber factory in 1943 and why they endured the difficulties.
In San Diego during World War II, there were two types of women: the women who wore skirts to work and the women who wore slacks (Bowman Reid, 67.) The garments had powerful class implications in the workplace and on the street. “It was bad enough being tired all the time and dirty most of the time, but worst of all the first week was having to go to work in slacks – down Fourth Street where people who knew us acted as if they didn’t, or down Third Street where people who didn’t know us whistled as if …show more content…

announced that they would be spending their summer vacation building big bombers, people laughed (Bowman Reid, 1.) A year and a half before, women were brand new to working in factories like this one (Bowman Reid, 83.) Consolidated tried to begin hiring 80 women to every 20 men (Bowman Reid, 14.) Male workers still felt like women were mentally, physically, and morally incompetent to be factory workers and that men were more conscious of safety hazards than the women (Bowman Reid, 80-81.) C.M.’s pop asked if their work was checked before the ships went into the air (Bowman Reid, 83.) The country did not feel like they could completely trust the work of the women working in the factories and they felt that a man could do it

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