OP-ED: Remembering ‘Wendy the Welder’

The San Francisco Bay Area shipyards, a behemoth in producing warships and cargo vessels in support of the war effort, accounted for nearly half of all the ships produced nationally. With a lack of a manual labor pool and a dwindling number of draft-exempt men available, the shipyard industry began hiring women to fill the positions left vacant. By the war’s end, the shipyards of San Francisco employed more than 240,000 U.S. women in the defense capacity. Most of the women were married, many had children at home. These women worked tirelessly around the clock, tending to children, rationing food and welding sections of hulls.

More so than any other city in the Bay Area, Richmond’s population surged from a sleepy 23,000 at the onset of the war to a peak of 100,000 at the height of the war in 1945. Of the four shipyards built by Henry J. Kaiser during the war and the 90,000 personnel of which it employed, approximately one-third was comprised of women. Largely due to his new mass-production techniques, the Kaiser shipyards of Richmond were able to reduce the time to produce cargo ships from 14 months to eight weeks and were able to produce “Liberty Ships” in two weeks.

A welder at the Kaiser Liberty Shipyards in Richmond, Janet Doyle fashioned the iconic “Wendy the Welder” movement, representing the hard-working women of her era. The plaque in front of the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Richmond’s Marina Bay is inscribed with the quote “(y)ou must tell your children, putting modesty aside, that without us, without women, there would have been no spring in 1945.”

While women have not always had the opportunity to serve in the U.S. military in a conventional capacity, women have found other ways to serve. “Wendy the Welder” and “Rosie the Riveter” turned wrenches on the home front as some women found ways to serve in a uniformed capacity in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), later the Women’s Army Corps (WAC); the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program; and through Army and Navy nursing programs in the Pacific and European fronts.

The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 granted women the rights to serve in the regular and reserve components of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, and as recently at 1976 were women admitted to the nation’s service academies. Today, there are approximately 214,000 women serving in the military, approximating 14.6 percent of the active-duty service of nearly 1.4 million people.

This Veterans Day, take a moment to recognize and thank not only the brave men and women who have served in our past and current conflicts, but those who served at the front lines of the “home front” during World War II, welding ships for the troops at sea.

Elizabeth A. Brunette is a captain in the U.S. Army and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Capt. Brunette is a recent honor graduate of the Maneuver Captain’s Career Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. She grew up in Burlingame, California and attended Mills High School.