Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of the all-women’s Barnard College in New York, believed that it was a duty for women to participate in helping the war effort. After the Pearl Harbor attack, she spoke to students at Barnard College about the opportunities women might have:
Are they really going to use women for ‘trained personnel’? Yes, they are. They have begun to realize that the ‘man power’ of the country includes also the woman power, and that the government and industry will be forced to use women for nearly every kind of work except the front-line military and naval fighting.
This photograph comes from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.
Hinges of History 