Transcript for: Women's contributions to the war effort.
Mary Romanuk:
They got a contract for army uniforms.
They really went through the stitches, stitch by stitch practically to come up the standard. Everything had to be just really specialized and, and well done. And of course GWG had a high reputation for doing things good, strong, well sewn...
Norah Hook:
In 1940, I was still in high school and at the... money was very short in those days, especially in our house...
so I went to Woolworth's. The line up of girls looking for work was through this door and out the door and down the street. So that didn't work out.
And then a friend of my sisters was working
at this job at GWG, and so I went there and was hired.
Everybody made a piece of something. It was an assembly line you know, they went from station to station to station and each piece was done as it...
I never saw my back end of the jeans after they left.
Women at GWG were paid piecework. They received a few cents for each part of the garment sewn.
Norah Hook:
I hated it, it was an awful place. I was, I was an outdoors person and I just couldn't be shut up like that, it was like being in jail almost.
Because I was sitting at a machine, the machine was on, and you worked while the machine was on...
And one day, Wanda and I, after an afternoon shift, we had heard that Aircraft Repair were hiring girls. So after our 4:00 shift, we walked from 97th Street out to the airport and put in our application there.
At Aircraft Repair, I was a sheet metal worker, I could move around. There was light, there were people, you could talk to, the work was never the same two days in a row. One day you might be working on whatever, next time you might be riveting on an airplane, it was interesting, it was exciting. There was a war on, you were helping, you weren't sitting - zip, zip, zip.