A Woman's Place by Lynn Austin

bicycle out of the toolshed. Her legs ached from pedaling to work all week, but she wouldn’t be riding much longer. She would have to drive Father’s car to work—assuming it still ran after all these months. She wondered who would keep it tuned up for her. Father’s chauffeur had enlisted in the navy. And what if she had a flat tire? All of the spare tires in America had been gathered up in rubber drives for the war effort. She saw buses stuffed with people at the factory every morning and evening, but public transportation was for people like that girl Rosa Voorhees, not for her.
    An hour later the clamor of machinery startled Helen anew as she entered the factory, especially after being greeted with the high-pitched laughter and squeals of children for most of her life. She was the first member of her crew to arrive, and after punching the time clock, she took a moment to tidy her crew’s tool station, setting all their equipment in order.
    “Look how nice and neat our workstation is compared to the men’s,” Virginia Mitchell said, coming up behind her. She gave Helen’s arm a little squeeze.
    “I’ve just been straightening it.”
    “Jean Erickson is such a good teacher, isn’t she?”
    “A very bright young woman,” Helen agreed.
    “She said we might be able to start working on the production line by the middle of next week. Can you imagine? I was afraid it would take me months and months to learn everything because I’m not nearly as smart as you and the other ladies are—”
    “Excuse me, Mrs. Mitchell—Ginny—but you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You’re every bit as capable as the rest of us.”
    “But there’s so much to learn, and—”
    “There are dozens of picky little tasks to master, true, but none of them are particularly difficult. They can be performed one at a time, and I’m sure you’re used to doing several chores at once, am I right?”
    “Oh no, I’m just a housewife.”
    Helen sighed and gave up trying to convince her.
    “You know, I still can’t believe I work here,” Ginny continued. “I was in Harris’s Drugstore down on Main Street last January when a long line of trucks came rumbling into town. Mr. Harris, who knows everything there is to know about Stockton, told me that the owners had applied for government money to expand the shipyard and build landing craft for the war effort. And now here we are six months later, walking through the employees’ gate in our coveralls every morning, carrying lunchboxes. Who would have ever thought?”
    Helen didn’t say so, but she certainly wouldn’t have imagined it, even in her wildest dreams. No one in her family had ever worked in a factory. On the contrary, her father’s bank had probably financed the loan to start the shipyard. In fact, if she dug through her father’s papers she would probably discover that she owned shares in Stockton Boat Works, as it used to be called.
    Jean arrived and assigned everyone a task. Helen settled down to work, concentrating on learning to do the job well. The other three women on her team were rapidly making friends with each other, and that was understandable. Helen felt like an outsider—which she was.
    When the lunch whistle blew, her crew filed into the lunchroom with hundreds of other workers. It was not a very attractive place to eat, with its glaring overhead lights and cheap wooden tables and benches, but is was less noisy than the factory floor. The smell of bologna and tuna fish and egg salad drifted out of lunchboxes, mingling with the aroma of stale coffee. Jean, Ginny, and Rosa found an empty table and sat down to eat together as they had done all week. Helen was searching for a quiet place to eat alone, apart from the others, when Rosa stopped her.
    “Hey, how come you never sit with us? You think you’re better than we are?”
    “Of course not. I thought you younger ladies would have more in common with each other. I’m trying to give you some