Jenny on the job: Work clothing

Contemporary Americans probably find these two "Jenny on the Job" posters amusing without realizing the irony of the fact that most modern Americans are not only badly dressed as a rule, but also inappropriately dressed for many roles they perform as well.  So, the posters are probably as ironically relevant today as they were in 1943 when they were published.

In 1943 the problem was that women were afflicted with an age old, albeit exaggerated, problem of women's fashion's being weird and therefore often inappropriate for industrial labor.  Having said that, it's important to note that this was partially due to their being a real device between the clothing of poor and middle class women as opposed to wealthier women.  The concept, in other words, that women have not worked is badly off the mark. Women, much like men, have worked as they have had to and where they had to, but work prior to the introduction of domestic machinery was by necessity highly divided between the sexes.

Women's clothing was and is subject to considerations inherent with their gender that men's is not.  When women first entered into industrial labor in strength, during World War One, it presented real challenges as women's clothing, including clothing that had been suitable for the field, wasn't for the factory.  Initially the early fashions to address this were more than a little odd, to the modern eye, but the direction was clear.

We'll not go back into the history of women's clothing, as we've done elsewhere on this blog, throughout the 20th Century, other than to note that, as we noted the other day, it really ceases to be strange to the modern eye in the 1930s.  And it was the clothing of the late 30s that women wore daily when the Second World War broke out.  By and large a lot of it wasn't very suitable to factory conditions.

Trousers had come in after World War One in a somewhat acceptable way for women, but most still wore skirts daily.  Work clothing for industrial labor had been introduced during the Great War, but women didn't stay in those occupations after the war and indeed there was a large element of social pressure for those who wanted to remain employed in them to depart.  Given all of that, when World War Two came about and women resumed employment in factories they were not acclimated to industrial dress.  A campaign was accordingly started to encourage it (factories would be requiring it any).  One of the things addressed by it was the length of women's hair, fwiw, which is shown in these posters via hair nets.  Beyond that, no less of star than Veronica Lake cut her long locks in order to encourage factory employed women to do the same.