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Different Era for Women

Riveters Rose and Sarah Ficaro of Grumman were among the women working in the war effort. (Photo Courtesy Northrup-Grumman)

By Patricia Kitchen | Staff Writer

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SEXUAL HARASSMENT and discrimination weren't talked about much back in the 1940s when women entered the aviation/defense industry to help the war effort, and in the following years when some women stayed on the job. More than 3.6 million women entered the work force between 1940 and 1950, according to the U.S. Census.

That's not to say discrimination and poor behavior weren't going on. It's just that there wasn't a name for it. Plus, both sexes saw the world quite differently than they do today.

Katherine Tarr of East Islip, for one, says she never experienced any problems when the men returned after the war. She was laid off from her assembly job at Grumman when the soldiers returned. "It was only right," she says.

But a couple of years later she went to work for Republic Aviation. "I liked working with my hands and there was more money in it [than office work]," says Tarr, who retired in 1983 after 32 years in the industry. "I carpooled with three or four men and I never heard bad language or an off-color joke," she says. Everyone was "gentlemanly," she says, even the men from the city who were perceived to be tough. "Sex," she says, "is so out in the open nowadays. In those days it wasn't."

Josephine Rachiele of West Babylon, who came to work for Republic when "we were knee-deep in the war," says she too never felt out of place in a male-dominated work force. She got on-the-job training in drilling and sheet metal work, and also gave up her job for a returning serviceman, though she came back to work a year and a half later.

She remembers, though, training a young man who was having a hard time learning. He asked to be reassigned because, he said, "I don't want to be shown up by a woman."

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