30 WESTERN PALLET
Already Here: Women at Work in the Wartime Industrial Economy
When we talk about the role for women in manufacturing, logistics and the pallet industry, the conversation often sounds like a story about breaking new ground, and in many respects, it is. More women are entering operations, working with automation, moving into management and increasingly taking on leadership or ownership roles.
But there is an earlier chapter worth remembering. During World War II, severe labor shortages forced American industry to rethink long-held assumptions about who could do industrial work. Women entered factories, shipyards, warehouses and military supply operations in enormous numbers. They drove forklifts, operated machinery, assembled components, inspected production, handled materials and learned skills that only a few years earlier had been regarded largely as men's work.
The pallet industry was part of that story. At Nepa Pallet in Snohomish, Washington, women worked in pallet production during the war. Among their jobs was operating drill presses used to prepare heavy dock pallets for assembly with lag bolts. It is a small piece of pallet history, but a revealing one. When workers were urgently needed, employers discovered that many of the beliefs surrounding industrial jobs were more traditional than practical.
The photographs on these pages capture that broader wartime transformation. They show women at machine tools, drilling, assembling, inspecting and learning unfamiliar trades. They are not simply images of women helping with the war effort. They are photographs of industrial workers doing necessary, skilled work.
Many women were displaced from those jobs when the war ended and returning servicemen re-entered the civilian workforce. As a result, part of the lesson was lost from industrial memory.
More than 80 years later, these photographs offer a useful reminder. Women working around machinery, materials and production are not a new development. They were already here.
Women performed drilling, riveting and other production work at wartime plants across the United States. At Nepa Pallet in Snohomish, Washington, women similarly operated drill presses while producing dock pallets during World War II. Photo: Alfred T. Palmer, Library of Congress.