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Notable New     Yorkers
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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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to utilize our obviously small inspection service in what was going to be a great increase in the number of persons employed in certain of the industries. Our rough decision was to think out a scheme of transferring them from the areas where there wasn't likely to be much increase in employment to the areas where there was.

We also had worked out a good many tentative and alternative plans for the utilization of women in industry. We in the Department of Labor had agreed long before this situation came up that the silliest thing to do in the United States would be to attempt to draft women. There was always that talk among some people - draft all the women and put them to work at the needed occupation. We based our conclusions upon a real knowledge of not only how women live, work and operate, but what family life is like in America, and upon the attractive power of wages to bring the women who were free to go to that area where you wanted them. We also knew enough about the experience in the previous war to know that the mere registering of all of the women, to say nothing of all the men, would lead us to a card catalogue nightmare, in which we had the names, addresses and listing of varied self-selected talent of millions of people and nothing on earth to do with those millions of people. There they would be in the card catalogue. Large numbers of them would be pounding the doors of the offices of every government establishment in the United States whenever





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