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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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used on the first call-up and were being used on the second call-up when the war ended. The second call-up went as far as age thirty-seven or eight, I think. They were just using it when it ended.

But women's call-up had never been used. All they had to do was to put in the paper that so many women were wanted for such and such work at such and such a place and they came in droves. To have taken the time to comb through the registration would have been ridiculous. If you wanted four women at a milk station, fifty would volunteer, and good and reliable ones.

I know about all this because I as the secretary - that is, the person who runs it - of the New York City Council of Women for War Work, which was the agency that was invented to both supply not only qualified women, but guaranteed women, guaranteed by some organization that knew them to be of good character, sound, healthy, and all that kind of thing, to do various kinds of war work. However, they were never picked with too much refinement. As soon as we tried to get them to specify what they could do best we found a terrific amount of imagination operating as to what people could do best. So we never asked an agency to guarantee more than that they were a member of this agency, that they were respectable, and that they were trustworthy so far as one could tell. You didn't want to take just the first fifty women who volunteered to go into a delicate situation, like visiting





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