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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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busily In the high-paid war industries where they could use their skills.

One of the things that troubled people, and it troubled Harold Smith very much about all this, was that the telephone company and some of the large manufacturing industries that had employed women for years were going out and privately dragging back the girls that had left their employment, to marry, usually, and had set up their families. They were just going one by one without saying a word to anybody. Of course, it was natural. These girls knew how to run a telephone, so you got back experienced operators with the lure of high wages and patriotic appeal, and it wasn't done systematically except by the women. I mean, they didn't come if they couldn't make some arrangement with their families.

This was the human tendency to fit itself comfortably without too much upheaval into the War pattern, and that seemed to Smith to be absolutely inadequate, because he thought of the War going on for a very long time and being a very huge effort, and I think that he sort of got drowned in his statistics. I mean, he could add up how many people would be needed if so and so, such and such a thing happened.

Interviewer:

He wasn't a Louis Brownlow type of man, though was he?





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