Elizabeth Hawes - Wartime

Wartime

After publishing her attack on the fashion industry, Hawes closed her dress business and wrote columns for PM, a populist afternoon newspaper. The staff included Communist sympathizers (such as Leo Huberman, the labor news editor) as well as anti-Communist liberals. She wrote the "News for Living" column, which has been called "a cross between the traditional women's page of newspapers and the consumer activism of the Popular Front." The FBI placed Hawes and other PM contributors under surveillance.

As a leader of the Committee for the Care of Young Children in Wartime she campaigned for child daycare centers.

In 1942 Hawes designed a uniform for American Red Cross volunteers. The same year, she applied for a night job at an airplane factory to personally experience the life of women machine operators. She used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book exposing the plight of American female laborers called Why Women Cry. She opposed the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment for women, fearing it would remove protective legislation. She called for a restructuring of home life to acknowledge that women were now expected to work outside the home while continuing their traditional roles as housewives. It was the only way the U.S. could avoid "the Hitlerian routine of children-kitchen-church for the next generation of Common American women and do away with economic slavery for their husbands." Still, she tried to keep her feminist rhetoric from being divisive: "Men must work along with us in the solution of our basic home problems, or there will, in the end, be no homes worth mentioning in the U.S.A." Betty Friedan though Why Women Cry could launch a revolution from the nation's kitchens.

Hawes and Losey divorced in November 1944.

In 1945, Hawes published an essay in Antioch Review titled "The Woman Problem". She called on American women to become "active citizens". She described how housework was taken for granted and no longer a matter of pride now that so many products once made in the home are bought in the store, to the point that:

It is belief practically everyone is now of the conscious or unconscious opinion that a simple housewife who contributes nothing much but children to the society in which she lives is a social parasite. The housewife wants praise and she can't get it by being a housewife, or a mother. So she has become rather slipshod at both jobs.

She called for an education campaign aimed at men, who needed to face competition from the female workforce she wanted to unleash. She cited group child care during the war as an example of what women could to lighten their own workloads. She challenged those who thought they were leaders on women's issues:

If, in order to get the housewives of this country to take a part in it, a few Do-gooders have to forget Dumbarton Oaks and the Atlantic Charter for a while, nothing will be lost in the long run. And if, in the process of arousing the housewives, a few homes are broken up, one can only say they couldn't have been very well stuck together at the start.

She considered working women as well, and their subsidiary role in unions. These women, she wrote, "aren't fooled by veiled male condescension", but needed to learn their way around the mechanics if union politics and win the respect of their male co-workers by slowly pressing their own issues. Yet she complained as well: "the women of this country with their tendency to keep quiet, to individualistic rather than group behavior on the one hand, and doing what some man says on the other, these women are a fine base for fascism."

When the war ended, Hawes worked for a time as a union organizer for the United Auto Workers focusing on women. In Hurry Up Please (1946), Hawes described her disillusionment with sexual and racial discrimination in the union movement. Impatient with political squabbling, she chose sides, writing, "If one believed in getting the union work done, one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters". But she preferred the practical communists who focused on real workforce problems to those who talked ideology and international issues.