Women In Shipbuilding
While it is widely known that women stepped into the public workforce in great numbers during World War II, this trend also took place during World War I. This included shipyard workers. During World War II, women were employed in greater numbers and also assumed more technical positions. Some argue that the move to mass production, which went hand-in-hand with wartime industry, created the need for a less skilled workforce and thus opened the door for more women. This was, of course, combined with large numbers of male workers sent away to war. However, this argument is flawed. Up to 30% of the employees at some shipyards were women by the end of the war, and they occupied a variety of jobs, from unskilled to highly skilled. The Women’s Bureau reported that in 1939, two-percent of the entire shipbuilding workforce was female. It would jump to between 10% and 20% in January 1944, with many women employed as journeyman welders.
Women shipyard workers welding the hull of DE-279 in 1943. This Evarts class destroyer escort would be transferred to the British Royal Navy and commissioned as HMS Kempthorne as part of the critical Lend-Lease program to support American allies during the war. Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service, BOSTS 14958
World War II opened doors in the industrial workforce that had been previously closed to women, and wartime polling indicated that substantial numbers of women wanted to continue in their wartime roles but could not. It is unfortunate that, after the war, they virtually disappeared from the shipyards when faced with uniform resistance of social institutions to any lasting change in the gendered division of labor. The crusade to reinstate pre-war gender roles was led by the government, unions, the media, and business management.
While the majority of women left the shipyards at the end of World War II, their work left the door ajar for a new generation of educated women to step through in the postwar years.
Elaine Kaplan: Breaking Barriers
Elaine Scholley Kaplan was one such woman. She began working for Gibbs & Cox, the naval architecture and marine engineering firm that designed the SS United States during World War II when she was an undergraduate mathematics major at Hunter College. Kaplan was a meticulous engineer with a knack for translating her work into simple nonprofessional terms. She quickly rose to become a top propulsion engineer and was rewarded for her excellent work with the assignment of working on designing the propulsion system for the future SS United States.
(from Left to Right): William Francis Gibbs, Walter Bachman, Elaine Kaplan , and Frederic H. Gibbs. The engineers sit together during a company luncheon.
The propulsion plants for large, fast ships had been dramatically improved over the course of World War II, and were adapted for merchant marine ships in the postwar years. The planned system for the SS United States was incredibly similar to that of the Iowa-class fast battleships and late-war aircraft carriers.
The power these produced, along with the SS United States’ lack of armor and high percentage of lightweight aluminum in her construction, guaranteed she would be fast. A potential downside to this extreme speed was the threat of noise and vibration. This was caused by cavitation, the creation and bursting of air bubbles created by propellers that inhibited a smooth grip of the water by the blades. Both the U.S. Navy and earlier merchant ship designers had accepted a degree of cavitation as inevitable when designing fast ships, but it would not do for the SS United States.
Kaplan’s original design included four 4-bladed propellers with 18-foot diameters. She paid particular attention to the size and pitch of the blades, as those elements greatly affect the way air bubbles travel across the propellers and influence vibration. While this first attempt still generated excessive noise, she was not deterred.
Along with other engineers at Gibbs & Cox, and Newport News Shipbuilding, Kaplan next adopted a propeller configuration more in line with what the U.S. Navy had implemented with its fast surface ships. This entailed installing two different types of propellers. The two outboard propellers had four blades, while the two inboard propellers had five. Because of the increased surface area on the inside props, they could better grip the water disturbed by the two outboard ones. Additional adjustments to the pitch and angles of the blades were also made. Basin tests, where engineers tested scale models of hulls and propellers, showed an astounding estimated top speed and greatly reduced cavitation.