Good Work, Sister!: The Making of an Oral History Production

Abstract

The Northwest Women's History Project was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1978 by a group of women brought together by our common interest in oral history. We each brought skills to the group in a variety of fields including social work, teaching, book distribution, office work, planning. Only two of us perceive ourselves as professional historians, but we all have felt a need to seek out and record the firsthand accounts of women's lives. Over the last four years, we found ourselves committing increasing amounts of time, energy, and money to develop and complete a media production using women's oral histories. At the beginning of our project, none of us envisioned just how great our commitment would become: during the last half of 1981, we collectively devoted 100 hours a week to the project, and the product of our work became the focus of considerable excitement in the Portland, OregonVancouver, Washington community.1 Like many other oral history projects, ours has focused on an event within the memory of numbers of people, one that was significant in the history of our region. The topic we chose grew out of a women's history class at a local college taught by one of our members. She was intrigued by the interviews students had done with women who worked in the shipyards during World War II. The story of the women war workers quickly captured the imagination of the Northwest Women's History Project. We were drawn to the issues and concerns the wartime and postwar periods raise about women in the workforce. Few of us had grown up in Portland; we did not fully understand the significance of the shipyard experience or the war years in the history of the area. We learned that the wartime shipbuilding boom had been a watershed for Portland and its neighbor city across the Columbia River, Vancouver, Washington. In 1940, both Portland and Vancouver were small, semirural towns in which less than one-sixth of the population was industrially employed. By the end of the war, the population had grown 30 percent, and half of the area's workforce was employed by industry. The number of black people in Portland grew from about 2,000 to 22,000 (after the war, it declined again to 11,000).2 Three small shipyards in Portland expanded rapidly as they obtained government contracts. Kaiser Corporation built three large shipyards, two in Portland and one in Vancouver, and recruited workers from all over the country. The massive influx of workers and their families strained the area's resources as the demand for labor continued. Seeking to tap a local source of labor, the shipyards began to hire women to do production work (in addition to clerical work). By 1944, there were over 40,000 women working in the six shipyards. Approximately three-quarters of these women were production workers, doing jobs that few women had done before. As they did in other war industries in the United States, women played a key role in the rapid and efficient production of ships.3 Similarly, after the war ended, the Portland story was not unique: women were among the first to be laid off as the shipyards slowed production. Our