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Published 21 Jun, 2018 06:51am

From The Past Pages Of Dawn: 1943: Seventy-five years ago: U.S. women in war industry

WASHINGTON: “There are almost 3,500,000 women in the United States now engaged in manufacturing,” Mary Anderson, Chief of the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labour, stated in the course of her testimony before a House Committee here today [June 20].

She testified that the present employment of women in major war industries is as follows: aircraft assembly, 183,000; engines, 23,000; propellers, 3,000; guns, cannon, etc., 6,000; artillery ammunition — loading and assembly — 39,000; small arms ammunition, 66,000; electrical products, 278,000; shipbuilding, 43,000; machine tools, 15,000. She said that of the more than fifteen million women in total employment at this time, nearly 2,500,000 have children under 16 years of age.

[Meanwhile,] Professor Hans Reuter delivered an address in Rome in which he urged that physicians should stop treating disease and concentrate on improving the health of the nation as a whole by applying eugenic principles. In other words, the sick should simply be ignored. According to Prof. Reuter, “Racist measures must be carried out on a wide scale, particularly sterilization, as means of preventing the reproduction of the socially unfit.” At a Berlin medical Congress, Dr. Bessau argued that a high rate of infant mortality was a boon because it was nature’s way of weeding out the unfit.

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2018

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