Episode 27: The Women Of The Shipyards

Episode 27 — The Women of the Shipyards

By May 1943, 45,174 women worked in U.S. Navy yards alone. They held welding torches. They cut asbestos cloth with their hands. They sewed insulation blankets. They filled sewn forms with loose asbestos fiber. The Women’s Bureau documented 189 different occupations — including, in official government classifications, “asbestos filler and sewer” and “asbestos layer-out and cutter.” Nobody told them what asbestos was.

When the war ended, one in four women factory workers was fired in the first three months. By January 1946, four million women had left the industrial workforce. Portland Kaiser collapsed from 97,000 workers to 2,000. The records went with them — because the same word that justified their lower pay also obscured their exposure history. They weren’t welders. They weren’t asbestos layers. They were helpers. And decades later, when they or their children got sick and their families went looking for documentation of what they’d breathed — the records said helper.

Key Takeaways

• 189 occupations documented. Among them: “asbestos filler and sewer,” “asbestos layer-out and cutter.” Official government classifications for women working in spaces white with asbestos fiber. No warnings. Instructions, not information.
• The “helper” classification did two things. It justified paying women less than half the rate of the men beside them. It also meant they weren’t recorded in exposure categories that would matter 40 years later on a trust fund claim form.
• Lucille Kolkin, Brooklyn Navy Yard tack welder, 1942. She wrote home to her husband Al every week. Her letters are at the Center for Brooklyn History. Her oral history, recorded in 1989, is in the same collection as 48 other women who built the ships. Jennifer Egan read them to research Manhattan Beach. “Nobody ever asked for a hammer,” Kolkin wrote. “They asked for a fuckin’ hammer.”
• Dr. Muriel Newhouse, 1965. Colonel in the British Army. Landed in Normandy after D-Day. Her colleagues called her a “fearsome ferret.” Her 1965 study found 9 of 83 mesothelioma patients had household-only asbestos exposure — 7 wives, 2 sisters. The most common history: washing a worker’s dungarees. A meta-analysis across studies: 5.02x increased mesothelioma risk from household contact.
• The industry knew in 1940. Metropolitan Life Insurance internal report: “asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure.” OSHA’s separate-laundry mandate: 1972. Thirty-two years.
• The Jeanette Franklin case. Born during the war. Both parents worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard. She never set foot in the yard. Diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1996. The jury awarded $6.5 million. The appellate court reversed on a 1948 purchase agreement’s fine print. The California Supreme Court declined review. Jeanette Franklin received nothing.
• Female latency is 29% longer. Median 43.7 years versus 33.8 for men. Cases from 1940s shipyard exposure are still emerging today.

Featured at Danziger & De Llano

Anna Jackson, Director of Patient Support at Danziger & De Llano. Nearly fifteen years of experience helping mesothelioma families navigate what comes after the diagnosis. She lost her own husband to cancer. She knows what this conversation costs.

Michelle was diagnosed with mesothelioma at age ten — secondary exposure through her father’s work clothes. Given three to six months. She survived thirty-five years. During those years, she counseled over two hundred newly diagnosed families. Her story is in Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma, compiled by Dave Foster, available free from Danziger & De Llano.

Resources

• Mesothelioma help: dandell.com
• Episode notes and sources: mesotheliomalawyersnearme.com/podcast/episode-27-women-of-the-shipyards/
• Full transcript: wikimesothelioma.com/Asbestos_Podcast_EP27_Transcript
• Previous episode: EP26 — The Shipyards Never Sleep

Next: Episode 28 — Wartime Production, Peacetime Deaths. The men came home. Production didn’t stop.

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is sponsored by Danziger & De Llano Mesothelioma Law Firm, a nationwide practice with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, the exposure happened somewhere—and Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano know how to trace it back. For a free consultation, visit https://dandell.com.

Resources:

→ Mesothelioma legal rights: https://dandell.com/mesothelioma/ 

→ Asbestos exposure sources: https://dandell.com/asbestos-exposure/ 

→ Asbestos trust funds ($30B+ available): https://dandell.com/asbestos-trust-funds/ 

→ Free case evaluation: https://dandell.com/contact/ 

Sister Podcast - MESO: The Mesothelioma Podcast:

http://mesotheliomapodcast.com/

Transcript

S1E27: The Women of the Shipyards

Series: Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making

Episode: 27 — The Women of the Shipyards

Arc 6 — The War Effort

Produced by: Danziger & De Llano, LLP

Host 1: Quick quiz. Why do sailors call ships "she"?

Host 2: Protective. Maternal. Ships carry you, shelter you, bring you home through storms.

Host 1: That's what I always heard.

Host 2: That's one theory. Here's another — ships were property. Like wives under English common law. Belonged to their master. Did what they were told. Or didn't, and got called difficult.

Host 1: That's... less romantic.

Host 2: There's more. Ships were expensive. High-maintenance. Unpredictable. Temperamental. Need I go on?

Host 1: Please don't.

Host 2: But there's also this — ships were named after goddesses. Athena. Isis. The Virgin Mary. Divine protectors. The feminine as sacred.

Host 1: So which is it?

Host 2: All of them. Probably. That's how language works. The possessive and the sacred, wrapped up in one pronoun.

Host 1: She's all yours, Captain.

Host 2: Be my first mate?

Host 1: Aye, aye, Cap'n.

Host 2: Here's the thing — every ship had a name. The women who built them? History forgot theirs. This is Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards.

Host 1: Before Pearl Harbor, women in the shipyards?

Host 2: The Women's Bureau put it at about two percent. And that two percent was mostly clerical. On the production floor — on the hulls, in the asbestos-thick insulation bays — almost none.

Host 1: And then Pearl Harbor.

Host 2: By May nineteen forty-three, forty-five thousand one hundred seventy-four women working in Navy yards alone. Terminal Island in California hit thirty-three percent women. Portland and Vancouver shipyards? Thirty thousand women.

Host 1: They were recruited.

Host 2: "Women in the War — We Can't Win Without Them." Brooklyn Navy Yard received twenty thousand applications from women. The entire yard employed about seventy thousand people at peak. Seven thousand of them were women.

Host 1: What jobs were they doing?

Host 2: The Women's Bureau documented one hundred eighty-nine different occupations. Including — and I'm reading directly from their report — "Asbestos filler and sewer." "Asbestos layer-out and cutter."

Host 1: Those are official job titles.

Host 2: Official government classifications. The women who held them cut asbestos cloth with their hands. They sewed insulation blankets. They filled sewn forms with loose asbestos fiber. They worked inside engine spaces that were white with it.

Host 1: And nobody was telling them what asbestos was.

Host 2: No warnings. No explanations. Instructions, not information.

Host 2: One of those seven thousand women at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was Lucille Kolkin. She started in nineteen forty-two. She trained as a tack welder. And she wrote home to her husband Al — who was a machinist at the same yard before they shipped him out to the Pacific in nineteen forty-four.

Host 1: What did she say?

Host 2: "The physical conditions were very rough, and I must say I wasn't crazy about the cold or the heat or… we stood on things that were very uncomfortable all day. I mean, ten hours a day."

Host 1: Ten hours a day standing on whatever they gave you.

Host 2: And she wrote — "Nobody ever asked for a hammer. They asked for a fuckin' hammer."

Host 1: She fit right in.

Host 2: She fit in, and she pushed back. She wrote about an African-American woman named Minnie who was planning to quit because she felt persecuted, and Kolkin and other women fought to convince her to stay. She organized. She paid attention to the pay. And she wrote it all down.

Host 1: Those letters still exist?

Host 2: Donated to the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library after Kolkin died in nineteen ninety-seven. Handwritten. Her letters, and her oral history recorded in nineteen eighty-nine. Jennifer Egan read them to research her novel Manhattan Beach. There are forty-nine oral histories in that collection — welders, pipefitters, women who built the ships that crossed the Atlantic.

Host 1: And here's what they promised those women.

Host 2: Equal pay for equal work. The War Labor Board issued General Order Number Sixteen — November nineteen forty-two. Nationwide policy. Mandatory.

Host 1: Did they get it?

Host 2: The same order that mandated equal pay gave employers a way out. If they called the job "modified" or "diluted" — if they said the women were doing a slightly different version of the work — they could pay less. And in the Navy yards, there was an easier trick than that.

Host 1: What was the trick?

Host 2: They called the women helpers. Not welders. Not journeymen. Helpers. One word. One category with a different pay scale.

Host 1: Kolkin was a tack welder. Filed as a helper.

Host 2: Ida Pollack. Sylvia Everitt. Both welders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Their oral histories are in the same collection. They described starting wages of something close to fifty cents an hour. The men beside them were making a dollar twenty.

Host 1: Less than half.

Host 2: And they got closer to parity only after they organized. After a fight. The War Labor Board's equal pay mandate was real. The enforcement was not.

Host 2: This episode is brought to you by Danziger and De-Yano. A team where everyone has skin in the game. Dan-Dell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Host 1: And the working conditions.

Host 2: Multiple sources describe the shipyards as — quoting here — "so clouded with asbestos dust that workers couldn't see across them."

Host 1: Were there respirators?

Host 2: The Navy required them. Kaiser shipyards — Portland, Vancouver — one of their own officials admitted years later they "never required workers to wear protective gear."

Host 1: The Navy had a policy. The yards chose not to enforce it.

Host 2: And when women did get respirators, there was another problem. "They didn't make them to fit women. They were in men's sizes."

Host 1: So you're working in dust you can't see through, with equipment designed for someone else, being told it counts as protection.

Host 2: And nobody's telling you what asbestos actually is.

Host 1: How bad was the exposure?

Host 2: Norfolk Naval Shipyard studied their workers after the war. Seventy-nine percent showed lung abnormalities.

Host 1: That's almost everyone in the yard.

Host 2: And nine percent of their wives. Who never set foot in the yard.

Host 1: Wait. Their wives.

Host 2: We'll get there. First — what happened when the war ended.

Host 1: The men came home.

Host 2: June to September nineteen forty-five. One in four women factory workers fired.

Host 1: Were they given a choice?

Host 2: The unions didn't fight for them. No documented efforts to retain women workers. And some of the foremen were very clear about why.

Host 1: What did they say?

Host 2: "The foreman said you ladies have to stop working so fast because when the war ends the men are coming."

Host 1: He said the quiet part out loud.

Host 2: By January nineteen forty-six, four million women had left the industrial workforce. Portland Kaiser went from ninety-seven thousand workers to two thousand women. Ninety-three percent reduction.

Host 2: Historian Amy Kesselman spent years documenting what happened to the women of the Kaiser shipyards after the war. She called the book "Fleeting Opportunities." Because that's exactly what it was. The work, the skills, the pay — all of it treated as temporary. Quote: "Despite the myth that these women yearned to return to their kitchens, in fact many wanted to continue working."

Host 1: But they were pushed out anyway.

Host 2: And when the women left, their records went with them. Here's something that gets overlooked: the word "helper" wasn't just a pay classification. It was an exposure classification. When you're listed as a helper, your records don't link to the trade you were actually working. You're not a welder. Not an asbestos layer. A helper. The exposure category doesn't exist for helpers.

Host 1: So decades later, when they got sick—

Host 2: When they got sick and their families went looking for documentation of where they'd worked and what they'd breathed — the records either didn't exist, or they were filed under a category that didn't match any asbestos exposure code on a trust fund claim form. Women weren't included in the long-term follow-up studies. Their children weren't tracked.

Host 1: The erasure wasn't random.

Host 2: It was structural. Built into the word "helper" from the day they hired her.

Host 2: Women who worked in shipyards during the war — or washed their husband's work clothes — were exposed without warning, without protection, without choice. If that's your family's story, Danziger and De-Yano can help. Dan-Dell dot com.

Host 1: Nine percent of the wives. You were going to get there.

Host 2: Muriel Newhouse was an occupational physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She had been a colonel in the British Army. She landed in Normandy after D-Day. She served in India. In Singapore. By nineteen sixty-five she was in occupational health research, and her colleagues described her as — and I'm quoting an obituary here — a "benign but fearsome ferret."

Host 1: Fearsome ferret.

Host 2: If you had information she needed, you were giving it to her. In one study of North Sea trawlermen, she achieved ninety-four percent compliance conducting physical examinations on sailors who had just disembarked from long voyages and were, quote, "intent on reaching the nearest bar."

Host 1: She stood between sailors and a bar and won.

Host 2: In nineteen sixty-five, she and her colleague Hilda Thompson published a study in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Eighty-three mesothelioma patients from the London Hospital. Fifty-two percent had documented asbestos exposure — compared to eleven percent of the controls. Statistically significant beyond any reasonable doubt.

Host 1: And the household cases?

Host 2: Nine women in her study had never worked a day near asbestos. Their only exposure was contact with a relative who did. Seven wives. Two sisters. The most common history: "The wife who washed her husband's dungarees or work clothes."

Host 1: Laundry.

Host 2: One docker came home every day — quote — "white with asbestos." His wife brushed him down at the door. She got mesothelioma.

Host 1: She never touched the material herself.

Host 2: Years later, Los Angeles County studied two hundred seventy-four shipyard workers' wives. Eleven point three percent had asbestosis. A meta-analysis across multiple studies found household contact gave you a five point oh two times increased risk of mesothelioma.

Host 1: Five times higher risk from living with someone who worked with asbestos.

Host 2: Here's the question. When did the industry know this was happening?

Host 1: Nineteen sixty-five, when Newhouse published.

Host 2: Nineteen forty.

Host 1: What?

Host 2: Metropolitan Life Insurance, internal report, nineteen forty. Quote: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure."

Host 1: They knew in nineteen forty.

Host 2: Nineteen forty-six, Journal of the American Medical Association. Workers should have showers and separate clothing storage.

Host 1: Okay, so by forty-six—

Host 2: By the nineteen fifties, the industry understood cancer was spreading to homes and neighborhoods.

Host 1: And they did what about it?

Host 2: March seventh, nineteen fifty-seven. The Asbestos Textile Institute's Air Hygiene subcommittee held a meeting. Question on the table: should they fund a study on asbestos and cancer? They voted no. And they wrote down why. The minutes record three reasons. First: someone else was studying it. Second — and these are their actual words, in their actual minutes — it would "stir up a hornet's nest and put the whole industry under suspicion." Third: there wasn't enough evidence.

Host 1: In nineteen fifty-seven. Not enough evidence.

Host 2: Those minutes were filed. Copies went to six companies. Someone typed them up, printed them, mailed them. Not one person in that chain said, "We can't write that down." Eight years later, Muriel Newhouse proved in a peer-reviewed paper what the industry had voted not to investigate.

Host 1: Their reason for not looking became the eight-year gap.

Host 2: Nineteen sixty-five, Newhouse publishes. Nineteen seventy-two, OSHA finally mandates: do not launder work clothing with family clothing.

Host 1: Nineteen forty to nineteen seventy-two.

Host 2: Thirty-two years of knowing and not warning.

Host 2: And here's why that math isn't abstract. Latency period for mesothelioma — how long between exposure and diagnosis.

Host 1: Twenty to fifty years.

Host 2: For women, it's twenty-nine percent longer than men. Median forty-three point seven years versus thirty-three point eight.

Host 1: So cases from the war are still emerging.

Host 2: Right now. Today. Jeanette Franklin was born during the war. Both her parents worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard in South San Francisco — her father Vern Harnish, a welder; her mother Opal, a ship's carpenter's assistant. Neither one worked directly with asbestos. They worked in spaces where it was present. Mixing mud. Sweeping debris. And then they came home.

Host 1: Jeanette never set foot in the yard.

Host 2: Never. She was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in nineteen ninety-six. The exposure pathway: asbestos dust on her parents' clothing and in the family car, traveling from the yard to the house, three years, nineteen forty-two to forty-five.

Host 1: She was a child.

Host 2: Her attorneys — Simona Farrise at Kazan Law — filed against USX Corporation. USX was the corporate heir to Western Pipe and Steel, through a chain of mergers and acquisitions that eventually ran through U.S. Steel. Her attorneys said USX refused to offer even one dollar in settlement.

Host 1: Not one dollar.

Host 2: Their defense had nothing to do with asbestos. USX argued they weren't legally responsible because a purchase agreement signed in nineteen forty-eight — when Jeanette was still in grammar school — said in its fine print that the buyer was not assuming the seller's tort liabilities. The exposure wasn't their problem. The paperwork said so.

Host 1: They never argued the asbestos wasn't dangerous.

Host 2: They never got there. They argued the chain of corporate ownership. March two thousand. The jury awarded six point five million dollars. They heard the evidence. They understood what childhood exposure meant. They found for Jeanette Franklin.

Host 1: First major verdict for secondary childhood exposure.

Host 2: And then USX appealed. In March two thousand and one, the California Court of Appeal reversed the verdict. Not because the exposure didn't happen. Not because the cancer wasn't real. Because of the nineteen forty-eight purchase agreement. Because the fine print said USX hadn't assumed those liabilities. The California Supreme Court was asked to review. Justice Mosk noted he would have granted it. The court declined.

Host 1: Jeanette Franklin received nothing.

Host 2: The jury found for her. The appellate court found a technicality. More than fifty years after her parents' last day at the yard.

Host 1: How many others?

Host 2: Dr. Selikoff documented another case. Man died of mesothelioma at age thirty.

Host 1: Never worked in a shipyard.

Host 2: Born nineteen forty-two. Two blocks from Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Host 1: And we don't know how many more.

Host 2: We genuinely don't. That's the answer. The women weren't in the long-term studies. The children weren't tracked. The records say helper.

Host 2: Anna Jackson is the Director of Patient Support at Danziger and De-Yano. Nearly fifteen years of experience. She lost her own husband to cancer.

Host 1: One of the families she helped — a woman whose father worked construction and auto repair in the seventies. As a little girl, she helped him out of his work clothes every evening.

Host 2: Secondary exposure.

Host 1: Diagnosed with mesothelioma at age ten. Given three to six months.

Host 2: She survived thirty-five years. During those years, she counseled over two hundred newly diagnosed families. Her name was Michelle. Her story is in "Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma," compiled by Dave Foster.

Host 1: Available free from Danziger and De-Yano. Dan-Dell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Host 2: The industry knew in nineteen forty that asbestos required changing clothes before going home. They knew in the fifties that cancer was spreading to families. They voted in fifty-seven not to study it. They didn't mandate separate laundry until nineteen seventy-two. Thirty-two years.

Host 1: And the women who built the ships—

Host 2: One hundred eighty-nine documented occupations. They built the ships that won the war. They got fired when the men came home. They got sick decades later. And when they went looking for records of what they'd breathed — the records said helper.

Host 1: Not welder. Not asbestos layer. Helper.

Host 2: Next time — what happened after the war ended. Not to the workers. To the industry. Production didn't slow down.

Host 1: Episode 28: Wartime Production, Peacetime Deaths.

Host 2: Ships are called "she" because sailors have always named them for goddesses. Because something that carries you through danger deserves a name that holds the weight of that responsibility. Aphrodite. Athena. Things that protect.

Host 2: Seven thousand women built ships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard alone. Millions more in Baltimore, in Portland, in South San Francisco. They held the welding torches. They cut the asbestos cloth. They were "helpers."

Host 2: The ships went to sea. The women were sent home. The asbestos stayed in their lungs. And in their children's lungs.

Host 2: The industry that called the ships "she" — that named them for goddesses, for mothers, for the things that carry you through danger — voted in nineteen fifty-seven, in an actual meeting with actual minutes, not to find out what the dust was doing to the women who had built them. Not enough evidence. That's what they wrote down.

Host 2: She built your ship. She named it for a goddess. You sent her home.

Host 2: You didn't look back.

Transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making. Produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP. Full episode notes and sources at mesotheliomalawyersnearme.com/podcast/episode-27-women-of-the-shipyards/. Full transcript at wikimesothelioma.com/Asbestos_Podcast_EP27_Transcript.