Jenny on the job - Steps ahead with Low Heels is a 1943 health-and-safety poster of the Federal Security Agency's U.S. Public Health Service, signed Kula. A cheerful cartoon war worker in coveralls and flat lace-up shoes pushes a loaded hand truck (NAID 514679).
The sheet
Jenny is a smiling cartoon woman in coveralls. She pushes a hand truck stacked with boxes, and a red dashed line traces her stride. Her shoes are flat and laced. That is the whole lesson, and the caption says it in five words after the series name.
Jenny on the job
Steps ahead with Low Heels
[imprint: WH 15 Federal Security Agency U. S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE]
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943 - O - 529858]
[signature: Kula]
Who issued it
The Federal Security Agency's U.S. Public Health Service printed the sheet through the Government Printing Office in 1943, with the series mark WH 15. The artist signed it Kula; the record gives no fuller name. The archive files it under health, labor and the home front, with the purpose to warn or inform. Its National Archives home is Record Group 44. It is one sheet in the Jenny series; the archive's neighbors to this one are "Lifts weight the easy way" and "Eats man size Meals."
How to read it
Plain folks is the archive's tag, and it rates the technique faint. Jenny is not a hero or a celebrity. She is a co-worker, pleased with herself, doing the sensible thing. The poster sells footwear advice by making it look like what a capable woman would choose anyway.
The sheet gives one piece of practical safety advice, it does not invoke the enemy, and it does not threaten the reader. It treats the woman at the hand truck as a worker to be kept safe, not as a symbol. The record gives no figures on how many women held such jobs, and this page adds none.
Two other 1943 sheets about women at war work are the OWI's recruiting poster The More Women at Work the Sooner We Win! and Westinghouse's shop poster We Can Do It!. For the Public Health Service in the same year, see Keep Out Malaria Mosquitoes. For how this sheet fits the wartime government's other requests, read the Roosevelt administration essay.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Jenny on the job - Steps ahead with Low Heels, 1943. Federal Security Agency, U.S. Public Health Service (artist Kula).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1141C, NAID 514679, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
