Women in the War: We Can't Win Without Them (1942)

Women in the war, we can't win without them is a 1942 poster of the War Manpower Commission. A black-and-white photograph shows a woman in a patterned apron working with a tool on a cylindrical aircraft parachute-flare container, under a red-banded slogan (NAID 513675).

What the sheet prints

The center is a photograph, in black and white, of a woman at a workbench. She wears a print apron over her clothes and works a hand tool on a metal cylinder that the FRAME record identifies as a parachute-flare container for aircraft. The photograph is set against a blue shape. The words come in two registers: a quiet heading and a slogan in a red band.

Women in the war

WE CAN'T WIN WITHOUT THEM

WAR MANPOWER COMMISSION • WASHINGTON, D. C.

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1942—O—477830

Who issued it

The War Manpower Commission is the only issuer named. It was the wartime agency charged with matching workers to war industry, and posters like this one were part of its effort to bring women into factory jobs. The photographer and the woman pictured are not named on the sheet or in the record.

How to read it

The apron matters. This woman is not dressed in coveralls or a welder's mask; she looks like she came from her kitchen to the bench. The poster borrows the familiar picture of a housewife and puts a war part in her hands. It tells women that the work is within reach and tells everyone else that it is respectable.

The slogan is a flat claim of necessity, and it is addressed to the country rather than to the woman: "we can't win without them." She is the subject being discussed, not the person being spoken to. That is a small detail, but it shows who the sheet expected to persuade: the public that would have to accept women at the bench, as much as the women themselves.

On the record, the appeal was a request. The poster does not mention pay, hours, child care or what happened to the job after the war. A Women's Bureau sheet of the same year did raise equal pay directly (More and More Women Work on Aircraft). The better-known image of a woman at war work is We Can Do It! from the following year. For the federal poster program, see the Office of War Information index. The essay on the Roosevelt administration reads the year's posters together with the fireside chats and the Office of War Information.