There's Work to Be Done, Vernon Grant's poster for women workers

There's work to be done and a war to be won... NOW! is a 1944 War Manpower Commission poster signed Vernon Grant for O.W.I. Small cartoon women in work clothes climb over giant letters spelling WOMEN, and readers are sent to the U.S. Employment Service (NAID 513682).

What the poster prints

The largest thing on the sheet is a word. Red block letters spell WOMEN, and tiny figures work on them: women in overalls, in uniform, one dressed as a waitress. A bomber wing, a locomotive, and a jeep sit around the letters. The tone is light, close to a cartoon page.

WOMEN

There's work to be done

and a war to be won . . .

NOW!

SEE YOUR U. S. EMPLOYMENT SERVICE

WAR MANPOWER COMMISSION

[signature: Vernon Grant for O.W.I.]

[imprint: U.S. Government Printing Office: 1944—O—598047]

Who issued it

Three bodies are on the sheet. The War Manpower Commission is the issuer. The U.S. Employment Service is where the reader is told to go. The artist, Vernon Grant, signed "for O.W.I.," which ties the art to the Office of War Information; the record does not say how. The archive classifies the purpose as recruiting, with labor, the home front, and gender among its themes.

How to read it

The archive's technique tag is bandwagon, and the picture earns it: so many women, so many jobs, that the reader is invited to see herself already among them. The waitress is a useful detail. The poster does not limit "war work" to riveting. Service jobs that kept a town running counted too.

What the poster offers is a direction, not a draft. Women were not conscripted for industry, and the sheet's only instruction is to visit an employment office. That is persuasion in the open, under the name of the agency doing it. A reader may still notice what is missing: pay, hours, child care, and what would happen to these jobs when the men came back. The sheet is silent on all of it.

The best-known image of women in war industry, We Can Do It!, was a company poster, not a federal one. This sheet is the federal side of the same push. For the agencies, see the Office of War Information hub and the domestic-branch case study. Military service for women is on the WAC and WAVES pages. The Roosevelt administration essay covers the war government the War Manpower Commission belonged to, from the Office of War Information to Executive Order 9066.