Stepping In.

When more than two million young men departed for military service in 1917 and 1918, the labor shortage that resulted brought more than a million women, most of whom had never worked outside their homes, into the labor market. For women who had previously worked outside their homes, primarily as domestics, seamstresses, and laundresses, the war years presented an opportunity to move into better-paying industrial occupations. The number of female servants dropped by a quarter of a million, while there was a corresponding rise in the number of women doing clerical work. Two and a quarter million of 9.4 million workers in war-related industries were women, and the number of women in industrial jobs rose more than 100 percent between 1910 and 1920. Nearly forty thousand women served in the armed forces as nurses, in National Guard camps, and as navy "Yeomanettes."

A Stir.

While...