The Pittsburgh Press (September 9, 1941)
DISTRACTING WOMEN
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
The Douglas airplane factory in California estimates that it costs about $800 each time a woman is taken through the plant. She distracts the workers.
I can well believe it. I remember once when nothing would do but I must see the inside of an Ohio steel mill. The owners said it was against their rules because it upset the men. That sounded funny to me.
The place was as big as a good-sized town and you could walk for blocks without seeing a soul. But we could also sense the pause that followed our appearance in those vast areas where the workers toiled. Not that I was anything to stop a laboring man in his tracks, but there was a peachy young reporter with us and she was pretty enough to stop a clock. I daresay her stroll through the plant cost the company plenty.
It was one of my strangest experiences, and it brought back vividly the memory of little-girl days when my mother cautioned me constantly about walking on the same side of the street where the barbershop was located. Men to me, then, were strange, mysterious and slightly wicked creatures – all except my father who wasn’t really a man at all. He was just Papa.
Now, as then, the female singly is a disturber. You might go so far as to say the modern miss is a saboteur, a hindrance to national defense, a co-worker with Hitler – and a general, all-round nuisance. There are places where she isn’t wanted and where her presence brings trouble.
So, while something wonderful is gained by the modern custom of mixing the sexes in business, something has also been lost – something intangible and mysterious that electrifies a group of men, cut off from feminine contacts, when a woman passes by and that quickens to new life any feminine sanctum invaded by a lonesome male.
It is the awareness of the man as man and the woman as woman. So the news that the Douglas officials find women visitors costly is cheerful. It reminds us that life and love will go on, no matter how persistently we work to destroy them.