Twenty-year-old Kathleen Taylor, a spot-welder at Lockheed-Vega, was an inexperienced applicant whose training and advancement is typical.  Instead of going to college to study music after her graduation from Pasadena Junior College in California, as she had planned, she chose to work at Lockheed.

After she had been interviewed and had passed her aptitude tests, she was placed in electrical precision assembly. First she was teamed with an experienced worker, who taught her the rudiments of her job. Then, to supplement this training, she took a one hour daily training course for a total of nine hours, exactly as any inexperienced man trainee would have to do. These periods were called "orientation" classes, to help her fit into her department.
 

New women employees, working with experienced men, can learn in a week to operate small drill presses like the one shown here. They first learn to repeat one operation, then add several others, and eventually become skilled enough to work from blueprints.  (Collection Shelby Stanton)

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While working in electrical precision assembly, she was moved from job to job each week, so that she could become familiar with all the processes in the department.  Classes conducted by the company on specialized types of precision and subassembly work and the hundreds of text-books in the company's free library helped her to learn more about her job, and later, to become a specialist in spot-welding.

Because she was ambitious, and anxious to do the type of work most interesting to her and most valuable to the company, Kathleen explored every department thoroughly before she decided where she wanted to work. The company counselor helped her by advising her to become a spot-welder, and suggested the proper training.
 

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Twenty-year-old Kathleen Taylor is one of the Lockheed-Vega women workers who has advanced steadily through various technical assignments. Not long after she mastered this stamping press she studied spot welding and is today one of the best women welders in the industry.  (Collection Shelby Stanton)

Now she is happy and efficient because she is doing a task for which she has been well trained and to which she is naturally suited. She started her work at the same pay as any inexperienced man worker received and, as she advanced, she received exactly the same pay increases.

Thelma Harsch is the first woman to be trained as a machinist at Lockheed-Vega.  Before she became a machinist, she had been a cashier. She took 200 hours of aircraft training before entering the industry, and because she proved to be so efficient, Lockheed-Vega now has many women machinists.

At this plant, they have found that women machinists can be trained in exactly the same time as men.  And they have also found that, once trained, they are just as efficient as men.
Lockheed-Vega is also training women in such skilled departments as maintenance, plumbing, template work, engineering, welding, tool design and other departments relatively new to them.
 

Another vital work station to which capable women are advanced is where bomb-release controls are assembled. One single mistake here might spell the difference between a hit or a miss on an important bombing mission. (Collection Shelby Stanton)

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Even with responsible women assembling bomb release controls, Lockheed-Vega takes added precautions against error by having trained women inspectors test every control produced. Women make good inspectors for other departments, too. (Note arm identity brassards, Collection Shelby Stanton)

Not all the women employed at Lockheed-Vega, however, are inexperienced. Many have years of aviation experience behind them. Henrietta Sumner Plume, who is probably the only woman in the United States inspecting on final assembly of airplanes, is one of these.

She has been interested in airplanes ever since she was 15, when she had her first airplane flight. The following year she received her pilot license. Later, working with her mechanic, she built her own racing plane — not knowing then how valuable this knowledge of mechanics would make her, later, to her country at war.

Before the United States entered the war, Mrs. Plume was an instructor at her own flying school. Well known as a racing pilot, she holds the women's unofficial upside-down flying record of two and one-half hours. She has a total of 1,700 flying hours to her credit.

She came to Lockheed-Vega eight months ago as a production worker and is now inspecting engine installations on the final assembly of the big bombers. Although any woman who wants to work and who is physically and mentally able to pass the Lockheed-Vega aptitude tests has the opportunity to be hired, executives do have certain preferences.

“Most of our departments heads,” says a personnel expert, “prefer women between 25 and 35, married, and, above all, they prefer widows with children to support. We also give preference to the wives of soldiers and sailors."

In a single day, 30 women were hired whose husbands had been wounded in action,
They have all become extraordinarily expert in the work they are doing — spurred
on, perhaps, by the knowledge that they are carrying on the fight their husbands began.
 

Some women become so skilled that they learn to operate complex machines hitherto considered for men only. The huge gear-driven sheet metal brake pictured here is such a machine, but the young lady especially assigned to it can make it perform to her will.  (Collection Shelby Stanton)

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Into the huge aircraft factories at Lockheed-Vega they stream each morning, asking no special consideration because they are women, showing no feminine loathing toward grease, soot or hard mechanical work.  And for that reason, there is reserved to them, along with all the brave fighting women of the United Nations, a place of honor in the most gigantic campaign for freedom that the centuries have seen.
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