1.

Social Effect of WWII on women and minorities

The war had a great effect on women as the military organized women
into units with equal pay and with their own officers.
More than
250,000 women joined the Womens Army Corps, the Army Nurses
Corps, Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, the Navy
Nurses Corps, the Marines, and the Coast Guard by 1945.
In these units,
the women were either nurses or took non-combat jobs and replaced the
men who served on the battlefield.
The number of married women that
were working was greater than the amount of single women working as
around 6.3 million women started to war during World War 2.
Working
mothers were blamed for the rise of juvenile delinquency as they did not
have as much time to look after their children and
propaganda such as
Rosie the Riveter encouraged women to participate in the war effort in
ways like working in defense occupations as opposed to jobs that were
normally given to women.
Trade unions were also against women
working during the war as this caused the pay of men to decrease, but
more labor was necessary and this concern was not very important as
production increased. Minorities were also affected by WW2 as around
one million African-Americans moved to the North
, which was twice as
much as WW1, and double the amount worked in the defense industries
during this period.
President Roosevelt prohibited discrimination in the
defense industries and created the Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) after the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) marched to Washington to protest the
discrimination in these industries.
The Marines excluded blacks, the
Navy used them as servants, and the Army created separate black units.
Many white soldiers discriminated against the blacks and was ironic as
Americans were fighting for equality in the war but was discriminating
in their own military. Around 400,000 Mexican American were in the
defensive forces during WW2.
There was an increase in the need for
labor on farms after Pearl Harbor and the Bracero Program was created
in 1942 to help this demand for workers
; this lead to thousands of

Mexican workers moving to the Southwest by 1945 to be workers on the

farms.
Labor unions did not like the competition and this caused
discrimination against the Mexicans and Mexican Americans that
worked on these farms.
There was also tension between the Anglo
soldiers and the Mexican Americans, which lead to riots between them
and lasted several nights between the groups.