WOMEN OF ARIZONA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 December 1942, Page 5

WOMEN OF ARIZONA

MANY WORKING ON FARMS & IN FACTORIES.

WIDESPREAD REPLACEMENT OF MEN.

Arizona women are working on farms, on cattle ranges, in mines, machine shops, and plane repair depots In fact, there isn’t very much that they are not doing to take the places of husbands, fathers, brothers and sweethearts called away to the fighting forces or to defence work.

The labour shortage is most acute in agriculture. Almost every dairyman’s wife has gone to work milking cows by hand or operating machines. Many fairly large dairies that formerly employed three or four men are now, of necessity, exclusive famliy enterprises. Not long ago an Arizona farm paper ran a picture of two young women working with a hay baler crew, keeping up with the men and earning five dollars a day. For a week after hundreds of subscribers called up to tell about women sewing -packs behind threshers, driving tractors, stacking hay, feeding stock, cleaning ditches, irrigating, and performing a thousand other tasks commonly thought to be beyond their strength. Most of these farmers’ wives and daughters, are pitching in to help because there is no help to be hired. Some have left employment in town because they like the open air and freedom,. and often because they can make more money in the country. Since cotton picking started, the exodus of domestic servants from city homes is accelerated. At li dollars a hundred pounds for short-staple cotton, and three dollars for long-staple, a day’s pay is far more than that of a cook or housemaid.

An experiment of the Miami Copper Company is being watched with much interest by other large Arizona copper producers, all of whom are hard pressed for labour. The Miami concern has hired women and girls for 100 “surface” jobs formerly filled by men. They are making delicate adjustments in the concentrating mill; they are in the pipefitting and repair shops. . The men they replaced became available foi’ heavier work underground.