Women of the Navy Yard

in Charlestown

The 1943 photo shows women welding the hull of a new destroyer escort. Women worked throughout the yard but not on ship repair, to avoid contact with sailors.

Courtesy of the National Park Service

“We don’t take women welders,” Peggy Merigo was told before demonstrating her welding skill and becoming Charleston Navy Yard’s first. She was soon joined by thousands of women whose work was instrumental to victory in World War II.

The Yard had employed women in clerical roles since World War I, but not until mid-1942 did an acute manpower shortage force broader recruitment. Women filled jobs as welders, electricians, and pipefitters, as well as bookkeepers and telephone operators. Some left civilian jobs for higher paying defense work; others were first-time workers. Many required training. They labored long hours under difficult conditions, alongside men unused to women co-workers, and often returned home to children and domestic chores.

At the peak of war time production, the Navy Yard employed over 8,000 women among its 50,000 workers. Their work brought job satisfaction as well as income, but war’s end meant loss of employment and a return to the home. “I still miss it,” said Peggy Merigo Citarella in 2018. “You feel you’ve accomplished something.” More than ever imagined, their trailblazing efforts inspire others to this day.

Recruitment posters distributed by the War Manpower Commission attracted women to industrial jobs to free men to fight overseas. Never before had women worked in the shipbuilding trades.

Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense

The original photo caption for a 1943 article about Navy Yard workers read: “This woman welder, with her electric arc, can sew two steel plates together as fast as she can baste a hem on a dress.”

Courtesy of The Boston Globe

“Have Your Pass Ready,” a 1943 watercolor by Allan Rohan Crite, depicts the diverse workforce of the Navy Yard. The artist, a nationally known African American painter, worked there as a technical illustrator from 1941 to 1974.

Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum

World War I was the first time women–but only white women–could enlist in the U.S. Navy. As Yeomen (F), they performed many of the same jobs as men and received the same benefits.

Cartoon by Charles Donelan of the Boston Traveler, courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command

Sign Location

More …

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

Acknowledgments

  • Thank you to Maria Cole and Polly Kienle of the National Park Service for their support and assistance.
  • Our gratitude to the Perkins School for the Blind and David W. Cook for their partnership in creating the audio files.