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Content: In the early twentieth century, women had pressed for workplace rights, reproductive rights, and voting rights. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped these activist women to help shape the New Deal. By the wartime years of the 1940s, the Victorian sensibilities of the late nineteenth century were fading fast. LOC 
Mary Ankrom, mother of six, works on a locomotive at the engine house of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Pitcairn, Pennsylvania; May 1943. While New Deal laws of the 1930s establishing a minimum wage and the right to unionize especially helped women in low-paying industries like garment manufacturing, the war years saw sharply increased demand for women’s labor and produced better-paying jobs. Ankrom made fifty-eight cents an hour, nearly twice the minimum wage. LOC
Women workers lunch in the women’s locker room at the yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Pitcairn, Pennsylvania; May 1943. LOC 
Bernice Stevens of Braddock, Pennsylvania, cleans a locomotive at the Pitcairn, Pennsylvania, engine house of the Pennsylvania Railroad;