An eye-opening first-hand account of life in a WWII shipyard from a woman's perspective 

In 1942, Katherine Archibald, a graduate student at Berkeley, left the halls of academe to spend two years working in a nearby Oakland shipyard. She arrived with a host of preconceptions about the American working class, race relations and the prospect for their improvement, and wartime unity. Her experience working in a shipyard where women were seen as intruders, where "Okies" and black migrants from the South were regarded with barely-disguised hatred, and where trade unions preferred protecting their turf to defending workers' rights, threw much of her liberal faith into doubt.  

Archibald's 1947 book about her experiences, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, remains a classic account of life and labor on the home front. This new edition includes an introduction written by historians Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, who explore Archibald's work in light of recent scholarship on women and African Americans in the wartime workplace. 

Katherine Archibald taught at Stanford University, Pomona College, and the University of Manitoba.

Alex Lichtenstein is associate professor of history at Rice University, and the author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South.

Eric Arnesen is professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality.