Constance Bowman Reid

Constance Bowman Reid was a brilliant and adaptable woman. She served her country in two major ways during the war: as an English and Journalism high school teacher throughout the 1940s and her work building B-24 bombers in San Diego, California. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, though her family moved to Arizona when she was five years old. Reid lost her mother at the age of five and her father in high school, though she treasured a close relationship with her sister, Julia and stepmother whom she “always thought of as [a] mother.” The family later settled in San Diego, California, where Reid attended high school and worked diligently on the school paper. 

She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University and started teaching at her alma mater, San Diego High School in 1939. During this time, Reid also worked diligently to support her sister through her education at University of California Berkeley, given that her sister showed great intellectual promise in mathematics and required a rigorous education. Reid’s investment in her sister indicated her affection for Julia, but also her sister’s potential, as Julia later became the first female mathematician to become a member of the National Academy of Science. 

In the summer of 1943, Constance Bowman Reid made the decision to spend her summer break from teaching working part time in a defense work “because it was fun and it was patriotic.” Reid’s book about her experience, Slacks & Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory, was illustrated by her teaching and defense work colleague Clara Marie Allen and republished by the Smithsonian in 1999. It remains the only factory diary by a Rosie the Riveter currently in print. Her work is unique from many of the other factory accounts, as it depicts the challenges of life on the night shift. In it, she notes that knowing when to sleep was obvious, but knowing when to eat was a challenge. Reid presents a realistic view that factory work served a greater purpose but was in fact, work. On her last night in the factory, she and Clara Marie Allen explained to a friend that “we were sorry we were going tonight, but we were glad we weren’t coming back tomorrow.”

Reid took lessons from her time as a teacher into the factory, finding that she could anticipate needs and problems before they became obvious to others. She saw problems ahead of her coworkers and made do with what materials were available. For example, she saw no need to invest in supplies like tools that she would only use for one summer, but quickly made do finding limited resources that were available in hardware stores during wartime. In other ways, the years she spent encouraging students to use formal English made for a difficult start in a blue-collar factory, as she stated: “The English teacher in me shuttered at the use of the word ‘untighten.’ (I did not know that I would be using the word myself in a few weeks!), and I shuttered at the thought of using this strange instrument, especially since I was not quite sure which was the bolt and which was the nut.” Reid’s experience demonstrates how quickly women adapted to wartime circumstances. 

Although Reid was later critical of her writing in Slacks & Calluses, she found immense success. She stated in a 1999 epilogue to the book, “over the years I became somewhat embarrassed by Slacks & Calluses.” Reid went on to explain that she felt the tone was too youthful and light, but the book sold well in the last year and a half of the war. Newspapers appreciated that her work was well rounded as a “Fairly representative, not a unique experience.” The lively tone was well received by the general public, as one reviewer described Slacks & Calluses as “Shoptalk in its liveliest form.” Perhaps due to jealousy, Reid lacked support from many of her teaching colleagues after the publication, as they felt that “anyone could write one book.”

After the war, Reid continued to teach through most of the 1940s. She built upon her intellectual curiosity, earning her master’s degree in education from the University of California Berkeley in 1949. It was during this study that she met her husband of sixty years, Neil D. Reid, then getting his bachelor’s degree in English. Neil Reid and Constance Bowman Reid were two of twelve students selected for a creative writing class at Berkeley. According to Neil Reid, she was “extremely intelligent, [a] very, very beautiful woman, but the main thing was she just was so smart and we just got along so well.” They married in 1950 and later had two children together. Neil went on to pass the bar exam in 1956 and they enjoyed many happy years together, all the while Constance Bowman Reid continued to embrace new challenges. 

Reid spent the next six decades of her life as an independent author, specifically writing successful biographies of mathematicians. While she was ready for a new challenge, she cherished her years as an effective educator, as former students from her nearly ten years excitedly came up to her in public to say hello for the rest of her life. She echoed her work as a teacher and defense worker in this way, as mathematician Martin Gardner noted that she granted “access to the laypeople” regarding the work of high level mathematicians and inspired many.  Gardner went on to state that Reid’s books such as From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers Interesting and A Long Way from Euclid stood alone in quality as “No one today has written about mathematics with more grace, knowledge, skill, and clarity than Constance Reid.” Reid’s writing talents were well recognized long after the war years, as her work was never rejected from publication. In fact, publishers frequently initiated her projects and went her entire career without needing an agent. 

After Slacks & Calluses was republished in 1999, Reid became one of the few female defense workers to receive attention for her efforts later in life. Reid and her friend and illustrator, Clare Marie Allen, held speaking engagements in regions that were prominent in defense work during the war. Just like Slacks & Calluses, these were lighthearted, humorous engagements in which the two would talk about the book on stage and even bicker back and forth. Audiences reportedly loved them and they “loved to get up on stage and put on a really great show.”

Constance Bowman Reid & Rosie the Riveter:

Reid’s thoughts regarding the Rosie the Riveter image can be gleamed from an Oral History interview with her now 95-year-old husband, Mr. Neil D. Reid. When asked about Constance Bowman Reid’s thoughts about Rosie, he stated: 

I don't think Constance particularly identified herself as a "Rosie" until much later when she and CM [Clara Marie Allen; illustrator of Slacks & Calluses] were invited to the opening of the park in Richmond, CA.  The reason may have been that most of the women who came to work in defense plants and shipyards did so because the jobs were available, the money good and much needed (coming out of the depression) and they held on to their jobs to the end. Constance and CM were high school teachers that spent one summer working on the assembly line at Consolidated building B-24 bombers.  Then they went back to teaching when school opened.

The reality of a “Rosie the Riveter” is represented in these comments. The real female defense workers of World War II did not take the job solely for patriotic or financial reasons, for many it was a combination of the two. For each woman, it was a different combination of these as motivating factors. Both prospects were exciting and propelled enthusiasm and war production. While Reid and Allen spent a single summer as Rosies, these individual contributions added up to Allied victory in the Second World War. This humility and understanding of teamwork were best articulated by Staff Sergeant Bill Guarnere in an oral history that appeared in the miniseries, Band of Brothers: “I’m just one part of the big war. That’s all. One little part. And I’m proud to be a part of it. Sometimes it makes me cry.” Neil Reid echoed these sentiments that the World War II generation demonstrated humility, stating “No one ever called themselves the greatest generation. Nobody at that time referred [to] or even thought of themselves as the greatest generation. That was two generations up the road.” In this way the women of World War II defense work displayed all of the reverence, but none of the vanity associated with the images of Rosie the Riveter.

Reid’s contribution remains more complex than the archetype of Rosie the Riveter, as she contributed to her country in multiple ways during the war. Sometimes her life outside of the factory could pierce her experience in beautiful ways. She worked alongside former students working in the factory, and felt the pride and joy when she heard a familiar voice excitedly yell “Miss Bowman!” from across the floor.  But she also found the full knowledge of her students’ limitations frustrating, as she stated “I found out when I went back to school this fall that these murderous rivets had been put in at the Parts Plant by one of the students in my second period English class, and it took all my self-control to keep from flunking the boy. Those “murderous” rivets led to a number of injuries, and while this is mostly in jest, Reid was in the clinic often enough during that summer to be considered a regular. Though Constance Bowman Reid only worked building bombers for a few months, her story demonstrates that the complex lives of women in defense work contrasted the lasting image of Rosie the Riveter. Defense work acted as a small window into the pressures and injuries of war, and the contributions of these woman far exceeded the expectations of the Rosie song, cartoon, or film. 

Citations

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses.

[1] Daniel E. Soltnik, “Constance Reid, Biographer of Mathematicians, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, October 25, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/books/26reid.html.

Reid, 23.

[1] Constance Reid, Julia: A Life in Mathematics (Washington D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1997), 3.

[1] Reid, Julia, 15.

[1] Tracey L. Matthews, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 149 (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006), 353, https://archive.org/details/contemporaryauth00trac_1/page/353/mode/1up.

[1] Reid, Julia, 29.

[1] Ibid., 41.

[1] Katherine Corrado, “Oral History with Neil D. Reid,” Transcript of an oral history conducted 2021 by Katherine Corrado, More Than Rosies: Naming Home Front Heroines, Pace University, Purcellville, VA via Phone. August 2021.

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses.

[1] Ibid. and Von Miklos, Pendleton, and Giles

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses, 61.

[1] Ibid., 62.

[1] Ibid., 166.

[1] Ibid., 37, 40-41.

[1] Ibid., 31.

[1] Ibid., 181.

[1] Ibid., 177-181.

[1] “Spirit and Humor of Working Inside Liberator Bombers,” Oakland Tribune, October 8, 1944, https://www.newspapers.com/image/185507164/?terms=Constance%20Bowman&match=1.   .

[1] “Girls on Aircraft: Slacks and Calluses,” The Province, March 24, 1945, https://www.newspapers.com/image/499799406/?terms=Constance%20Bowman&match=1.

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses, 179.

[1] Matthews.

[1] Ibid.

[1] “Oral History with Neil D. Reid.”

[1] Ibid.

[1] Neil D. Reid, marriage certificate, 23 June 1950, available in “The California, U.S., Marriage Index, 1949-1959,” Ancestry.com.

[1] Soltnik.

[1] “Oral History with Neil D. Reid.”

[1] Martin Well, “Constance Reid, 92; Wrote about Mathematics, Work in WWII Bomber Plant,” The Washington Post, October 23, 2010, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010102304957.html. https://www.newspapers.com/image/252406866/?terms=Neil%20D.%20Reid&match=1

[1] Reid, Julia, 124.

[1] “Oral History with Neil D. Reid.”

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Slacks and Calluses, 101.

[1] Ibid., 137.

[1] Ibid., 138.

[1] “Oral History with Neil D. Reid.”

Harold M. Lambert, circa 1943: One American female worker drives rivets into an aircraft while another sits in the cockpit on the US home front during World War II. They wear aprons and their hair tucked into scarves. Women who went to work in industries to aid the war effort became known under the moniker 'Rosie the Riveter’, January 1943, https://www.gettyimages.no/detail/news-photo/one-american-female-worker-drives-rivets-into-an-aircraft-news-photo/3201751?et=u7rIWNoPQt9YERSg_tZzKw.

[1] San Diego High School, The Gray Castle (San Diego, CA: 1942), 55, Classmates Archive, https://www.classmates.com/siteui/yearbooks/115691?page=58, accessed on July 20, 2021.

[1] Poster similar to the one Bowman described on page 17 of Slacks & Calluses.

The Attack Begins at the Factory, Imperial War Museum, 1943, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20395.

[1] San Diego High School, The Gray Castle (San Diego, CA: 1944), 30, E-Yearbook Archive, http://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb, accessed on July 20, 2021.

[1] San Diego High School, The Gray Castle (San Diego, CA: 1946), 10, E-Yearbook Archive, https://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb, accessed on July 20, 2021.

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses, 15.

[1] “Girls on Aircraft: Slacks and Calluses,” The Province, March 24, 1945, https://www.newspapers.com/image/380758795/?terms=Constance%20Bowman&match=1.

[1] Newman Post Card Company, Los Angeles, California, US, Picture postcard of first building in "Gray Castle" period of San Diego High School, John and Jane Adams Post Card Collection, San Diego State University Digital Collection, https://digital.sdsu.edu/view-item?i=140686&WINID=1628645968797.

[1] Reid, Julia, 124.

[1] Reid, Slacks & Calluses, 176.

[1] San Diego High School, The Gray Castle (San Diego, CA: 1947), 31, E-Yearbook Archive, https://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb, accessed on July 20, 2021.https://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb?school=181&year=1947&up=2&startpage=31.